He can tell you produce shrink before the report runs.
A grocery client. North of a thousand employees. Hundreds of documented processes. Union contracts, health inspectors, shrink audits, and a customer who swears the rotisserie chicken was better last Tuesday.
Their Integrator started behind the meat counter with a sharp knife and an apron. He has worked every department in the stores he now runs.
Last year, an inspection landed. The binder said one thing. The floor did another. They passed. Barely.
He did not blame the crew. He said the sentence that changed the year:
“We documented everything, and we follow almost none of it.”
That is the Process Component. It was never about completeness. It is about consistency.
So they cut. Document the 20% of major steps that get you 80% of the results. Each Core Process in one to three pages, owned by one person, agreed to by the whole Leadership Team.
Then Followed By All. The FBA Checklist is four moves:
- Train – everyone who touches even one step.
- Measure – compliance, frequency, and results on the Scorecard.
- LMA – Lead, manage, and hold accountable, no exceptions.
- Update – Clean up, simplify, and retrain one Core Process per quarter.
Aviation ran this experiment first. Pilots used to read a line, do a line, look back down. Then they evolved to flow, then check. Run the sequence from memory, then read to confirm. The reason it is safer is redundancy: a step missed in the flow gets caught by the check, and a line skipped on the check was already done in the flow. aopa
Same idea on the floor. The 20% is the flow a shift lead runs from memory at 5:45 a.m. The system is the check.
Same open. Same close. Same temp log. Same price change. Every store, every day, whoever is on shift.
That is what protects you with a union, a regulator, and a finicky customer at the same time.
I sit in the room as their Expert EOS Implementer. The Traction is theirs.
Is your process a to-do list, or a flow?
Stay Curious,
JBS