Process Design & Optimisation

Most operational underperformance isn't a people problem. It's a process problem.

Costs creeping up without explanation. Service variability nobody can quite pin down. Workarounds quietly hardening into "how we do things." A new system that hasn't delivered the productivity case it was bought on. Teams working harder every quarter to stand still.

You don't need a long-tail transformation programme. You need someone who understands organisational process, a laser focus on finding what's broken, and the expertise to rapidly build systems that run efficiently to deliver value for the business.

That's what this service does.

An engagement with De Clifton runs in two integrated phases. A Process Diagnostic of two to three weeks: end-to-end process mapping, data and time-and-motion analysis, structured interviews with the people doing the work, and a quantified view of where cost, time, and quality are leaking. This is delivered as a written findings report with a prioritised redesign roadmap.

Then Redesign & Embed over six to twelve weeks: hands-on rebuild of the highest-impact processes alongside your team, new SOPs and control points, and operating systems, followed by a structured handover so improvements stick after the engagement ends.

You exit the engagement with measurably leaner processes, a defensible productivity baseline, reduced cost-to-serve, lower service variability, and a team that owns the new way of working, not a slide deck.

De Clifton draws on twenty years of frontline operational leadership across parcel and courier networks, healthcare logistics, automotive supply chains, and military aviation, including process design under conditions where errors carry real consequences.

Process Diagnostic from £15,000 fixed fee. Full engagements from £60,000.

Case Study: Marketplace Delivery Defect Recovery

Diagnosing and redesigning the labelling process driving a 20-percentage-point on-time delivery shortfall

The situation

A global e-commerce marketplace was missing on-time delivery promises by a 20-percentage-point margin against target across a major merchant cohort. Customer experience scores were dropping. Carrier partners were being blamed in escalations, but the data wasn't conclusive. The operations team had several competing theories about the root cause, inbound carrier scan delays, sortation centre handling, last-mile coverage, and was weeks away from Peak.

The intervention

Engaged to lead the diagnostic and corrective programme end-to-end, working with operations, merchant integration, and carrier management.

The diagnostic ran in parallel across three workstreams: structured interrogation of consignment-level delivery data to isolate where in the journey time was actually being lost; on-site audits at merchant fulfilment locations and carrier hubs to validate the data against physical reality; and a process map of the merchant labelling and dispatch workflow from order receipt to first carrier scan.

The data and audits converged on the same finding: the defect was originating upstream of the carriers. A material proportion of merchant-generated shipping labels carried errors that were causing carrier rejections, manual rework at injection points, and downstream missed delivery windows. The carriers weren't the problem. The labelling process was.

The corrective programme redesigned the merchant labelling workflow: tightened pre-dispatch validation rules at the point of label generation, introduced exception-handling protocols at injection, established a daily defect dashboard shared between merchant integration and carrier management, and re-trained merchant operations teams on a revised SOP.

The results

  • Identified the true root cause of a 20-percentage-point on-time delivery defect that had previously been mis-attributed to carrier performance.

  • Redesigned the merchant labelling and dispatch process with new validation, exception, and escalation controls.

  • Established a daily defect dashboard giving operations, merchant integration, and carrier management a shared, single source of truth.

  • Recovered on-time delivery performance materially within the engagement window.

  • Restored commercial confidence with carrier partners by removing an incorrect attribution of fault.

The outcome

The marketplace exited the engagement with a process, not a workaround, that prevented the defect from recurring. The corrective controls were owned by the merchant integration team going forward, with no ongoing consultant dependency.