Operations Visibility Assessment
Most operations teams build dashboards that nobody uses. The problem isn't the dashboard — it's that no one mapped what visibility actually needs to exist. Our assessment finds the gaps, quantifies the cost, and gives you a prioritized roadmap before you write a single line of code.
When your COO asks "what's our current WIP?" — can you answer in 30 seconds, or does it take three people and two days?
When inventory ages past 90 days — do you catch it before it hits the P&L, or discover it during month-end close?
When a vendor starts missing TAT targets — do you see it in real-time, or find out when customers complain?
Operational visibility means your team can see problems forming and act before they cascade. It's not about pretty charts. It's about whether the right information reaches the right people in time to do something about it.
What's in your pipeline right now, by station, status, and age?
How long does work take to flow through? Where are the delays?
What's passing? What's failing? Where are quality escapes occurring?
What's been sitting too long? What's at risk of write-off or penalty?
What The Assessment Reveals
Most organizations don't know what they can't see. The assessment systematically uncovers visibility gaps before they become expensive surprises.
Stages where work disappears from view. Handoffs where status goes dark. Processes that only exist in spreadsheets or tribal knowledge.
KPIs that look green when the floor is red. Definitions that vary by department. Numbers that require reconciliation before every meeting.
Problems that only surface after they've already caused damage. Aging inventory discovered at write-off. SLA breaches found when customers complain.
The 30+ hours per week your team spends pulling, cleaning, and reconciling data that should be automated. The tribal knowledge that leaves when people do.
Critical operational data trapped in WMS, ERP, spreadsheets, and legacy systems that don't talk to each other. The integration work nobody has time to do.
The gap between when something happens and when someone who can act on it finds out. Days of delay that could be minutes.
You've probably seen it before: a dashboard project kicks off with excitement, launches to fanfare, and six months later nobody uses it. The metrics are stale. The filters are wrong. It doesn't show what people actually need to see.
This happens because most dashboard projects start with technology instead of questions. They build what's easy to build instead of what's needed. They skip the hard work of understanding how decisions actually get made.
The assessment prevents this. Before any dashboard gets built, you'll know exactly what visibility needs to exist, who needs it, and how it connects to decisions that matter.
Dashboard shows what's easy to pull instead of what ops leaders actually need to make decisions.
Information exists but isn't integrated into how people actually work. Requires extra steps to access.
Dashboard requires people to check it. Problems only found if someone remembers to look.
Too high-level to be actionable, or so detailed it overwhelms. Doesn't drill down where it matters.
Built once, never updated. Data pipelines break and nobody notices until the numbers are obviously wrong.
Deliverables
A complete picture of your operational visibility — gaps, opportunities, and a prioritized roadmap for what to build first.
DELIVERABLE 01
A comprehensive map of where operational visibility exists today and where it's missing. We document every blind spot, manual workaround, and reconciliation bottleneck.
DELIVERABLE 02
Clear, agreed-upon definitions for your key operational metrics. No more debates about how WIP is counted or what "on-time" actually means.
DELIVERABLE 03
The business case for fixing visibility — not just "data is important" but specific dollar amounts tied to specific gaps.
DELIVERABLE 04
What to build, in what order, with realistic effort estimates. Quick wins first, foundational work sequenced properly, dependencies mapped.
The most expensive dashboard is the one nobody uses. We've seen companies spend $200K+ on analytics platforms that become shelfware within a year — not because the technology was wrong, but because no one did the upfront work to understand what visibility actually needed to exist.
The assessment forces the hard conversations early: What questions do ops leaders actually need answered? Where do decisions get made, and what information is missing? What would change behavior if people could see it?
When you start building after an assessment, you're building what matters. Every dashboard has a clear owner. Every metric has an agreed definition. Every alert has a workflow attached. The result: systems that actually get used.
"We'd tried to build ops dashboards twice before and failed both times. The assessment showed us why — we were building around the data we had instead of the decisions we needed to make."
— Head of Operations, European logistics companyProcess
A structured 2-week engagement that maps your current state and delivers a clear roadmap forward.
We interview ops leaders, analysts, and stakeholders across functions to understand how decisions get made and where visibility breaks down.
Days 1-4We document your data sources, existing reports, and current workflows. We identify what exists, what's missing, and what's broken.
Days 3-7We map visibility gaps to business impact, estimate costs of current blind spots, and identify quick wins vs. foundational work.
Days 6-9We present findings and deliver the complete assessment package: gaps, opportunities, metric definitions, and prioritized roadmap.
Day 10Is This For You
You know there are problems, but you don't find out until they've already caused damage. You spend meetings debating numbers instead of solving problems.
Your analysts spend more time pulling and cleaning data than analyzing it. Everyone has their own spreadsheet. Reports take days to produce.
You've invested in BI tools that nobody uses. Previous dashboard projects never delivered value. You don't want to make the same mistakes again.
You're planning a dashboard project, BI implementation, or data platform investment. You want to make sure you build the right thing the first time.
Get a clear picture of your operational visibility gaps and a prioritized roadmap for fixing them — before you invest in dashboards that might not work.
2-week engagement delivering gap analysis, metric definitions, opportunity quantification, and implementation roadmap.
Get Your Ops Visibility AssessmentStarts with a 30-minute discovery call to confirm fit. No obligation.