End-to-end outcomes · the outcome catalog
The chain the business actually feels
A function reports on its own segment. Nobody reports on the thing the supplier, the customer or the new hire is waiting for. These are 8 named end-to-end services, each with a start event, an end event, the functions and towers it crosses, and one person accountable for the whole chain. 1,750 instances were assembled out of 3,959 documents in the sampled week, and cycle time, wait and cost are measured on the chain rather than summed from the segments.
Health
What the assembled week looks like
Cycle time, wait and cost are computed on complete chains only, because a chain that never found its last stage has no cycle time. Matching confidence is computed on joined chains only, because a chain of one stage was never matched to anything and its confidence would be a tautology.
The week ended before the chain could reasonably finish. This is the observation window closing, not the work being late. The chain had room left in the week and did not move. Its next stage never appeared. The difference matters: 901 chains are stuck and 252 are simply still running when the ledger stopped.
A chain takes the weakest regime any of its joins used, so one cohort link makes the whole chain cohort. The chain crosses a boundary and no usable party join exists on either side. Only place and timing were left, so confidence is capped low and the chain is a hypothesis.
Operations
The outcome catalog
Eight services, each owned end to end by one person. Open a service to see its stages, where chains stop, how confident each join is, and one instance traced document by document.
Named end-to-end services
8 services · 1,750 assembled chains · 669 complete · 689 chains crossed more than one tower
| Service | Accountable | Stages | Chains | Complete | Median cycle | Wait share | Cost a chain | Confidence | Commitment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S1Req to receipt A requisition is raised against a cost center → The goods or service is receipted against the order | Diego Fuentes Head of source to pay | 3 | 360 | 96 · 27% | 2.9 d | 82% | $19.29 | 0.77 | Breaching 96 h | Open |
| S2Invoice to pay A supplier invoice is received → The payment clears and reconciles against the bank statement | Sofia Kalogeropoulou Head of payables and payments | 3 | 300 | 131 · 44% | 3.4 d | 76% | $21.77 | 0.62 | Not measurable 168 h | Open |
| S7Query to resolution A ticket is raised against a service → The change that resolves it is recorded | Wei Lin Tan Head of service operations | 3 | 210 | 190 · 90% | 2.7 d | 60% | $22.02 | 0.60 | At risk 120 h | Open |
| S3Order to cash A customer order is accepted → The cash is applied against the open item | Beatriz Salgado Head of order to cash | 5 | 200 | 1 · 1% | 3.0 d | 94% | $7.60 | 0.74 | Not measurable 336 h · thin base | Open |
| S5Hire to productive An offer is accepted and a hire event is created → The joiner is paid correctly for a full period | Grace Mutiso Head of people services | 3 | 190 | 133 · 70% | 4.3 d | 76% | $19.75 | 0.56 | Not measurable 720 h | Open |
| S4Claim to credit A retailer deducts against an invoice → The deduction is settled or recovered by credit | Rafael Duarte Head of trade and revenue control | 3 | 170 | 3 · 2% | 3.9 d | 48% | $22.28 | 0.76 | Not measurable 504 h · thin base | Open |
| S6Close to report The period accrual is posted → The reported figure is certified | Nils Andersen Group financial controller | 5 | 165 | 113 · 68% | 4.2 d | 62% | $36.68 | 0.61 | Not measurable 240 h | Open |
| S8Concept to shelf A formula change is proposed → The first production order is released against it | Yasmin Chaudhry Head of innovation delivery | 5 | 155 | 2 · 1% | 6.7 d | 70% | $7.60 | 0.56 | Not measurable 1,008 h · thin base | Open |
Median cycle, wait share and cost a chain are computed only on the complete chains in that row, so a service with a handful of complete chains carries a median drawn from a handful of chains. Those rows are flagged thin base. 3 of the 8 services are in that position, which is a statement about how far a one week window reaches into a long service, not about how those services perform.
Where the chains stop
Every chain starts at stage one by construction. The drop from one bar to the next is where the outcome fell out of the sampled week.
How much to trust the assembly
Matching confidence across the 1,117 chains that were actually joined
The 633 single stage chains are deliberately excluded from this panel. They carry a confidence of 1.00 because nothing was matched, and including them would lift the mean from 0.63 to something that means nothing at all.
What the chains cross
An outcome that never leaves one function is not an outcome problem
Query to resolution is the one service in the catalog whose every stage sits inside a single function. That is a finding rather than a modeling shortcut: an incident, the agent exception it raises and the change record that closes it are all IT, so nothing about it is a boundary problem. The other 7 services all cross at least two functions.
Operations
Commitments against the outcome
These sit alongside the 28 function level service levels, not instead of them. A function can hold every one of its own commitments while the chain running through it misses, and that is exactly the gap this layer exists to expose.
Outcome level service levels
8 commitments · 2 could be measured inside a 168 hour window · 6 could not
| Commitment | Committed to | Target | Observed | Attainment | Breaches | Status | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Requisition to receipt inside 4 days End to end cycle from requisition raised to receipt posted | The group operating committee | 96 hours | 66.9 hours | 30.1% | 135 | Breaching | Measured on the 193 chains that started early enough for the whole 96 hour commitment to fall inside the extract. Chains that started later are left out, because they could not have been seen to miss. Inside that set a chain still running past the commitment counts as a miss, not as pending. |
Invoice to payment inside 7 days End to end cycle from invoice received to cash reconciled | The group operating committee | 168 hours | 80.9 hours | — | 0 | Not measurable | Not measurable from this extract. The commitment runs to 7 days and the extract covers seven, so no chain in the week had the whole commitment available and none could have been seen to miss it. 102 chains did close inside the window, at a median of 80.9 hours, which describes the fast chains and says nothing about the slow ones. |
Order to cash inside 14 days End to end cycle from order accepted to cash applied | The group operating committee | 336 hours | 71.3 hours | — | 0 | Not measurable | Not measurable from this extract. The commitment runs to 14 days and the extract covers seven, so no chain in the week had the whole commitment available and none could have been seen to miss it. 1 chain did close inside the window, at a median of 71.3 hours, which describes the fast chains and says nothing about the slow ones. |
Deduction to settlement inside 21 days End to end cycle from deduction taken to credit issued | The group operating committee | 504 hours | 94.8 hours | — | 0 | Not measurable | Not measurable from this extract. The commitment runs to 21 days and the extract covers seven, so no chain in the week had the whole commitment available and none could have been seen to miss it. 3 chains did close inside the window, at a median of 94.8 hours, which describes the fast chains and says nothing about the slow ones. |
Hire to productive inside 30 days End to end cycle from hire recorded to first pay run | The group operating committee | 720 hours | 101.0 hours | — | 0 | Not measurable | Not measurable from this extract. The commitment runs to 30 days and the extract covers seven, so no chain in the week had the whole commitment available and none could have been seen to miss it. 111 chains did close inside the window, at a median of 101.0 hours, which describes the fast chains and says nothing about the slow ones. |
Close to report inside 10 days End to end cycle from accrual posted to report certified | The group operating committee | 240 hours | 101.3 hours | — | 0 | Not measurable | Not measurable from this extract. The commitment runs to 10 days and the extract covers seven, so no chain in the week had the whole commitment available and none could have been seen to miss it. 102 chains did close inside the window, at a median of 101.3 hours, which describes the fast chains and says nothing about the slow ones. |
Query to resolution inside 5 days End to end cycle from ticket raised to change recorded | The group operating committee | 120 hours | 62.6 hours | 85.9% | 11 | At risk | Measured on the 78 chains that started early enough for the whole 120 hour commitment to fall inside the extract. Chains that started later are left out, because they could not have been seen to miss. Inside that set a chain still running past the commitment counts as a miss, not as pending. |
Concept to shelf inside 42 days End to end cycle from formula proposed to first build released | The group operating committee | 1,008 hours | 163.8 hours | — | 0 | Not measurable | Not measurable from this extract. The commitment runs to 42 days and the extract covers seven, so no chain in the week had the whole commitment available and none could have been seen to miss it. 2 chains did close inside the window, at a median of 163.8 hours, which describes the fast chains and says nothing about the slow ones. |
Handoff economics
25 handoffs across six mapped flows
Waiting, rework and duplicated data entry priced at every one of the 25 handoffs in the cross-flow map comes to $3.5m a week. 19 of those handoffs have no owner at all, and only 3 carry enough assembled chains to observe a real wait rather than a modeled one. 11 of them are human gates where the work is deliberately stopped until somebody approves it.
Boundary disputes
9 entries · 7 undecided
Where two functions disagree about who owns a delay inside a chain, the register holds both positions in their own words, names an arbiter and sets a decision date. 9 are on it and 7 have not been ruled on. Until they are, the disputed hours sit on neither scorecard while the outcome carries them anyway.
Actions
What is waiting on a person
Each count below is an assembled chain, or a service level over those chains, that will not resolve without somebody deciding something. They are drawn from a two percent sample of one week, so the population behind each one is roughly fifty times larger.
Restart a chain that stopped with time left in the week
The next document never appeared and the week had not run out. These are the 51.5 percent of chains where the outcome is genuinely stuck rather than simply still running.
Clear an exception sitting inside a chain
A stage raised an exception, so the chain carries a defect that its owning function may not know crossed into the next one.
Give a low confidence chain a correlation key
Matched below 0.60 because nothing in either document names a party in common. Until a key survives the handoff, these 275 chains are hypotheses, not measurements.
Trace a chain that had to be redone
The same work was recorded twice inside one chain. Rework inside an outcome is invisible to every function level report.
Reopen a chain that failed outright
A stage failed in the ledger, so the outcome the customer or the supplier was waiting on did not happen at all.
Close a boundary dispute
Two functions disagree about who owns a delay inside a chain, and until an arbiter rules the wait sits on neither scorecard.
Shorten a commitment nobody can observe
The commitment runs past the 168 hour window the ledger covers, so attainment cannot be computed at all. Of the services that can be measured, 1 is already breaching.
Operations
What this desk is allowed to start
A surface that only reports is not operable. This is the work this page can set in motion, and the bound it runs into.
Trigger and bound
This page can assemble a named service end to end, measure its cycle time, wait and cost to serve on the chain rather than summing them from segments, and show how confident the assembly is at every join. It cannot start a chain, move a document between stages, reassign an owner or change a commitment. Those live in the source systems, and no connector is attached to any of them.
Live observability
What the record shows right now
Chain state at the close of the sampled week, an exhaustive partition of all 1,750 assembled chains into 4 states: every chain carries exactly one. Open means the week ended before the chain could reasonably finish, which is the observation window closing rather than the work being late.
Current distribution
1,750 chains
Is policy and strategy coming to fruition
Whether the written intent is holding here
Measured on the chain rather than the segment: 70 percent of a completed outcome is waiting, and 42 of 1,750 chains could be joined on a real key.
Not holding on the record
The position this layer exists to test is that an outcome is the unit the business feels, and that measuring functions one at a time hides what happens between them. The assembly bears that out and then indicts itself. Across 669 completed chains the average outcome takes 87.3 hours, of which 61.0 hours, 70 percent, is nobody working on it. No function level report contains that number, because the wait falls between two of them. But the join itself is weak: only 42 chains of 1,750 were keyed end to end, 769 rested entirely on place and timing, and 275 of the 1,117 chains that were actually matched came out below 0.60 confidence. 19 of the handoffs carrying $3.5m a week have no owner, 6 of the 8 outcome commitments run longer than the window that observed them, 3 services book no value at any stage so their cost to serve has no denominator, and 1,037 chains never left a single function. The intent is holding on the measurement and not yet on the evidence.
An outcome is assembled, not recorded. No source system in this estate stamps a single reference across a purchase requisition, the order raised against it and the receipt that closes it, so the chains on these pages were stitched together after the fact. Where both documents sit in the same source system the chain is keyed and the join is exact. Where it crosses a system boundary the chain is matched on the party, the market, the region and whether the timing is plausible, and it is labeled inferred with its confidence shown. Where the two sides name no party in common the only evidence left is place and timing, and the chain is labeled cohort and confidence is capped low on purpose. A cohort chain is a hypothesis about which documents belong together. Read it as one.
The ledger behind these chains is one week, 10 to 16 August 2026, which is 168 hours. A chain that had not finished when the week ended is open, not late: the week simply stopped watching it. A chain whose commitment falls after the end of the week could never have been seen to miss, so its service level reads not measurable rather than holding. Nothing on these pages should be read as a monthly or annual attainment.
Cost to serve is modeled from the touches the ledger recorded, not billed from a timesheet. Every touch is priced at 11 minutes of a person at a loaded 58 dollars an hour, and every stage carries 1.10 dollars of system cost and 0.42 dollars of inference. Handoff cost is priced separately: waiting is held at 0.90 dollars an item an hour, rework at 34 minutes, and duplicated data entry at the re-keying minutes recorded against that handoff. Change any of those six rates and every dollar on these pages moves.
The documents underneath are a two percent stratified sample of one week from the modeled consumer goods group, so a chain assembled here has only a two percent chance of finding any given successor document that actually exists. That is the dominant reason 633 chains never found a second stage, and it means the 38.2% completion figure is a property of the sample, not a measurement of the business. Read the shape of the chains and the size of the waits inside them. Do not read the completion rate as performance.