Lead Time

Customers judge a company by lead time, far more than by any internal efficiency measure. They feel the wait, not the effort behind it. Lead time is usually dominated by idle time: requests sitting in an inbox, a task waiting for approval, a booking that is days away. That means it can often be cut sharply by removing a delay, with nobody working faster.

• Pick the one or two processes a customer feels most, such as onboarding or a support request, and measure those first.
• Time from the customer's request to the moment they get the result, not from when work starts.
• Map every handoff and queue, and find the step where requests wait longest.
• Fix the waiting before touching the work. Removing a two-day delay usually beats speeding up a twenty-minute task.
• Track it on the same process over time, since a fix can quietly slip back.
• Set a target and treat a miss as a signal to investigate.

Lead time starts the moment a customer asks and ends when they receive what they asked for. It counts every hour in between, working or waiting. The idea comes from lean manufacturing, and it is not related to a sales lead. A client who signs up on Monday and is fully onboarded the next Monday has experienced seven days of lead time, even if the hands-on work took one hour.

• Confusing it with cycle time, which counts only the time spent actively working.
• Reporting an average and ignoring the slowest cases, which are the ones customers remember.