Routing the Work

Grace stood at the front of the twelfth-floor annex with both hands wrapped around a paper cup she had not touched. The room held twelve people, three laptops, and a wall screen showing her workflow map in blocks of white and blue.

Rebecca Collins sat near the end of the table, pen poised, watch face catching the light every time she shifted her wrist.

“Walk us through the bottlenecks,” Daniel Reyes said.

Grace’s cardigan cuffs slipped over her knuckles. “I should say, this started as a routing layer for duplicate requests. Then I added queue flags for handoffs, because the same ticket was getting bounced three times.”

Logan watched the cursor move on the screen as she clicked through the demo. One button. Then another. A task from sales dropped into support, then to logistics, then back with a timestamp and a name.

Marcus Pruitt gave a short laugh. “Looks neat on a screen.”

Grace kept her eyes on the panel. “The screen is the easy part.”

She opened a second window. Colored bars filled the chart.

“In the pilot divisions, late escalations fell by thirty-two percent. Rework dropped twelve. The biggest gain came from routing packaging exceptions before they hit dispatch.”

One director leaned forward. “By how much?”

“On the current run rate, about ninety-four thousand in direct quarterly waste reduction.”

Rebecca’s pen stopped. “And the error rate?”

“Lower than the legacy process by three tenths of a point.”

“And adoption?”

Grace swallowed. “Frontline use is high. Managers who tried to override the suggestions got fewer exceptions than the control group.”

A few heads turned.

Daniel folded his hands flat on the table. “Continue.”

Grace clicked to a final slide showing dock lanes and ticket chains. “The main value is local judgment. The system asks for a reason when someone reroutes work. That made patterns visible. It also made it harder to hide work by burying it.”

Rebecca’s lips pressed thin. “Or to slow decision-making with needless reporting.”

Grace looked down once, then back up. “Only if people use the old habits.”

Silence settled.

Rebecca lowered her pen and cleared her throat. “For the record, this should have been reviewed months ago. The software has merit. The worker who built it should have been heard.”

No one moved.

Logan turned his wedding band once. The room had shifted. She knew it too.

Rebecca set her pen beside her pad, no longer smiling.