The framework
Eight blocks. None of them are about software.
An Operations Map describes how a business actually runs. Seven blocks describe the running; the eighth — the destination — is what makes the other seven routable. Without it you have an atlas, not navigation.
Agents
Events
Workflows
Records
Policies
Measures
Integrations
Destination
What the method is built on
Two bodies of work, one for each half of the job.
Getting how a business really runs out of the people who run it, on a wall, in hours rather than months. Your mapping session is an EventStorm.
Resources, Events, Agents — every business fact is an economic event affecting a resource, involving people, and every give has a matching take. The ontology underneath ERP itself, standardised as ISO 15944-4.
Also drawn on: Evans and Vernon on domain-driven design, Fowler on event sourcing (why position is computed rather than stored), and Goldratt's The Goal (throughput over local efficiency).
Current position
Where the business actually stands, right now.
Computed from the event log — never typed in. The moment someone keys in where they think the business is, this stops being navigation and becomes a report.
Where you'll land
Not a forecast from a spreadsheet — this is the unit's own event history run forward. Clear the three items alongside and the pace changes.
What's stopping you · 3 live
- 1
Scrap running at 6.8% — nothing records itNo event captures material consumed per run. Blocks the goal outright.
- 2
Machine 4 idle 31% of every shiftMould changeover between short runs. Costs ~2.1 margin points.
- 3
11 invoices past 45 daysCash tied up in receivables. Funds the discounting that erodes margin.
Margin per job
Scrap
Receivable days
The workflows
Three workflows. Every event carries who acts and what it writes.
This is the business, written down. Each event names its role (who is allowed to do it) and its record (what it writes, and of which kind). Read together they are the whole of blocks 01–04 made concrete — and the place a missing event becomes visible.
Enquiry to order
Measures: win rate · booked valueException — rush job: jumps the queue and forces an unplanned mould changeover. Costs time on workflow 02 and nobody records why.
Run the job
Measures: margin per job · scrap % · machine utilisationException — rework: QC fails after the material is already spent. The cost lands on the original job, but nothing links the two.
Dispatch to cash
Measures: on-time dispatch · receivable daysException — short delivery: part shipment against a full order, so the invoice and the dispatch note disagree. Handled by memory today.
What the tags are doing
Every event names a role and a record. Read down the role tags and you have the access rules. Read down the record tags and you have the database. Neither is written twice, so they cannot drift apart.
Why this matters here
Workflow 02 carries the measure the December goal depends on — and it is the workflow with the missing event. Laid out like this, that is obvious in five seconds. On a dashboard it is invisible, because a number that was never recorded simply doesn't appear.