Imagine a patient's critical medical records trapped in digital silos, unable to seamlessly transfer between their doctor and a specialist, delaying vital diagnoses. Or picture a customer trying to resolve a complex banking issue, only to be transferred through three different departments, each time having to reexplain their entire story to a new agent. That is transport waste: Unnecessary digital or physical movement of work between people, departments, or systems often involving rework or duplication.

Now imagine the employees behind the scenes. One is toggling through five systems to piece together a customer profile. Another is digging through inboxes and shared drives to find the most up to date document. These are not handoffs, they are motion waste: Excessive or inefficient movement within a role or system such as scrolling, searching, navigating screens, or switching between apps.

In service environments, Transport and Motion are not about forklifts and conveyor belts. They are digital, invisible, and everywhere. And the costs are real. According to McKinsey, knowledge workers spend nearly 20 percent of their time searching for internal information or tracking down colleagues for input*. Meanwhile, a Harvard Business Review study found that employees switch between apps over 1,200 times a day, losing up to five weeks a year in digital friction**.

To build truly Lean and intelligent operations, we must learn to see and eliminate both forms of waste. One moves the work inefficiently. The other exhausts the worker trying to make progress.

* “The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies,” McKinsey ** Harvard Business Review, “Stop the Meeting Madness,” 2023

Smart Lean: Eliminating the Hidden Wastes of Transport and Motion

Fixing What You Can’t See: Eliminating Workflow Waste Between and Within Roles

Spotting Waste in the Flow: Between and Within Roles

Transport and Motion waste often hide in plain sight, embedded in broken workflows, disjointed systems, and clunky interfaces. While Transport waste shows up as unnecessary handoffs between people or systems, Motion waste surfaces as excessive effort within a role to complete simple tasks.

  • Customer Service

    ➤Transport: Call transfers, ticket rerouting, or chatbots escalating without context.

    ➤ Motion: Agents searching through multiple systems to build a full customer view before responding.

  • Healthcare

    ➤ Transport: Patient records bouncing between departments due to poor interoperability.

    ➤ Motion: Staff toggling between outdated EMRs and lab systems just to prepare for one consultation.

  • Banking

    ➤ Transport: Loan applications shuffled across underwriters with redundant validations.

    ➤ Motion: Advisors manually reentering customer data from CRM to risk models or spreadsheets.

  • IT/SaaS

    ➤ Transport: DevOps teams waiting for approvals due to misrouted change requests.

    ➤ Motion: Engineers navigating multiple dashboards and tools to assemble status reports or deployment histories.

These inefficiencies may not always cause outages, but they quietly inflate cycle times, frustrate employees and customers, and drain operational capacity.

Diagnosing Invisible Waste: How to Detect Friction in the Flow

In service operations, Transport and Motion waste are often invisible. They don’t stop work, they slow it down. Tasks get done, but with extra effort, delays, and growing frustration.

Look for these behavioral and system-level signals:

  • Are employees hunting for documents, data, or the right person? (Motion)

  • Do requests or tickets bounce between teams before resolution? (Transport)

  • Is data being reentered across systems due to poor integration? (Both)

  • Are workflows cluttered with redundant steps or unclear handoffs? (Both)

These patterns rarely appear in dashboards, but they drain time and focus.

To surface them, use:

  • Value Stream Mapping to trace work end-to-end.

  • Process Mining to spot detours and rework.

  • Employee Interviews or Shadowing to expose hidden Motion waste.

Once visible, these inefficiencies shouldn’t just be automated—they should be eliminated, redesigned, or rerouted. That’s where AI can turn friction into flow.

Root Causes: The Hidden Drag Slowing Your Service Velocity

Transport and Motion waste often show up as delays, rework, or redundant effort, but their causes lie deeper in how work is structured and systems are connected.

Here are the most common sources of operational drag:

  • Siloed Systems
    Data is trapped in disconnected platforms, causing reentry, delays, and manual workarounds. (Transport and Motion)

  • Fragmented Processes
    Unclear workflows and undefined task ownership lead to excessive routing and duplicated effort. (Both)

  • Manual Handoffs
    Work moves via email, chat, or spreadsheets, adding wait time and increasing the chance of errors. (Transport)

  • Redundant Documentation
    Multiple versions of files create confusion, leading to time lost verifying accuracy. (Motion)

  • Poor Knowledge Management
    Critical information is buried in inboxes, shared drives, or outdated portals, forcing employees to search, ask, and rebuild. (Motion)

  • Lack of System Integration
    Nonintegrated tools result in duplicate data entry and app switching. (Both)

  • Limited Process Visibility
    Without an end to end view, bottlenecks and task stagnation remain hidden. (Both)

  • Low Digital Maturity
    Dependence on legacy systems or paper-based steps blocks automation and delays intelligent routing. (Transport)

Identifying these issues is the first step to removing unnecessary movement between roles and within them. The payoff: less friction, more capacity, and smarter flow driven by Lean and AI.

Accelerating Flow: How AI Removes Operational Slowdowns

Artificial Intelligence, when integrated with Lean principles, turns time loss into flow gain.

AI does not just speed up what is slow. It enables the elimination of what should not exist. In service operations burdened by Transport and Motion waste, the greatest gains come not from moving faster, but from using AI to remove unnecessary movement altogether. That includes both the digital detours between people and systems and the click fatigue within individual tasks.

While Lean thinking helps identify nonvalue adding steps, AI provides the tools to eliminate them at scale. These capabilities target the hidden slowdowns behind fragmented systems, redundant searches, and manual handoffs, restoring flow across your operations.

1. Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Type of waste reduced: Motion
By extracting key data from unstructured content, NLP eliminates the need for manual document digging.

  • Automates extraction of critical information from forms, emails, and notes

  • Enables agents to pull structured data from disconnected sources in real time

2. Process Mining

Type of waste reduced: Both Transport and Motion
AI powered process mapping reveals how work actually flows, highlighting inefficiencies that are otherwise invisible.

  • Identifies where tasks bounce between teams or systems unnecessarily

  • Detects routing delays, unnecessary loops, and inefficient steps within tasks

3. AI Powered Document Retrieval

Type of waste reduced: Motion
Advanced semantic search helps employees find exactly what they need—without excessive clicking or context switching.

  • Surfaces relevant documents instantly from across scattered drives and platforms

  • Reduces time spent navigating folder structures, shared drives, or outdated portals

4. Virtual Assistants and Chatbots

Type of waste reduced: Both Transport and Motion
AI driven assistants guide users through streamlined workflows, eliminating repetitive queries and routing steps.

  • Handle service requests, document retrieval, or FAQs without escalation

  • Minimize back and forth communication and reduce reliance on human handoffs

5. Predictive Routing and Contextual AI

Type of waste reduced: Primarily Transport
By anticipating the next step based on real time context, AI keeps tasks in flow and out of limbo.

  • Sends requests directly to the right agent or system

  • Times delivery and routing based on customer behavior signals and urgency

Restoring Flow Where It Breaks Down

Together, these AI capabilities reduce the invisible friction behind knowledge delays, system toggling, and digital rerouting.
The outcome is not just faster work—it is smarter flow, where work moves only when, where, and how it should.

These tools do more than improve speed.
They remove friction by eliminating digital detours, cutting unnecessary handoffs, and freeing teams to focus on what matters—delivering value to customers faster.

Do not automate complexity. Simplify first.

Then, use AI to eliminate what should not exist.

The KPIs That Reveal Workflow Waste: FCR and Time to Retrieve Information

A key indicator of operational flow in services is First Contact Resolution (FCR). It tracks whether a customer issue is resolved during the first interaction, without being passed between agents or systems.

Low FCR often signals unnecessary handoffs, disconnected knowledge, or fragmented workflows, classic signs of Transport waste.

To detect Motion waste, the time employees spend navigating systems or searching for information, another metric is essential: Time to Retrieve Critical Information. It shows how much time is lost inside the task, before anything moves.

To get a full picture of friction, pair FCR and Time to Retrieve Critical Information with:

  • Digital Handoffs per Workflow (Transport)

  • System Toggles per Task (Motion)

  • Customer Wait Time (Both)

These KPIs expose excess movement that slows teams down even when outputs look fine.

What You Gain When Flow Replaces Friction

When Lean thinking is combined with AI, the result is not just efficiency, it is operational flow. By removing unnecessary movement whether between roles and systems or within tasks and tools organizations recover time, focus, and capacity lost to friction.

Replacing excess movement with AI enabled flow:

  • Frees employee capacity for meaningful work

  • Reduces errors from repeated entry and manual transfers

  • Accelerates service by delivering the right information at the right time

  • Improves morale by eliminating repetitive tasks

These improvements build over time, driving smoother operations, better outcomes, and stronger customer and employee experiences.

Real-World Examples

Klarna Eliminates 25% of Repeat Inquiries with AI Customer Assistant

Klarna, a global leader in “buy now, pay later” financial services, faced increasing complexity in its customer service operations, where human agents managed high volumes of repetitive inquiries. Each case often involved handoffs between teams, slow routing, and duplicated effort, resulting in longer resolution times and fragmented customer experiences.

To streamline support, Klarna deployed a generative AI-powered customer service assistant based on OpenAI technology. Integrated into the company’s digital service infrastructure, the assistant handles inquiries end-to-end, reducing the need for manual escalation, repetitive data entry, and inter-agent transfers. The solution delivers responses in real time and can manage both simple tasks and more complex product searches, freeing agents for higher-value interactions.

Results:

  • Repeat customer inquiries dropped by 25%

  • Average resolution time reduced from 11 minutes to under 2 minutes

  • $40 million in estimated annual profit impact in 2024

By eliminating redundant handoffs and automating request routing, Klarna’s AI assistant addressed a critical form of digital transport waste, that is the unnecessary movement of information across agents, systems, and touchpoints, ultimately accelerating resolution and improving customer satisfaction.

Sources:

  1. BCG, “How AI Agents Are Opening the Golden Era of Customer Experience,” January 2025

  2. Klarna, AI customer service performance data, 2024 (as cited by BCG)

  3. OpenAI x Klarna announcement, March 2024

Comcast Cuts Agent Search Time by 10% with AI Assistant (Motion)

Comcast, one of the largest telecommunications providers in the U.S., faced persistent efficiency challenges in its customer service operations. Call center agents routinely toggled between multiple systems and knowledge bases to answer customer questions, adding unnecessary manual steps and increasing call handling time.

To address this, Comcast deployed a generative AI assistant—nicknamed “Ask Me Anything”—powered by a large language model (LLM) and embedded directly into agents’ desktops. The assistant enables agents to ask natural-language questions during live calls and receive real-time, context-relevant answers, eliminating the need to search manually across documents or tabs.

Results:

  • Average time spent on knowledge searches per call dropped by ~10%

  • Reduced agent cognitive load and task switching

  • Millions in projected annual labor efficiency gains, according to Cisco

By removing repetitive digital motions like searching, toggling, and retyping, the AI assistant streamlined agent workflows and eliminated a key form of motion waste in Comcast’s service operations.

Sources:

1. arXiv, “Ask Me Anything in a Call Center: Evaluating LLM Assistants in Live Support Settings,” May 2024

2. Cisco AI Customer Success, “LLM Assistants in Enterprise Contact Centers,” 2024

Conclusion: Eliminate the Invisible to Unlock Real Flow

Transport and Motion waste are not small, they are just hidden. Handoffs, toggles, repeated searches, and reentry may seem routine, but they quietly erode time, energy, and performance.

Lean thinking helps us recognize what does not create value. AI gives us the tools to remove it, but only when used with intent. The real win is not speed. It is clarity. It is flow.

When organizations remove unnecessary movement between systems and within tasks, they unlock capacity, improve service, and give people the space to focus on what matters.

By eliminating the waste of Transport and Motion with AI enabled strategies, businesses not only streamline internal workflows, but also deliver superior outcomes to customers: faster answers, fewer touchpoints, and effortless service from start to finish.

This is how smart operations scale not by working harder, but by removing what gets in the way.

FR

@ 2025 Lean Bizness Inc. | Strategy Through Execution

Based in North America | Working with clients across the U.S. and internationally

[ Privacy Policy ] [ Terms of Use ]