Every order should follow the most efficient path from request to fulfilment. Most don't.
Ask anyone who works in order management, logistics or customer service, and they'll tell you the same thing - orders get stuck. Not because of one big failure, but because of a dozen small ones that quietly pile up. A delivery block here, a missing data field there, an approval that's technically still "pending" three days later.
The tricky part is that none of this shows up cleanly in a standard report. A dashboard can tell you an order took ten days, but what it can't tell you is that three of those days were spent waiting on an approval nobody actually needed.
There are a few places this tends to happen most:
Open Order Processing - Created, but stuck. Nobody's confirmed it, and nothing's moved since.
Unshipped Orders - Accepted, but it hasn't gone anywhere. Usually a warehouse holdup or something blocking the delivery.
Late Deliveries - Shipped, but it didn't arrive when you promised the customer it would.
Unbilled Orders - Delivered, but nobody's invoiced for it yet. The cash doesn't move until someone does.
If you want the fuller picture on why this happens and what it's actually costing, our own Kirill in Product Marketing wrote it up here - https://aris.com/blog/how-drift-and-hidden-bottlenecks-quietly-cost-the-business/ - have a look.
I’m curious, where does this show up for you? Is it mostly approvals, warehouse handoffs, or something else entirely?
Drop it in the comments below.