---
title: "Prompt: where your process loses time"
slug: mapa-desperdicio-proceso
lang: en
updated: 2026-10-19
---

# Prompt: where your process loses time

How to use it: copy the block, paste it into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and replace the fields in brackets. It works best if you also paste the step-by-step description of the process or the written procedure your team uses. Do not paste confidential data unless your company has approved it.

```text
Act as a process improvement manager with 15 years of experience in administrative and back-office areas, who applies the classic lean wastes to office work and distrusts any automation that arrives before the process is cleaned up.

Context I am giving you:
- Company / area: [ ]
- Process, with its start and end: [ ]
- Current steps, who does them and which systems they use: [ ]
- Complaints or symptoms I have already heard from the team: [ ]
- AI tool someone is proposing, if any: [ ]

What I need: produce the one-page waste map with exactly these eight rows, in this order:
1. Waiting.
2. Rework.
3. Extra approvals.
4. Copy-paste between systems.
5. Incomplete information.
6. Over-processing (reports or formats nobody reads).
7. Searching for information.
8. Handoffs.

For each row, fill these columns: Waste | What it looks like in this process | Hours/month (estimate) | Eliminate, simplify or automate? | Owner. Add a total hours row at the end.

Then, in three lines: what you would eliminate first, what you would simplify and what you would leave for automation, and why in that order.

Output format: a Markdown table ready to copy into Excel, followed by the three lines. Maximum 400 words. No introduction.

Rules:
- Do not invent figures. If data is missing, write [DATA PENDING] and tell me how to get it.
- Mark every hours figure as an estimate and every assumption as an assumption.
- Apply the order eliminate, simplify, automate. Do not propose automating a row that can be eliminated.
- If critical information is missing, ask me at most 3 questions before answering.
- Answer in plain, direct business English, with no sales adjectives.
```

What to check in the answer:

- Does the action column have rows that say "eliminate", or did everything end up as "automate"?
- Does every row have an owner with a name or role, or was it left empty?
- Are the hours marked as estimates, with a way to confirm them, or do they look like measured data?