Denis N. — Process Improvement Specialist
Based in Yerevan, Armenia. PMP and ACP certified by the Project Management Institute.
At the start of my career, 22 years ago at IKEA, I didn't know anything about how business works. I had a lot of questions:
- why a customer who waits too long for their order gets a coupon for a free cake
- why every damaged or broken item has to be recorded in the system
- why there are feedback kiosks throughout the entire store
- why price tags and product information have to be so precise and complete
- why it matters which products sell best and which ones customers ignore entirely
With experience, I started getting answers. The customer values their time and isn't willing to pay for what they don't need. They won't wait longer than seems reasonable, especially when they can get the same thing somewhere else immediately.
Eight years ago, I went deep into lean methodology and process optimisation. My existing knowledge about processes got a new structure: the concept of waste, its types, and how to find it. Working with teams of different sizes, from groups of five or six people to company-wide initiatives, I kept confirming the same thing. In any process, even one that looks well-designed, there is an inefficient part. Remove it, and the process improves. The people in those teams already sensed something was wrong. They just needed someone to name it clearly and point them toward a fix.
Talking to small business owners here in Yerevan, I saw the same symptoms I had seen in large organisations. Owners working long hours with results that didn't match the effort, always firefighting, rarely getting to the work that actually matters. The TIMWOODS framework applies here just as well as it does in a 1,000-person company. It shows what in the process is not working and where resources are being lost. The hard part isn't the diagnosis. It's that most owners never get one.
HiddenDrain
HiddenDrain is built to close that gap. A business owner answers a few questions about how their operation actually runs — scheduling, approvals, handoffs, information flow — and the tool maps their answers to the TIMWOODS waste categories most active in their business. The result is a prioritised picture of where the time and money are going.
Not a generic checklist. Not a consulting engagement. A diagnostic built on the same framework I have been applying for eight years, available to any business owner, free, in under ten minutes.
A Note on AI
AI has made process improvement more accessible. Solving a specific operational problem used to mean finding a specialist. Now a well-prompted AI can do a reasonable job of the advisory part.
But a powerful tool applied to the wrong problem makes things worse, not better. If you identify the wrong bottleneck and optimise around it, you have made an inefficient process run faster. The output of the wrong process, delivered more efficiently, is still the wrong output.
Lean is the diagnostic layer that AI alone does not provide. It tells you where the problem actually is before you start fixing anything. That is the sequence HiddenDrain is built around: diagnose with the framework first, then use AI to help act on what the framework surfaced.
The framework itself — TIMWOODS — comes from the Toyota Production System. I am not the one who invented it. I am someone who has spent eight years applying it across service teams in IT, retail, and banking, and who is now making that structured view available to owners who would otherwise never get one.
Writing
Practical guides on operational waste and process improvement for SMB owners. No theory, no consulting jargon — just what a business owner can actually act on.
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