When Processes Collide: Lessons from the B2B Shop Floor

Working in B2B means living in a world where no two customers look the same. Each partnership comes with its own processes, exceptions, and workarounds—until one day you realize that the system you thought was predictable has become a web of hidden dependencies. And when something goes wrong (as it inevitably does), the real struggle begins: where do you even start? The issue isn’t always a failing service or a missing metric. Often, it’s the gap between organizations, unclear handovers, or decisions made under pressure that ripple through the system.

In our journey, we found ourselves asking: how do you diagnose a problem when it’s not a technical bug, but a process breakdown? Surprisingly, the answers didn’t just come from software. By looking at how lean production and shop-floor management deal with exceptions, we began to see new ways of bringing clarity and rhythm to our collaborations. This is the story of what went wrong, what we learned, and how borrowing from outside software helped us navigate complexity by exception.