Case duration
Case duration is the elapsed time from a case's start to its completion. The distribution of case durations is the most useful operational view: median tells you typical experience, p95 tells you SLA-breaching cases, and the tail tells you systemic failure modes that drag specific cases far longer than average.
Case duration aggregates everything that happens to a case: wait time, work time, rework, escalation. Decomposing duration into its components (wait per step, work per step, queue depth) is the typical next analysis. The most common pattern: wait time dominates work time, often by 10-100x. A case that's '4 days end-to-end' often involves 30 minutes of actual work and 3 days 23.5 hours of waiting. That recognition usually re-anchors improvement work from 'do steps faster' to 'reduce wait time' — different remediation entirely.
Related terms
- Case throughput
Case throughput is the number of cases completed per unit time (cases per day, per week) — the basic flow metric of a process.
- Flow efficiency
Flow efficiency is the ratio of value-add time to total elapsed time for a case — typically expressed as a percentage.
- Process bottleneck
A process bottleneck is the step in a workflow with the lowest throughput — the constraint that limits the entire process's output.