"Network Flow: how work moves through the network"

What Network Flow shows

Network Flow is the process-mining read on your network: how many days work sits at each stage of a job, a supplement, a recruiting pipeline, and a safety incident, before it moves to the next one. Verinode mines this straight from the lifecycle dates your offices already log in their own IQ accounts, the same dates that power each operator's own process-mining view. Network Flow rolls those dates up to the network level and lays them side by side, one tile per stage transition, so you can see at a glance where the network's time actually goes, which offices are fast and which are slow on any given stage, and how the network compares to the wider industry where a comparison is available.

This is aggregate intelligence, not a franchisee lookup tool. Verinode HQ never surfaces an individual job, case, or timeline, and it never shows you a franchisee's underlying business records. What crosses the boundary from a franchisee's private data into your Network Flow view is a small set of numbers: the median days a stage took, the fastest and slowest quarter of cases behind that median, and how many in-order cases the number is built on. Franchisees own their operational data; HQ sees the aggregate. That boundary holds everywhere on this page, including the per-office breakdown, where office identity is disclosed only in the way your network's data-sharing model allows (more on that below).

Network Flow covers four processes today, each one already cleared a minimum-data bar before Verinode turned it on for the network:

• Job lifecycle, from a job being assigned through to being paid.
• Supplement turnaround, from a supplement being submitted to the carrier through to a response.
• Recruiting pipeline, from an application being received through interviews to a hire.
• Incident follow-through, from a safety incident occurring through to its corrective action closing out.

A fifth flow, purchasing (order to invoice), and two more, lead response and review response, are mined per-operator inside IQ, but have not yet been added to the network-level HQ rollup shown here.

Where to find it

Network Flow lives on your network's home page. Open Network Health from the HQ sidebar (hq.verinode.ai/network-health) and scroll to the Network Flow row, below Take Action and Best Practices To Propagate, above Explore. Each tile in the row is one stage transition. Click any tile to open the full Network Flow tab in the network health slider, with every mined transition and the office-by-office breakdown behind each one.

If your network has stage-time standards defined, a Standards Conformance tile leads the row, grading every office against those standards. That is a distinct, related feature, covered in Process standards and conformance; this article is about the Network Flow tiles that follow it.

Reading a Network Flow tile

Each tile carries four things:

• Process name, in the label position: Job lifecycle, Supplement turnaround, Recruiting pipeline, or Incident follow-through. Each process gets its own accent color on the row: copper for Job lifecycle, teal for Supplement turnaround, steel blue for Recruiting pipeline, amber for Incident follow-through, so a long row still reads as four distinct flows at a glance.
• The stage transition, in the subline, written as "Stage A → Stage B" (for example, "Started → Completed" or "Submitted → Responded").
• The network median, the headline number, in days. Under 10 days it shows one decimal place (for example, "3.5d"); ten days or more it rounds to a whole day (for example, "18d"). This is the network's own median for that stage, pooled across every case from every office that has one, not an average of each office's median. A high-volume office's cases weigh into the pooled number more than a low-volume office's, by design, so the tile answers "how long does this stage actually take across the network's work" rather than "what is the typical office's median."
• A comparison line, one of two things depending on what data is available (see the next two sections).

Below the number, a bar shows the stage's duration as a fraction of the row's longest stage, so a three-day stage reads visibly short next to a thirty-day one, and you can see at a glance where the lifecycle actually spends its time. When an industry median exists for the transition, a small tick mark sits on that same bar at the industry's position, so the network's bar and the industry tick read directly against each other.

The industry median tick

Where the anonymous peer cohort behind a stage transition is large enough, Verinode publishes an industry median for it, drawn from the network's peers across the wider industry over the trailing twelve months, and snapshots it onto the tile as the small tick mark on the duration bar and as the comparison line underneath:

• "Xd Faster Than Industry" or "Xd Slower Than Industry", in green or red depending on direction, when the network's median and the industry median differ by half a day or more.
• "On Pace With Industry", in neutral gray, when the two are within half a day of each other.

The industry figure is never a named competitor or a specific peer's number. It only appears once the peer cohort behind it is broad enough that no single contributor's data could be identified from it; below that bar, the tile simply carries no tick and no industry comparison line, and falls back to the office-spread comparison described next. Verinode does not disclose how many peers sit behind a published industry figure, only that the anonymity floor was cleared.

The office spread, when there is no industry figure yet

If a transition doesn't have a published industry median, the tile's comparison line instead reads the spread across your own offices, for example "Offices 2d–7d", the fastest office's median to the slowest office's median for that stage. This tells you the range you're managing across your own network even before an outside benchmark exists for that specific transition.

The full drill-in

Clicking a tile opens the Network Flow tab in the network health slider (the same slider you reach from every Network Health tile). Each transition gets its own card, laid out top to bottom:

• The process name and the stage transition, same as the tile.
• The network median in days, with "Network Median · N [cases]" underneath it, where the case noun matches the process (jobs, supplements, applicants, incidents) and N is how many in-order cases the network median is built on.
• "Industry median Xd across the anonymous peer cohort", when one is published for that transition. This line is omitted entirely when no industry figure exists yet for that stage.
• A per-office list, one row per office that has enough of its own cases to report a stage median, sorted fastest to slowest. Each row shows the office name, a bar sized against the fastest and slowest offices on that specific transition, the office's own median in days, and how many cases back it.

How office names appear

Whether an office shows its real name or an anonymized label depends on your network's data-sharing model, the same setting that governs every other per-location view on HQ:

• Same-entity networks (one enterprise operating multiple company-owned locations) see real location names throughout, including here.
• Independent-operator networks (franchise and association models, the default) see each office labeled "Franchisee #XXXX", a short stable code derived from that operator's account, not their business name. The same franchisee always gets the same code across every HQ surface, so you can track a pattern over time without their identity being disclosed.

How to use it

1. 1Open the Network Flow row on your Network Health home and scan left to right. Because every tile shares the same duration scale, the longest bars are the stages where the network's lifecycle actually spends its time, that is where a fix has the most leverage.
2. 2Check each tile's comparison line. A tile reading slower than industry, or with a wide office spread, is a candidate worth a closer look before one reading on pace or with a tight spread.
3. 3Click into a tile that stands out. Read the per-office list fastest to slowest. A handful of offices sitting well past the network median on a stage that others clear quickly is usually a coaching or process-adoption gap, not a data problem, once each office's case count is high enough to trust.
4. 4If the network is falling short of an industry median on a transition, take it into Best practices to propagate or your own process standards conversation; Network Flow surfaces the gap and the office pattern behind it, it does not tell you what to change. Leadership decides.

Empty states

Network Flow only shows what your network has actually reported. Until there's enough data, the surface says so plainly rather than showing a placeholder chart:

• The whole row, when no process has a live network median yet: "Network stage medians appear as offices report lifecycle dates. Job, supplement, recruiting, and safety flows map here automatically."
• The Network Flow tab in the slider, same condition: "Network Flow appears as offices report lifecycle dates. Job, supplement, recruiting, and safety stage medians map here automatically, with the office spread behind each one."
• A transition's per-office list, when no office has cleared the five-case floor yet: "Per-office comparison appears once an office clears five in-order [cases] on this stage."

None of these are errors. A quiet Network Flow row usually means offices haven't logged enough lifecycle dates yet in their own accounts, not that nothing is happening in the network.

What Network Flow is not

Network Flow is a network intelligence surface, not a job-management or case-tracking tool. It will never show you an individual job's timeline, a specific supplement's status, or an applicant's record, that data belongs to the franchisee and stays in their own account. It also never lets HQ push a change into a franchisee's process; Verinode surfaces the pattern, your leadership decides what to do with it, whether that's a coaching conversation, a standards update, or a best-practice rollout.

Related

• Network Health: your network's overview, the home page Network Flow lives on, and where Best Practices To Propagate and the other Network Health tiles are covered.
• Process standards and conformance, the Standards Conformance tile that leads the Network Flow row, and how HQ grades offices against defined stage-time targets.
• How your work flows, the same lifecycle mining, read from a single operator's own IQ account rather than the network rollup.