Cha-ChingNearly every order system models the same five states: placed, confirmed, shipped, in transit, delivered. It is clean, it fits on a slide, and it is missing a day.
Between the customer saying yes on the telephone and the parcel being handed to a courier, somebody has to type the order into whatever system actually moves boxes. Pick the right variant, resolve the address into something a courier will accept, print a label, put it on a shelf. In a Moroccan operation it is called saisie, it is often a different person from the one who made the call, and it routinely takes longer than the call did.
What collapsing it costs
If your model goes straight from confirmed to shipped, then every hour spent in data entry is invisible, and it is attributed to whichever neighbour you are measuring. Confirmation looks slow, or dispatch looks slow, and neither team recognises the number as theirs.
Worse, nobody owns the backlog, because the backlog does not appear on any screen. A hundred confirmed orders waiting to be entered look exactly like a hundred orders about to ship.
So it is a stage
Saisie has its own queue, its own operator, and its own timestamp. Which means you can see it building up, you can see how long it takes, and you can tell the difference between a confirmation problem and a keyboard problem. That is the entire argument for seven stages instead of five.