We have many products going through exact same steps, we use child items for that.
As a result the timeline looks like a bunch of items with the same name. So we have to manually copy ant paste the parrent items' name to the child items, this way it is more clear. Item ID's dont help a lot because they are more like a code than a name.
An example: a product needs to go through a Quality check (QC).
Ten people are doing QC at the moment for ten products.
Timeline just says: QC; QC; QC; QC...
It COULD say: QC // product 1; QC // product 2; and so on.