The symptoms of low productivity

COST- Typical issues

• Market pressures compel you to reduce costs
• Budgeted costs are being exceeded
• The business needs a better margin to be more profitable
• Lower costs could give you a competitive advantage
• Compare the costs of a change to equipment or a process
• Investigate the consequences of a batch size reduction

Does this sound familiar?

•  “Can we call off goods every week,  instead of every month, with no impact on cost?
•  “Compare costs across our different  group sites – and what about response time?”

If any of these issues are in your business, you should consider making changes. Every business will get benefits from improved costs. Here’s a step by step guide to improving productivity.

CAPACITY – Typical issues

• Customer asks for more – can you produce them?
•  Customer wants same volume but smaller batches of more products
• How many people do you need, now that we’ve identified these changes?
• Identify the capacity of a machine or process, a warehouse or site
• Establish the capacity to handle new customers
• Determine what space capacity you have to introduce new products and people
• Capacities have to be determined at a variety of levels: strategic, site, operational, departmental, area, at an individual person or equipment level.

If any of these issues are in your business, you should consider making changes. Every business will get benefits from improved capacities. Here’s a step by step guide to improving productivity.

RESPONSE – Typical issues

• Have you the right information to meet project or delivery deadlines?
• What’s your response time with quotes or tenders?
• Customer wants to improve your delivery response time an ongoing basis – can you do it?
• What’s the impact of changing a specification to bring a new product or service to market?
• Are you confident in delivering on time, in full, at correct specification and quality?
• Reduce queuing at the checkout, in a call centre or in vehicle turnaround at a DC.
• Response isn’t just about time but how well you react to order quantities, commercial terms, supplier issues. Response involves improving the whole cycle of quote, design, process, deliver.

If any of these issues are in your business, you should consider making changes. Every business will get benefits from improved response. Here’s a step by step guide to improving productivity.