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As markets are becoming more and more competitive, managers need to find ways to make their processes more efficient and achieve better results.

The concept of Lean Six Sigma and the benefits it brings have arisen to help companies in this aspect. Keep reading this post to find out more about this topic!

What is Lean Six Sigma?

To better understand what Lean Six Sigma methodology is, first we need to understand the separate concepts of what is Lean and what is Six Sigma:

Lean Six Sigma is a combination of both philosophies which seeks to achieve excellence by optimizing processes and reducing waste. This concept has arisen due to the desire of companies to make their operations more agile and efficient.

How should you apply it to your company?

Lean Six Sigma can be applied to any company that‘s seeking to maximize its results and make its operations leaner and more precise. However, the first step in doing this is to be aware that you’ll have to break paradigms and you’ll need to be willing to do this.

The change begins with the mapping of your processes. In addition to evaluating your activity flow searching for errors and waste – to eliminate them – you also need to understand how a company creates value for its customers.

When the creation of value is defined, this is when you should identify which steps in each process don’t contribute to this goal and eliminate them, adjusting your work methods so that your operational performance doesn’t suffer.

The focus should be on improving processes and avoiding waste, which can be characterized as:

In general, the goal is to implement this philosophy in your company and create conditions that will ensure that the correct materials are used, in an appropriate place, in an ideal quantity – always avoiding accumulations of material and losses and correcting process failures as they occur.

What are the benefits that it offers?

The adoption of the Lean Six Sigma methodology offers various advantages for your company in terms of production and your overall results. Among these benefits, we can mention:

Applying Lean Six Sigma takes time, but it’s relatively simple and it will bring your company closer to achieving excellence in its activities. In addition, with all the improvements made, it’s safe to say that it will also provide you with a competitive advantage.

In the business world, good opportunities arise from correct decisions. Some need to be taken advantage of quickly, which can cause apprehension on the part of entrepreneurs. The best way to make more efficient choices is to create and analyze KPIs.

How to create and analyze KPIs

KPI stands for key performance indicator. These are metrics that business leaders use to analyze the efficiency of a given process.

For example, a company invests $ 50 thousand in a television commercial. Its objective is to encourage television viewers to visit and register on the company’s website, thereby generating leads. Determining an ideal number of leads to be achieved is a way to create and analyze a KPI in this case.

If the company determines that the number of leads should be 100 thousand and just 20 thousand have been created, this will help the marketing department verify whether the strategy has been successful or not.

Examples of KPIs

One tip in terms of creating and analyzing KPIs is to work with data that’s easy to understand. This data should be easy to collect. Here are some examples of KPIs:

This way the company will have access, in a rapid manner, to data which can easily be understood. This practicality ensures that changes in strategy can be made quickly and safely. If the business has a low number of website views, this reveals that the page is not being successful, and that it should be modified.

The ideal is that a company shouldn’t use too many KPIs because one metric can contradict another. The number of leads may be high, however, sales may be falling, for example. In this case, the company should place emphasis on the result that gives the best idea of how well the venture’s adopted strategy is doing.

Another important point in creating and analyzing KPIs is to remember that these numbers should be understood by all of the company’s departments – normally they shouldn’t be specific to, or the exclusive use of just one department.

KPIs improve processes

In this article we’ve used the example of using KPIs to examine leads or sales. However, they can be used in any other business processes — not just sales or marketing, and can help improve quality and avoid rework, for example.

A good indicator of the quality of your sales department is to analyze the rate of complaints that your customer service department receives, for example. A way to reduce these complaints is to improve your team’s training.

KPIs also help identify the efficiency of investments, serving to determine the ROI.

Normally the answers to your company’s questions are in your business itself. That’s why it’s important to create and analyze KPIs. Don’t ignore your greatest source of information about your venture: your internal process metrics.

Frequently reducing costs ends up becoming a necessity for a manager. However, it’s extremely important to know how to do it, because it will, after all, affect your company’s strategies. Contrary to what many think, reducing costs isn’t something bad and doesn’t always involve laying off employees – and it can, even, serve to stimulate greater efficiency in your company.

Want to know how you can reduce costs without having a negative effect on your company, your employees and your working environment? Then read our tips!

Map waste

The first step is identifying where your company is wasting resources. Small expenses, considered insignificant, can represent great savings for your company.

Electricity is a good example of this concept. That’s why you should verify the efficiency of the equipment that you use in your company. Exchanging them for more economic models could be a good investment.

Work with targets

Companies need targets, not just to encourage growth, but also to measure the assertiveness of the decisions taken. When entrepreneurs have to decide how to reduce costs, they need to maintain the strategies that have worked in the past, rather than those that have proved to be mistaken.

A good source of information is evaluating the targets that have (or haven’t) been attained. They will provide you with valuable data.

Improve your training process

Rework is synonymous with losses. If your company has to do a lot of rework, investigate the cause. In many cases, employees haven’t received adequate training and this is why they can’t perform their jobs well, wasting their work time, and in some cases, raw materials.

Instead of beginning a hiring process — which is normally expensive — look at training your current employees. Besides being less expensive, which will contribute to your cost reductions, this initiative can greatly improve your company’s efficiency.

Reevaluate your company’s investments

A good way to discover how to reduce costs is to reevaluate your company’s investments. Many companies have investments that are distant from their area of expertise. In some cases, the rates of return aren’t advantageous and these investments only generate the expenses of maintaining them.

Your company’s investments, besides being safe, should be simple to manage — this way, you’ll save in terms of fees and/or the costs of the professionals responsible for monitoring them.

Seek new suppliers

Besides improving your buying process, meeting with your suppliers can be a way to discover how to reduce costs. In many markets, there’s been an increase in the number of companies that can be considered potential suppliers. Your purchasing department should evaluate the reputation of these companies — as well as delivery logistics and payment timeframes — to know if it’s viable to change a supplier.

The entrepreneur should always be looking for chances to reduce company costs. This attitude normally results in improved company processes and greater financial solidity for your business. It shouldn’t be seen in a negative light, and certainly not associated with layoffs or compromising the quality of your final product.

It’s rather a series of natural and constant advances that can be found in successful companies. It’s necessary for businessmen to keep their business data in an organized and secure form, because this will be fundamental when it comes time to find ways to streamline your company’s processes. Remember: you can’t manage what you can’t measure!

The planning and financial control area of a company is responsible for strategic planning, producing budgets and providing decision making support to company leaders and the managers of other departments. The professional controller is the one who manages and coordinates the work of this department, assuring the quality and results of its work.

Overall the manager of the financial control area is a strategist with managerial responsibilities, because by consolidating data and providing management support, this professional guarantees that all of the business areas are well run and efficient, and that the company’s CEO and executives are taking good care of the organization.

Find out a bit more about the importance of this position in a company’s hierarchy and the advantages that this person can offer to your company’s business.

Optimization of accounting processes

In the past, the managers of the financial control area were accounting specialists. This has changed, but a professional controller is still an accounting specialist — with knowledge of administration, management and business strategy as well as finance.

With these professional duties and knowledge, this manager simulates scenarios for the accounting department, analyzes its structure and may possibly identify changes that need to be made while keeping up with the department’s progress and making projections for it. Thus, this professional will use diagnostics to evaluate the accounting department and its processes and support the department’s manager in making decisions to optimize it.

Improving the measurement of results

One of the duties of a professional controller is evaluating results and also understanding them. This means that, along with measuring and documenting results, this person knows how to define targets, compare budgeted and actual numbers, and will know what has enabled the company to achieve or not achieve its goals, and will also be able to identify the factors and actions that have influenced the obtained metrics.

Through this work, the business will be better able to control its numbers and provide its managers and executives with greater insights. As a consequence, the company will be able to improve its operations, its budgeting, management and its overall and segment strategies and actions.

Improved decision making by managers

The company as a whole has its strategic planning and, within thus, budgets and strategies for each department. To help the departments develop these budgets and strategies, the planning and financial control area consolidates information on all of these factors and provides support for the company executives and managers in their decision making.

The results of this process are more agile decisions and more efficient budgets. As a result, the company’s prospects will improve and it will start to invest its financial resources better.

Thus it’s correct to say, for these reasons and countless others, that having a professional controller responsible for the planning and financial control area offers a competitive advantage, because the strategic and managerial improvements and changes that this professional promotes will result in improved company performance in the market.

For example: with leaner but still appropriate budgets, it’s possible to maintain good processes, profit and a positive return on investment and still have money left over to invest in business development to improve market penetration.

Improved financial analysis

Taking into account the company’s capacity to supply strategic data in real time, it becomes easier to perform reliable audits, which will diminish errors and fraud considerably.

This way the company gains credibility with the market, its partners and possible investors. It’s not incorrect to conclude that the work of a controller, when well executed in a strategic manner, can help increase the market value of a business.

In addition, efficient financial control guarantees security for your company when it comes time to make investments and make other strategic financial decisions, such as mergers for example.

Strategic analysis of current actions

In the not too distant past, it was impossible for a company to analyze the actions it was taking while they were being executed. One had to wait for them to finish to conclude whether they were successful or not.

This led to losses when planning was not executed well. However, today with a professional controller this situation can easily be turned around.

The strategic analysis of information makes it possible for this professional to verify when an action is not generating the expected results. In some cases, this can happen during the first moments of execution. Thus a company can interrupt a strategy before it leads to irreversible results.

The data that this action presents will be used for analysis, giving these professionals the chance to study why this error occurred in order to avoid the occurrence of similar errors.

Creation of efficient reports

When well executed, the work of a controller ensures that your company focuses on the correct analysis of information, generating efficient and easily understood reports.

It’s important to emphasize that all of a business’s important decisions should be made based on this type of document. We may conclude that many of the losses that companies have had have been due to erroneous information in problematic reports.

Ensuring the reliability of this information is of key importance to any business. Achieving this level of quality is only possible when the company has a professional working in the control area, because this ensures that there is a strategic analysis of the data through management software which will present really credible reports.

Compliance with regulatory norms

Companies have the responsibility of complying with the requirements of various regulatory committees. Non-compliance with these rules can cause grave damage to a business’s image, and can even put the company’s operations at risk.

To meet these obligations, it’s important to maintain a level of discipline in operations, which is possible only through the strategic vision provided by the constant analysis of data from your operational processes.

This way it’s possible to verify if production processes are in compliance with the parameters required by regulatory agencies. In addition to this, the presence of a professional controller ensures the veracity of the documents presented by the organization, guaranteeing its compliance with norms, because they are generated by the latest software which can attest to its accuracy.

If a company concludes that its processes contain errors, it’s possible to correct them in a rapid manner to meet regulatory demands and avoid recalls or problems with the company’s image.

Now do you understand the importance of a professional controller to a company? Did you like our tips? Then follow us on the social networks and follow our updates. We’re on Facebook, Twitter and Linkdeln!

When it first appeared in the 1980s, Microsoft Excel was a revolutionary program for editing electronic spreadsheets. In fact, Excel is still widely used and is a good solution for maintaining control over various aspects of your finances.

But medium and large sized companies can’t depend on this program’s solutions anymore and have been discovering the advantages of having financial management software, mainly for integrating data to optimize decision making.

In today’s post, you’ll see 5 reasons to migrate from spreadsheets to financial management software. Take a look!

1. Ease of access

Despite the fact that Microsoft has developed solutions for using Excel on various platforms such as tablets and smartphones, spreadsheets are more functional and easier to use with desktops or laptops.

Financial management software has been developed to work on any platform, which enables you to follow the progress of your company’s finances in real time. Working faster enables you to make decisions faster, which makes your processes more agile and improves your company’s return on investment.

2. There are no secrets to using it

You can use Excel for controlling your personal finances, but for small, medium and large-sized companies, financial management involves thousands of data elements that make electronic spreadsheets unwieldy.

Financial management software doesn’t depend on a system of formulas and all of its programming is performed automatically, which only requires that you adapt it to your company’s reality. This avoids human error and also makes training easier, when necessary.

3. It saves time

An Excel spreadsheet needs to be constructed from scratch to work, including the development of formulas and pivot tables. And when a user alters any of these formulas it can ruin the configuration of the entire spreadsheet. Frequently an error will only be perceived during a demonstration of the results to company leaders.

Since it’s already pre-programmed to function according to your company’s needs, financial management software saves time, avoids rework, and as a result, reduces operational costs.

4. Shared access

To function in real time, financial management software can be used by various users at the same time, in terms of both entering and accessing data. Microsoft, for example, doesn’t allow two users to access the same Excel file at the same time.

5. Reliable information

Any mistaken action by an Excel user can invalidate all of a spreadsheet’s data. Financial management software avoids problems like this, because its initial programming enables it to alert the user when there’s been a data entry error.

In addition to this, it’s also possible to configure reminders, which are valuable in the financial area and make teams more efficient.

With the help of technology, you can obtain software that offers a global vision of a company’s entire financial situation with low acquisition and maintenance costs. And the main thing is that any employee in the organization can use it, because its systems are so simple and intuitive.

And what about you? Why haven’t you acquired financial management software for your company? What are you waiting for?

Every entrepreneur seeks to earn money when opening a business. This is obvious. The terms profitability and rate of return and often considered synonymous by entrepreneurs and businessmen. But are they really? The answer is no.

It’s essential that the financial and management areas of a firm have a perfect understanding of the difference between these two concepts so that the entrepreneur will be better able to manage the business.

It’s important to understand that these two concepts mean different things. If you want to learn more about this subject, then continue reading this text and eliminate your doubts once and for all!

Find out more about profitability

A company’s profitability, as the name suggests, has to do with its profit. Or in other words, a venture is considered to be profitable depending on the relationship between its net profit and total revenues.

The basic formula for calculating the profitability of a company is as follows:

Profitability = Net Profit x 100 ÷ Total Revenues

Remember that the net profit is the total profit of a company after you deduct expenses, and total revenues are the total amount of money that the business receives. Profitability is an indicator of operational efficiency, whose result is given in the form of a percentage.

Find out more about the rate of return

The rate of return, on the other hand, is a business’s capacity to generate revenue. Unlike profit, which deals with the revenue that the business has already generated, this indicator refers to investments in products. In other words, it deals with the capacity of a business to generate profit by investing in a given product.

Thus to discover a product’s rate of return, you need to analyze its previous sales. If the investment in it is less than the revenues from its sales, then it’s considered to have a positive rate of return. And for a venture to have a positive rate of return, it has to have greater revenues than its total fixed costs and other expenses.

This indicator is also given in terms of a percentage. The way to calculate the rate of return of a venture is as follows:

Rate of Return = Net Profit x 100 ÷ Investment

Understanding the difference in practice

The main problem with the confusion between these two concepts, however, is the fact that profitability and a positive rate of return don’t necessarily go together. Profitable companies don’t always have a positive rate of return and vice-versa.

For example: many people think that a large number of sales automatically implies that the merchandise in question is profitable and has a positive rate of return. And this is a mistake: even though the product may have a positive rate of return, given that it doesn’t spend much time in storage, it won’t necessarily be profitable.

This is because profit takes into account the price of the product. In this case, if the price is below the market price, it’s natural that it will have greater sales than the competitors’ products. However, if this price is well below the ideal price, in contrast to the business expenses, it won’t generate profit for the company. The product will have a positive rate of return, but won’t be profitable.

After reading this, you can see how unquestionably important it is to consider both the profitability and rate of return of your company in order to know where and how to invest. Focusing on just one of these aspects may be fatal to your firm’s budget, and confusing these two concepts may hide serious problems with your business.

In times of crisis, it’s natural for companies to seek to reduce costs to guarantee the solidity of their ventures. However, many businessmen don’t know how to identify the expenses that can be cut.

This article will offer you a few tips on how to reduce your company’s costs. Take a look!

Reducing costs: study your numbers

It’s natural for a company to pay attention to external numbers, such as market indicators or growth projections, for example. However, the greatest source of information for business decision making comes from your company itself.

That’s why it’s very important to have access to indicators — for a wide variety of departments and processes — which are organized and available.

In this way, you can safely make important decisions such as whether to discontinue a product.

Evaluate the quality of your processes

Your final product is the sum of various forms of effort called processes. Guaranteeing that they’re efficient can increase your company’s profit — without having to attract another client.

In turbulent times, poorly designed processes can suck precious resources from your company. Evaluate how much each of your processes costs and whether it’s aligned with your organization’s goals.

Calculating the return on investment (ROI) for a process can help measure its results.

Talk with your suppliers

One way of economizing without affecting your company’s strategy is renegotiating the value of your next purchases with your suppliers or searching for new partners.

In the same way that consumers favor promotions when it’s time to go shopping at the supermarket, companies need to opt for strategic partnerships during times of recession.

However, be careful not to put the quality of your final product at risk. Select companies that offer the same level of quality as your customers will expect.

 

Avoid waste

When we talk about waste in business, we’re not just talking about electricity and water which frequently draw our attention. Any resource that’s used inefficiently can be considered a loss.

Your company should ask itself: how can we produce in the same manner but spend less?

No expense should be underestimated. After all, it’s obvious how small savings can make a difference over a long period of time.

Train your employees

Before resorting to the easiest way of reducing costs (laying off workers), question yourself about the productivity of your team — or the lack thereof.

Low productivity and high indices or rework drag down your business’s activity, but they may be the result of errors in the training of your employees, for example. That’s why you should find out how to make your team more efficient, because using strategies with pauses for feedback can correct errors and increase your team’s productivity.

Remember that economic crises are cyclical and strategies to reduce costs taken during these times can benefit your company in the future, making it more competitive and guaranteeing it access to new markets.

None of these measures should be viewed in a negative fashion. They’re simply common reorganization necessities in the business world.

What’s important is that your company has access to internal data to make decisions in the correct manner. This is why you should invest in technologies that can improve your company’s management.

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Every businessman knows that controlling a company’s costs is important, however, when everything’s going well this fact can be forgotten, and often it’s remembered only when an economic recession comes – like the one we’re going through today.

When facing a crisis, two words should become more important: cost management. Find out more about this!

What is it?

Basically, cost management is rethinking your costs in terms of the products and services that your company offers. In a shoe factory, for example, this involves all the costs that go into producing the final product, the shoes.

Some businessmen believe that it’s important to cut costs in this case, but cutting costs without studying their effects can be dangerous. For example: a company decides to lay off temporary workers, but months later it won’t be able to accept a big order because it doesn’t have enough employees to do the job.

How should you manage costs?

The first step in managing costs efficiently is identifying waste. Think of your company as a residence. What advice would you give a housewife who’s complaining about her household budget, but always leaves her taps running?

To find out where your company is wasting resources, it’s important to monitor internal processes in order to perceive whether they’re being conducted in an efficient manner.

You could be losing sales because your salespeople aren’t providing the correct information, for example, which would demonstrate that there’s a problem with your hiring and/or training of employees.

Is reducing quality an option?

At times of economic crisis, people rethink their spending. Your customer may do the same thing and begin to use another less expensive brand to save money. However, the businessman should have a long-term vision and realize that crises come, but also go away. Thus, you need to analyze the risks that changing the quality of your product could pose for you in the future.

This doesn’t mean that a company can’t reevaluate supplier contracts, on the contrary! Moments of economic crisis require this approach. Your procurement process should prioritize the best supplier for the lowest cost.

Correct decisions

Some fundamental company decisions will be made quickly, which is why data related to purchasing and costs should be analyzed with precision.

Having this information in digital form is fundamental, but it’s no use having hundreds of spreadsheets that no one understands. This type of data storage and analysis only wastes your company’s time and money.

To implement good cost management means making the right decisions and, to do this, you need to have quality information always in the hands of the company’s leaders.

Companies of various sizes already use software to improve their business’s information management. These programs don’t just organize data, they analyze it, helping your company make better decisions.

Cost management isn’t something that needs to be done only in moments of crisis, but it’s at these times that it becomes essential. Why not start now? Discover our solutions at www.myabcm.com/solutions/

Your business’s rate of return is the ratio between profit gained and total investment during a given period. Or in other words, if your balance is positive, that means that your profits are greater than the value you’ve invested in the company. Following this indicator is important in evaluating whether the decisions you’re taking are bringing good results and whether your money’s being well spent.

Below we list 5 mistakes that result in your business having an unsatisfactory rate of return. Check it out!

1. Investing in products that aren’t in demand

Before investing in a new product, even if it’s a high quality product, you need to evaluate whether it will receive a warm reception from your customers. If not, you run the risk of investing capital in something that will remain in storage losing money. In other words, you’ll be spending money that won’t result in any financial return for your company.

2. Not retaining your customers

You need to focus your efforts on attracting new customers for your business and leveraging your sales. However, you should also be concerned with retaining the customers that you’ve already won. This will greatly lower your customer costs, guaranteeing you greater profitability than if you concern yourself solely with new customers.

In order to retain your customers, you need to invest in improving your relationship with them by offering them positive buying experiences and, if possible, structuring a post-sales process.

3. Maintaining very high operational costs

Controlling costs is fundamental to knowing precisely how much your company spends to maintain its activities, and if this represents a risk of future losses.

However, this variable can also directly affect your business’s rate of return. When costs are high, profitability is compromised — even if your revenues are high, a large part of them will be used to cover your costs – which directly affects your rate of return given that it directly depends on your net profits.

That being true, you need to identify and create controls that will help you visualize where your money is being spent, which costs are superfluous, and what actions need to be taken to reduce them.

4. Ignoring delays in payment

Ignoring delays in payment is a serious mistake, because even if your revenues are high, this will affect the value that’s effectively entering your company’s accounts. Or in other words, this affects profit, which affects your business’s rate of return.

To avoid this, you need to keep track of it and find ways to diminish these delays – such as creating a debt collection policy and finding more efficient ways to restrict credit, for example.

5. Not taking advantage of technology can also diminish your business’s rate of return

Investing in technology helps automate processes, diminishes the risk of errors, makes your data safer and more reliable, and improves data sharing, which makes your processes more agile and efficient, among other benefits. Investing in a solution that helps optimize your financial routines will help you reduce costs, which will later be reflected in your rate of return.

In general, you need to identify these mistakes that hurt your business’s rate of return and seek solutions that will resolve these problems. Ignoring these issues or not knowing about them is something that can seriously affect your business’s financial health, and in the long run, your business’s staying power in the market.

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All companies should seek to be efficient, but some of us still don’t really understand what it means to be efficient. Many entrepreneurs confuse efficiency with “achieving targets.” They believe that, if a company manages to fulfill its commitments, in terms of its finances as well as its customers, that makes it competent, but that isn’t true. In this post, we’ll teach you how to increase the operational efficiency of your company by listing a few actions and points to pay attention to.

What is operational efficiency? Why is paying attention to this so important to your company? Find out in this article!

What is operational efficiency?

The concept of operational efficiency encompasses the practice of improving all of your processes (all your company’s activities that lead to your final product or service). For example, a supermarket has various internal methods (of production, hiring, sales and communications, for example) and all of these processes help the company achieve a target, which may be in terms of product sales.

But even if the supermarket is hitting its sales targets, this doesn’t mean that it has achieved operational efficiency. Bad stock control can lead to the spoiling of products and losses for the company. If the purchasing department isn’t able to efficiently identify the ideal suppliers, the supermarket is missing out on a chance for big savings. Thus, these examples illustrate the importance of knowing your company well, because the bottom line is that each venture possesses its own reality in terms of its processes.

How can you achieve operational efficiency?

As a businessman you should list your company’s processes and follow them to discover whether they’re being performed in the correct manner (generating profit, offering quality and avoiding waste, for example). If you are able to identify failures in your processes, try to study alternatives to improve them.

Is your company experiencing losses due to employee performance?

It’s not unusual for businessmen to believe that seeking operational efficiency is directly linked to laying off workers. This isn’t true. Pay attention if you’re able to identify losses due to employee performance, because you may be running your hiring process in an incorrect manner, or in other words, your company may be hiring the wrong people for the functions you need to perform.

In addition, you may find that you need to create or improve your employee training processes. Seeking quick cost savings through layoffs is usually an inefficient solution – you’re removing the person but not the process or activity that he or she is performing (which frequently is not adding value to the company and then is performed by other employees – which frequently just overloads them). Also laying off employees is a temporary solution, which may not help in the medium or long term. The best strategy to improve operational competence depends on analyzing the results of each company department rather than careless cost cutting.

Businessmen should pay attention to all of the business’s results

First of all, seeking operational efficiency consists of knowing your own company. You should also pay attention to all of your business’s results and not just the final results. Don’t confuse efficiency with cutting costs, because it has other objectives besides savings, such as improving your company’s productivity. This is why associating it with layoffs is a mistake.

What are the advantages of investing in operational efficiency?

The quest for operational efficiency is to identify problems and create solutions. There is no point in knowing that a certain process is not happening in the best way possible and taking no action to reverse it.

The key is to understand that every challenge encountered is actually an opportunity to be better every day. Although some amounts need to be invested, they should never be considered as costs. These are investments that will surely bring returns.

When a company provides personnel training, for example, it is enabling people to perform the service in the best way. A team that has good communication tends to keep goals and expectations aligned, which makes everyone work for the same purpose.

Purchasing processes and the finance department can also be positively impacted by operational efficiency. With it, employees optimize their time and the company gains productivity.

Needless to say, from that point until increasing profits and raising your market levels is just one step.

How to achieve this efficiency?

While you may have already understood why you should deploy operational efficiency in your business, you may still feel a bit lost, not knowing exactly where to start.

To help you, we’ve listed some valuable tips below:

Study the business situation

In order to correct unsatisfactory processes, it is necessary, first of all, to discover what these processes are. Only then it will be possible to improve them.

To do this survey, the manager should talk to the people who head departments and evaluate the conditions of the company in the market in which it operates. It is only after a few reports and reflections that a conclusion can be drawn.

Pay attention to production costs

Every production generates a cost. However, it is important to know exactly how much resource, manpower and time each process requires. This way, it is easier to identify outlier expenses.

Once identified, one must find out the reason to seek a correction that allows the reduction of costs without losing quality.

Map process failures

Analyzing each process, piece by piece, also allows the identification of failures. They need to be measured and related so that it is clear where the changes should happen.

Of course, theoretically everything can be improved, but you need to know what to prioritize when fixing problems.

Discover the source of failures

There is no point in knowing the failures if you do not know where they come from. Whenever a failure is identified, it is important to find out its origin and why it has occurred.

This way, it is possible to correct the problem from its root, avoiding the creation of illusory solutions that only mask inefficiencies in the productive process.

Use technology

Nowadays, there is a technological tool for everything. You can store data, integrate departments, and create reports that allow for a broader analysis of the company’s situation.

Performing this whole process manually would certainly require a much longer time, in addition to leaving you susceptible to failures. That’s why we often say that technology is a great ally in achieving operational efficiency.

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