Finding opportunities in engineering departments
There are a couple of typical questions we explore when we’re looking for opportunity in engineering departments. Read more to find out.
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Finding opportunities in sales areas
The main focus for performance improvement is to improve sales effectiveness and efficiency. In essence, can you sell more higher margin things at a lower total cost?
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Finding opportunity in marketing departments
The first functional area we will look at is marketing, which also happens to be one of the more difficult functions to assess. The reason marketing is tricky is because it is
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Ten key functional areas
Most of the opportunities we have examined in this series have dealt with financial line items or at least fairly specific concepts. In the next 10 segments we will look a little
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It doesn’t grow on trees
The tenth and final profit driver we will examine is cash. Cash is of course the lifeblood of any organization and its importance becomes all the more pronounced when you don’t have
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The conflicting objectives of inventory management
The ninth profit driver we look at for opportunities is inventory. Inventory reduction tends to go straight to the top of every production executive’s priority list when interest rates are high. Even
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Better, cheaper, maybe not faster
The eighth profit driver is Accounts Payable (AP). The AP function plays an important role in managing the cash flow cycles of the organization. The objective of most performance improvement projects is
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Where is the money?
The seventh profit driver, accounts receivable (AR), sounds a little dull but is actually one of the more important barometers of the general health of the organization. AR can be a very
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The by-product savings in variable overhead costs
Finding the opportunity with variable overhead costs requires trying to understand how these costs are allocated in the financial statements and then analytically drawing some correlations between those costs and the process hours.
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The variable nature of fixed overhead costs
When companies volumes decline they are often stuck with more fixed costs than they need. Fixed costs are often much more difficult to reduce than variable costs because they represent a longer term commitment in many cases.
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