Hours worked are driven by how many people you need to run a process to achieve some volume output. So there are two distinct analytical questions; how do you staff the process, and how well does the process run?
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Material costs can make up a significant part of a product’s cost structure, often many times more than labor costs, so it’s a good profit driver to focus on to find opportunities.
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Cost reduction is generally perceived as fairly negative whereas revenue improvement is almost always positive. But many improvement projects focus on cost, rather than revenue. Why is that?
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When we look at organizations to assess opportunity, we focus on ten key profit drivers.
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Suggestion boxes are one of those seemingly good ideas that can easily backfire. When we are studying a process area we create a big wall map which is a visual presentation of how the process works. It makes it easy for employees to see how and where their part of the process fits into the whole.
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Due to the functional nature of most organizations, workload can become quite easily unbalanced when you look at it from the perspective of a horizontal process.
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World-class, or best-in-class, are terms that organizations like to use to either describe themselves or to use as a benchmark comparison. These terms are often used as some kind of blanket description.
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It takes quite a lot of humility to find opportunity and sometimes being smart simply makes it that much harder.
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In the last Opportunity we discussed the value of being a contrarian, so it seems only appropriate that now we’ll explore the problem with it. The good side of being a contrarian
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Contrarians have an innate desire to be skeptical, take opposing viewpoints, and want to do things differently. Although it can be slightly irritating for others in a social setting, it’s very helpful when you are looking for opportunities in a business.
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