Steps to Improve Operational Efficiency

Summary: Here are five steps you can take to improve operational efficiency in your business.

Let’s look at real business changes and solutions you can utilize to improve operational efficiencies in your company.

Employee communications

This is less about speaking with your employees and more about other people being able to reach them. Missed calls are a pain and they waste time. People can spend ages listening to voicemails or attempting to get back in contact with customers, suppliers or partners. Time could be better spent. Ensuring you have an efficient communications system in place is important. Phones that can travel with employees via headset or via work-specific cell phones is a great solution. Having employees who are always reachable is a benefit for everyone. Smart phones will also allow for access to work emails, even on private networks, so nothing is being missed.

Cut out the travel

If you don’t need to fly an employee across country, don’t. Telecommunications technology has come leaps and bounds in the last decade. The amount of time wasted on travel is incredible, and it’s all unproductive time too. Video conferencing is a great option, and so is telecommuting. If there are jobs that could be performed from home, you should consider allowing for that to happen. You can increase the amount of productive time employees are getting in an eight hour day, and reduce the amount of unproductive time they are spending traveling or commuting.

Invest in your IT

You need to have a reliable network with fail safes and excellent protection. You want your data to be safe and your network to be running at peak performance all the time. Losing your network or having programs be sluggish wastes a lot of time and can impact the integrity of your data. Not only do you need to invest in good computers and secure networks, but you also need to invest in IT professionals. You want pros dealing with your network problems, not your employees. The more time employees spend troubleshooting their computer issues, the less time they spend being productive. It’s a necessary investment.

Enhance employee retention

Losing employees can really slow down productivity. Not only are you down manpower but at some point you will need to pull someone else away from their work to train new employee, once you spend time and money finding and hiring them. Poor management, subpar wages, overly-stressful workplaces and lack of appreciation can all drive good employees away. You also need to be mindful of demands, responsibilities and the work hours prescribed if you want to avoid burning people out. Create a pleasant work environment and people will want to stay.
Benchmark

Just like looking at comparables before you put your house up for sale, you want to stack your business up against your competitors to see how well you are doing. You can achieve this by running analytics and comparing research data, such as stock market information or accessible financials, but another great way to do is to just meet people. Go to conferences and network within your industry. You can learn a lot about the challenges to come and how to face them. You can also find many opportunities to capitalize on. You may find businesses looking to sell or merge, and learn, potentially, of ones that are going under. One’s loss is another’s gain, and since information is power, the more you know the better off you’ll be when it comes to competing in your market.

Improving operational efficiency can be done at all levels of business. Look at your supply chain, your employees, your tech, and your processes. Find inefficiencies and discover where you are wasting time or resources. Creating a more efficient business from the inside out will help improve revenues in the long run. Contact The Burnie Group to learn more.