Levers to improve productivity, profitability & competitive advantage!

As we know Business Operations are super important to drive competitive advantage and profitability.?Business Operational challenges are not merely what Porter's 5 forces are about but tackle other macro topics like supply chain issues, geopolitics, inflation, recession,?etc.

How can we maximize operational effectiveness given the dynamic challenges all around us?

Be it SMEs or large public enterprises, Operational Efficiency (OE) is of paramount importance for every company globally in every sector.?While most think OE will lead to cost takeoff but it can help us more than the cost-benefit.?While there are many levers for OE, some of the levers to unlock value are Standardization, Automation, Elimination, and Delegation.

Standardization: Today speed & agility are the biggest differentiator.?To bring agility to any organization, reuse, and redeployment are important.?To achieve this, streamlining systems and processes is key for seamless operations on an ongoing basis.?The team should learn to collaborate well with multiple functions proactively by an interlock process which would help in transforming the current operations.?For example, they can continue to templatize things, create standard formats, have regular governance mechanisms systematically and predictably, and avoid reinventing the wheel every time.???All these small things when done consistently over some time, would help the team to focus on their deliverables and become easy for them to achieve their goals and objectives.

Automation: One common complaint employees have is the amount of time they spend creating reports and PowerPoint presentations.?Employers hire smart candidates and expect them to prepare Excel and Powerpoint Reports!!! Employees would think that their time and talent are not being utilized properly and their capabilities are not being leveraged meaningfully leading to job dissatisfaction.?Given most of the team are using some form of management system, it is quite possible to convert all sort of reporting requirements into Dashboards in the Management System itself. The advantage of such an approach would be the report would be live at any point in time and we need not expect the employees to work in an ad-hoc manner and on manual reports.

Elimination: Have a target of eliminating at least 10% of your tasks for every year done by your team through standardization or automation by continuously improving the systems and processes.?When we have an operating plan this way, the team works hard to find ways and means to either standardize or automate things thereby eliminating the manual tasks or process issues with a naturally inclined continuous improvement mindset.?

Delegation: If you want to do a few small things right, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate. - John C Maxwell. Over or under-delegation is bad.?However, delegation is critical for the growth of the leader and the team.?The team will take more accountability and will come up with more creative ideas which we might not even thought about it as possible.

By incorporating these in day-to-day operations, the turnaround time would improve significantly.?Employees can deliver more meaningful work effectively without the need to keep adding more manpower.?All these would improve the service excellence of an organization, and improve profitability due to improved productivity, value creation, and focus by the employees, leading to great client satisfaction and the organization growing faster than the market.?