An increasing number of businesses don’t have a brick and mortar operation at all anymore, but many still need to have a physical office with a full staff. In many cases, businesses are coming up with flexible solutions to enable their employees to telecommute or work from multiple locations. With so many people operating in different locations, the potential for communications breakdowns increases significantly.
Lean manufacturing” and “Total Quality Management” have been instituted in just about every business sector since the 1980s, particularly in manufacturing. But the principles are just as applicable in other business sectors. By taking a top to bottom approach to the problems of doing business, organizations can locate bottlenecks and streamline processes. The name of the game in lean manufacturing is doing more with less, and making sure your line employees have direct contact with decision makers. They also need fast track authority to make decisions based on the best available information in real time.
At Capital, Business Machines have been our business since 1939. We’ve seen many business trends come and go over the decades, but the most successful companies start out with the basics. There’s nothing wrong with acting quickly when your company creates an innovative product or finds an untapped market, but you need to create consistency and structure throughout your organization from the beginning. You need to automate routine procedures so you can free up time to make plans and grow your business. You also need to be prepared for future growth.
Small business owners have always struggled to make ends meet, but the past couple of years have been some of the most economically difficult in our history. We began 2020 with a global health crisis, and just when we thought we were out of the weeds we started getting more bad news. How do we expect to keep our doors open in the face of such adversity in the marketplace?
As a small business owner, you’re already quite familiar with the idea of doing more with less. Operating on a lean budget is the key to survival, and you can’t afford to overspend even after your business is successful. Unfortunately, wasted productivity is the silent killer in a small office. An inefficient process might only take a few extra minutes, but those minutes add up. If you want to improve your bottom line, you need to figure out how to convert those minutes into time spent taking care of your customers and growing your business.