The Attivo Blog

The Fed told us that the recession is over – What do you do to prepare for the recovery? Chances are you’ll need to create a “new normal” for your business.  If you don’t make adjustments on the way up, the risk is that during the next downturn (there will most likely be one; after all), things will be as painful as they were this time.  Here's my top 5 recommendations: 1)  Assess and improve your processes Look around.  See that crack in the ceiling?  Of course you don’t – you’ve ignored it for the last 6 years, why would you see it now?   A good business process review is in order – a “full 360” examination of how well each process is working will reveal lots of opportunities to streamline your business and cut costs – while positioning for growth.  You want to be able to handle a lot more business without a significant increase in personnel.  Contact me for a free worksheet tool to help you get this done. 2 )  Improve your customer service! Price is interesting, but today customer service is king.  If you can’t deliver on time with high quality products and services, somebody else will.  Invest in customer service improvements.  Delight your customers, not just satisfy them.  Survey them (with tools like Survey Monkey) to make sure they’re delighted. 3)  Shorten your lead times Like customer service, someone else will deliver sooner if you can’t.  Look at all elements of lead times – they’re not all on the shop floor, by the way.  A tremendous amount of lead time improvement can be achieve in the front office, in areas such as quoting, planning, etc.  Lead time reduction is a critical part of becoming a lean organization…so get lean already! 4)  Tighten your controls.  If you have inventory, what is your inventory accuracy level?  No, really, what is it? If you’re going to rely on systems (as you should), one of the key metrics in your operations is inventory accuracy.  It’s at the core of all the assumptions that systems use in their logic.  I’ve heard many a business owner tell me that “we have an inventory problem”, to which I always answer “your inventory system is probably just fine, it’s you’re everything else’ that isn’t working”.  Inventory accuracy is very telling about how well your processes are defined and controlled within the system, and is the best report card for operations to measure their controls.  So, how are you measuring inventory accuracy?  Gut feel?  I wouldn’t buy your company. 5)  Invest in Ecommerce  Still depending on that tired looking electronic brochure of a website that your nephew did for you back in ’99?  Well, welcome to the 21^stcentury.  Your customers and suppliers expect more (see #2 above).  Figure out how to collaborate via the web with your customers and suppliers – it will keep your costs low and your customer service high.  Don’t underestimate the importance of ecommerce, regardless of whether you pride yourself on the “personal touch”.  Consider that generation Y or Z customers communicate differently, and perhaps don’t think they need to speak with you.  What about your South Korean manufacturer?  Staying up until 2:00 AM is not exactly what anyone would call a productive way to spend your time.

Did you, or are you getting ISO 9001 certified because of the proverbial "gun-to-the-head" by your customers..? …Or, did you decide that certification would actually provide benefits in not only the area of quality, but also operational performance and business objectives? There is no question that it costs money for companies to prepare for and maintain ISO 9001 certification. It’s also arguable that many companies would not have opted to do so if they weren't forced to by specific customers or from competitive industry pressures. I’ve worked with a few clients that simply wanted the ISO certificate and the shortest route to obtain it. They would have just bought the certificate if they could have! I have also been fortunate to work with clients that opted to become certified as a way to implement an enterprise-wide, concerted effort to benchmark practices and make improvements where needed as a business improvement objective, where certification was simply icing on the cake. Case in point, my experience with All-New Stamping, Inc. of El Monte, California.  All-New completed the AS 9100 certification to support it's growing aerospace business.  Nick Kopinga, the company President, felt that even with close to forty years in business, the process of becoming certified would force them to properly document the things they were already doing well. Additionally, though, he knew it would also highlight new areas of opportunity to update and improve both their business systems and their management practices. And that’s exactly what they experienced. In particular, the ISO mandate for regular management review of the quality system, and the requirement to achieve continuous measurable improvement was widened in scope to include additional business objectives. Can there ever be any reason to separate quality from any other business objectives anyway? The objectives they monitored only intuitively before, such as on-time delivery, plant efficiencies, supplier quality, product conformance, etc. now have objective trend charts that are used as their dashboard to drive the organization’s priorities for action and improvement. Most importantly, it conveys the metrics in a very visual way to the entire organization, which has given everyone a continuous improvement mindset. What started out to achieve an objective (ISO Certification) has continued to provide true return on investment at All-New Stamping. Check out this case study about All-New Stamping - and call Nick Kopinga if you'd like to hear it straight from the top.

Productivity is the engine of profit, or, more precisely, we earn profit by being productive.  In fact, when we go to work in the morning, our goal is to return home with more profit than we had when we left, not less.  We do that by being productive.  It really isn't more complicated than that, so don't overthink this. Profit is simply the wages of being productive.  Making a profit is done by providing a good or service that is of more value to someone else than it cost you to produce.  Profit is not a bad thing...it is our responsibility! Since we all have the same fixed amount of time each day, our goal should be to continuously look for ways to improve productivity so that we can maximize our profit each day.  It is the responsible thing to do as good stewards of our available resources.  With business slowing pretty dramatically in many areas, meaning volume is down, productivity gains are pretty important just to stay even.  One sure way to gain productivity is to manage information as efficiently as possible.  Check out www.AttivoConsulting.com for some innovative ways to improve the way that you manage and use information.  And check back here regularly for tips and tricks that will keep the productivity - and profit - rolling in. Do you happen to know what "Attivo" means?