An effective growth plan needs to identify and manage the risks and ensure that plans are aligned across the whole business, in particular ensuring that Operations has the capability and capacity to support them effectively.  Only by taking this ‘whole system view’ will you ensure that growth is appropriately profitable and sustainable (i.e. maintains or enhances margins) and deliver ‘high performance with ease’.

Reducing inventory is often seen as a quick and effective way to free up cash. However, such reductions are often made in an arbitrary way without understanding the role of inventory in the smooth running of a business, and can often do more harm than good. Just like oil in an engine, both too little and too much inventory can be a problem. By taking a ‘whole system view’, the optimal level of inventory to maintain smooth product flow and meet customer demand can be identified to delivery ‘high performance with ease’.

How much resilience does a business need? As a response to more volatile market and supply environments, many businesses have invetsed in greater resilience or are think9ng about doing so. But are they adding more cost to their business than necessary

An effective resilience and agility plan is best tailored to the real needs of your business rather than from comparing your organisation to some ‘absolute’ standard that considers all sorts of possible resilience measures.

Without such an approach, you may be adding costly measures into your business that may adversely affect your business or even be completely unnecessary.

All too often, cost reduction measures – even where results look impressive at local level – don’t result in the anticipated benefit to the bottom line or, at best, are short–lived.  In extreme cases, total cost can even go up rather than down.

Typically, there is a short–term focus on ‘cost cutting’ driven by an imperative requiring urgent cost reduction to meet, for example, quarterly or annual budgetary targets.  The result is often a ‘knee jerk’ approach that produces a ‘piecemeal’ response that does little to address the true operating cost of the business and often produces a result that is actually detrimental to the business.

What’s needed for sustainable reductions in operating cost that make a real bottom line difference is a more strategic, ‘whole system’ approach.

If this year’s goals to improve operational performance look worringly familiar, it may be because you didn’t fully achieve them last year and resolve to “try harder” this year. Yet, if you don’t change your approach, what’s the realistic chance of that happening. This article explores the need for seeing such goals in the context of a holistic “operating system” and points at an approach to but such a system in place to ensure that your goals are reliably and sustainably achieved.

In many organisations people can be working incredibly hard only to achieve results that are inconsistent and fall short of what customers and the organisation require, with the consequential impact on customer perception, margin and employees.

It doesn’t have to be that way! Many organisations achieve “high performance with ease” this article explores how that is achieved.

Ever found that you’re so busy “doing” that you’re missing something so obvious that, if you changed it, it would radically transform your situation. That’s where an external advisior can help. This blog explores that value that an external perspective can bring.

Goal setting is an annual routine in many businesses, yet often the results don’t translate to improvement in the business as a whole.  Worse still, improvements in one area actually make things worse for another one.  It’s like putting together a jigsaw and finding that the pieces have got mixed up and you have parts of several pictures or that some pieces are missing.  Somehow the whole is less than the sum of the parts.  Why is that?