Operations
The hire starts in April. Net capacity falls until August.
Hiring plans assume new people add capacity from day one. For several months they subtract it, and almost nobody models the dip.
Rialto Bridge
Operations
Articles on operations.
Operations
The contract caps your liability at £2m. Your subcontractor’s cap is £25,000.
Risk flows down a chain of contracts, and it almost never flows all the way. The gap it leaves behind…
Operations
The tender saved 8%. Eighteen months later the part costs more.
Unit price is the one number in procurement measured precisely, owned by one person and recognised immediately. That is exactly…
Operations
The invoice went out on the 30th. The work finished on the 3rd.
Debtor days are measured from the invoice date: which conveniently hides the one stretch of the cash cycle that needs…
Operations
The deposit is 30%. The deepest hole is in week seven.
Project businesses negotiate payment terms as percentages. The cash risk sits in the timing, and in who controls the event…
Operations
The customer left in month fourteen. The reason was set in week three.
Exit interviews explain the trigger, not the cause. Most of what decides a renewal is already in place long before…
Operations
Stock turns four times a year. Half the cash sits in lines that turn once.
Aggregate inventory ratios are weighted averages, and the weighting quietly hides the money, usually in the lines nobody has looked…
Operations
Headcount grew 30%. Output grew 12%.
Adding people to a busy team rarely adds proportionate capacity, and the reason usually sits in the arithmetic, not the…
Operations
The defect rate is 2%. Capacity behaves like 90%.
A firm getting it right 98 times out of 100 can still be chronically short of capacity, and the arithmetic…
Operations
The job spec asks for ten years’ experience. Four hours a week need it.
Most senior hires in smaller firms are priced as though the whole week requires judgement. Very little of it does,…
Take it further
This is the general pattern. Your business is the specific case.
Everything here is free to read with an account, and always will be. What it cannot do is tell you which of these applies to your numbers, your market and your constraints. That is the work we do with clients.