Operations
You hired for the peak. The peak is eleven weeks long.
Capacity gets added in the busiest week of the year and paid for in the other forty-one: which is why the trough, not the peak, is where the decision is tested.
Rialto Bridge
Operations
Articles on operations.
Operations
The role needs ten years’ experience. Six of the eight tasks need none.
Vacancies that stay open for months are often not hard to fill: they are badly specified, and the specification is…
Operations
The lead time is fifteen days. The work takes nine hours.
Most quoted delivery times are mostly waiting, and the waiting responds to a different lever than the one most businesses…
Operations
The cash forecast is monthly. The shortfall happens on a Tuesday.
A business can end every month in surplus and still run out of money halfway through one: the monthly view…
Operations
Procurement negotiated 5% off. The drawing had already chosen the supplier.
Most of what a business pays for a category is decided long before anyone asks for a quote, usually by…
Operations
Stock turns four times a year. A quarter of it turns once.
An aggregate inventory turn is an average of two very different businesses sharing one warehouse, and only one of them…
Operations
The unit price came down 8%. The minimum order went up fivefold.
A procurement win lands in margin the same month. What paid for it sits somewhere nobody is measuring, and it…
Operations
Debtor days are 47. Eleven of them happen before the invoice goes out.
Most businesses measure collections from the invoice date, which quietly excuses the one stretch of the cycle they control completely.
Operations
The rework rate is 6%. Two-thirds of it comes back through one door.
Most firms know how often work has to be redone. Far fewer know where it re-enters the process: which is…
Operations
The bottleneck moved. The meeting didn’t.
Debottlenecking works precisely once before the machinery built to fix the old constraint starts quietly destroying the gains from fixing…
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.