Operations
The invoice went out on the 1st. Their clock started on the 19th.
Debtor days rarely stall because customers are slow payers: they stall in a gap most sellers never measure, and chasing harder doesn't close it.
Rialto Bridge
Operations
Articles on operations.
Operations
The management accounts close on the 12th. The decision they inform was needed on the 3rd.
Most reporting problems are described as gaps in what gets measured. More often the content is fine and the delay…
Operations
You consolidated to one supplier for the rebate. The rebate is now the switching cost.
Volume rebates are usually priced as a discount. Structurally, most of them are something else entirely, and the difference shows…
Operations
Revenue grew 40%. That’s why the cash ran out.
Profitable growth still has to be paid for in advance, and the bill usually arrives about two months after the…
Operations
You dual-sourced the component. Both suppliers buy from the same plant.
Two invoices from two vendors can hide a single point of failure, and the tell usually shows up in their…
Operations
The bottleneck moved. The hiring plan didn’t.
Adding people to the wrong step doesn't raise output, and in service businesses it can quietly lower it. The tell…
Operations
The job spec says eight years. The work needs two.
Most roles are specified by their hardest task and consumed by their most common one, and the gap between the…
Operations
The unit price fell 6%. The order quantity tripled.
Volume discounts are the easiest saving in the business to evidence, and the hardest to work out whether you actually…
Operations
Utilisation is 87%. Nobody has a code for rework.
The most expensive activity in most service businesses is doing things a second time, and it is the one activity…
Operations
You’re 60% delivered. You’ve billed 30%.
A project can be profitable on every line of the P&L and still drain the bank account for four months.…
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.