Operations
The work finished in March. The invoice went out in May.
Most businesses measure how long customers take to pay. Far fewer measure how long they take to ask.
Rialto Bridge
Operations
Articles on operations.
Operations
The dashboard has forty metrics. None of them has a trigger.
Most management reporting measures a great deal and decides almost nothing, and the missing ingredient is smaller than it looks.
Operations
The service has three tiers. Every delivery is still bespoke.
Productising a service usually starts with the price card and stops there, which is the one place it produces no…
Operations
The firm hired two juniors. The seniors got busier.
Adding capacity below the bottleneck rarely relieves it: why junior hires often make senior people busier before they make them…
Operations
The job was delivered on time. It came back twice.
Rework rarely shows up as a cost. It shows up as a hiring request, a lengthening lead time, and a…
Operations
The enquiry came in on Tuesday. The quote went out on Friday.
Three days feels like nothing from the inside; from the buyer's side it is often the whole decision, and capacity…
Operations
The new hire started in March. Output fell until June.
Adding a person to a stretched team subtracts capacity before it adds any, and the depth of that dip is…
Operations
Terms are 30 days. The cash arrives on day 54.
The gap between agreed payment terms and actual receipts is usually blamed on customers. A surprising share of it is…
Operations
Three suppliers quoted. The spec was written by one of them.
A competitive tender only discovers a price if the requirement is neutral. Often it isn't, and the paperwork is the…
Operations
Eleven people can raise a purchase order. The same item has nine prices.
Scattered buying rarely shows up as a problem in the accounts, because the money leaks in small enough amounts that…
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.