Operations
The board pack runs to twenty pages. Nothing in it has changed a decision.
Most management reporting grows by accretion, and the test that would prune it is a single question almost nobody asks of a metric.
Rialto Bridge
Operations
Articles on operations.
Operations
The target was hit every month last year. That is the finding.
A metric that never misses is carrying information, just not the information the dashboard implies. On reading variance instead of…
Operations
The team is at capacity. A third of the hours are the second attempt.
Rework almost never appears as a cost line. It appears as a hiring request, and the two are remarkably easy…
Operations
The hire starts in March. The plan has them billing in April.
Hiring decisions get approved on salary and go wrong on ramp: the months where a new person costs more than…
Operations
The deposit is 20%. Two thirds of the cost lands in month one.
Most payment schedules were inherited from someone else's business, and they quietly decide how much cash a growing project firm…
Operations
Sales grew 40%. The cash position got worse.
Growth consumes cash long before it produces any, and most businesses discover the exchange rate only when the overdraft tells…
Operations
The invoice was paid 14 days late. It was raised 19 days late.
Most businesses measure how slowly customers pay. Far fewer measure the gap they create themselves, and it is often the…
Operations
Three quotes were obtained. The spec was written by the incumbent.
Competitive tendering tests price against a specification. It says nothing about who wrote the specification, and that is usually where…
Operations
The proposal takes six hours to write. It wins one time in four.
Bid effort rarely appears in any budget or any margin calculation, which is how the most expensive work in a…
Operations
One supplier is 40% of cost of sales. Nobody has spoken to a second.
Client concentration gets board attention. The supplier who accounts for half the cost base usually gets an annual price letter…
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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.