Operations
The team is at 88% utilisation. A tenth of it is doing the job twice.
Rework almost never appears on a report. It appears as capacity pressure, as a hiring case, and as an estimate that quietly grows every year.
Rialto Bridge
Operations
Articles on operations.
Operations
Utilisation went from 78% to 91%. Lead times tripled.
Pushing a delivery team closer to full occupancy looks like free capacity. The maths of queues says it is the…
Operations
The contract auto-renewed in March. The review was booked for June.
Most supplier savings are lost to a calendar, not a negotiation, and the date that matters is never the renewal…
Operations
One supplier takes 58% of cost of sales. Nobody has priced the alternative.
Customer concentration attracts a valuation discount. Supplier concentration usually attracts a volume rebate, yet the two dependencies behave far more…
Operations
The finance team is two people. The control framework assumes five.
Segregation of duties was designed for organisations big enough to segregate. What actually protects a business where one person raises,…
Operations
Revenue per head rose 9%. Gross margin fell four points.
A service business can hire exactly the person it was missing and still end up with worse economics. The mechanism…
Operations
The dashboard has fourteen metrics. Thirteen of them are the past.
Most management packs report outcomes that were settled weeks before the meeting. Whether a metric genuinely leads is a testable…
Operations
The negotiation won 8%. The ledger shows 2%.
Negotiated savings and realised savings are different numbers, and the gap between them has a small number of predictable causes.
Operations
The terms say 30 days. The money arrives on day 58.
Most of the gap between your payment terms and your actual cash is created inside your own business, and it…
Operations
The catalogue has 1,800 lines. Four hundred of them are the business.
Nobody ever decided to tie up six figures in slow-moving stock. It accumulated one reasonable decision at a time, and…
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.