Optimisation is the word on everyone’s lips this year. Whether it is making the most effective use of a situation to save costs or improve productivity, businesses should look at these three areas – workforce, asset management and data.
Although training and development budgets can often be one of the first expenses to be cut, businesses must look to invest in their people to build back better after the pandemic. Ensuring your people have development plans in place with associated training will enhance their commitment and ensure their skills are relevant for the post-COVID world.
This will help everyone in the business better understand the constraints and unmet needs of clients. This will also provide better transparency on capital and operating expenditure spend and ultimately deliver a lower total cost of ownership to clients.
Right people, right place, right time
Productivity now, more than ever, is absolutely vital in looking for ways to remove wastage and to get a business operating in the most efficient and effective way possible. Workforce management technology has paved the way to achieve this in a way that is measured, taking into account non-productive time, planned and unplanned leave, as well as for annual training requirements.
Using workforce management systems to track and measure progress and monitor staff movement in real-time relative to the task being undertaken is vital to ensure you have the right person at the right time in the right location with the right skills. And even more importantly, at the right cost for effective management of the workforce.
Most value from data
Data management is also a key area to look at for business optimisation. Understanding what to do with that data is where businesses can truly leverage and maximise its usefulness. At a basic level, data can be used to identify trends and perform detailed root cause analysis of any recurring issues at any level of your business’s operations.
Optimisation, by definition, is the removal of inefficiencies and data is where you can find, identify and design solutions to those inefficiencies. The sharing of data is also invaluable in the goal of business optimisation. Often, businesses that share the same parent company or who are part of the same group do not maximise the potential of the data that they have collected to benefit each other.
Optimisation of assets ties together the accurate usage of data and the maximisation of the development of your people. It’s no secret that procuring, operating and maintaining assets requires considerable cost.
Through digital asset management you will have greater transparency and accuracy on future capex and opex decision-making in a way that truly reflects the condition of your facilities and reduce the likelihood of unexpected costs incurred due to asset failure or unnecessary replacement.
