Cutting the fat with your small business

If you have a small business, you have probably noticed that there is inevitably a certain amount of waste, both time and resources, in the way you run your business. In order to cut the fat with your small business, you should strive to bring lean into your small business. Cutting the fat with your small business will result in a lean business of greater success, happier customers, a reduced amount of wasted resources, and a commitment to continually improve.

A lean organization is one that reduces waste throughout the entire process of delivering a product or a service to a customer. By focusing on each step of the process as a whole, it is easier for a business to identify wasteful activities and processes between each step, allowing them to eliminate them and save time and money. This in turn makes the process more productive, resulting in more satisfied customers.

Benefits of a lean organization

The benefits of bringing lean into your total organization are many. They include:

• Increased customer satisfaction. The whole concept of a lean organization is customer-centered. Customer satisfaction increases within a lean organization as lean reduces defects and is more efficient, resulting in quicker deliveries of products that are better.
• Savings. A lean organization saves far more money than a company that has not incorporated lean. Bringing lean into your total organization reduces waste, which in turn reduces costs. In addition, the processes are more efficient, allowing businesses to quickly identify costly problems or areas and then work to eliminate them.
• Employee morale/productivity. Productivity increases as time-consuming processes are eliminated from the processes your small business uses. This results in faster turnaround to market, improving morale within the company.
• Quicker time to market. When company reduces waste by bringing lean into their small business practices, products reach the market much quicker than they normally would.

Cutting the fat with your small business

You've seen the benefits of cutting the fat and bringing lean into your small business; now you just need to do it. While it is an ongoing process, here are some steps your organization should take when bringing lean into the manufacturing process:

• Establish goals or success measures. Establishing goals, or success measures, is the first step in bringing lean into your organization. These goals could be to improve customer satisfaction, or reduce production costs by 10%, or reduce the time it takes for the product to go to market.
• Identify the fat and then work to eliminate it. Keep in mind that waste does not have to be tangible; anything that keeps the product from being produced and delivered in a timely fashion can be considered waste. This is why bringing lean into an organization is an ongoing process - there are always processes that can be improved upon.
• Customer feedback. Because lean organizations are customer-centered, you must develop a system of customer feedback. You may have lean in your organization, but whether or not it is reaching its ultimate goal of exceeding the customer's expectations will be unknown unless you have a system in place. This could be through meetings, feedback forms, or mailers.
• Service Agreements. Establish service agreements between each area of support, as well as its customers, to determine what is expected in terms of quality and service.

Ultimately, to cut the fat from your business, you will need to make it a lean organization. A lean organization establishes a system that allows that to happen by eliminating waste and being as efficient as possible.

Rating: 0/5 (0 votes cast)

---

Categories: organization,

Help others find this article:
Socializer, Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, StumbleUpon

Favorites: Add to favorites
Tags: reducing small business waste saving money with your small business cutting small business fat lean workplace