Enhance Your Operation 1: Overview

This begins our series on maximizing satisfaction and profits by improving your operation
In the past, we’ve explored marketing, financing, establishing your strategy, and legally structuring your business. This series will explore how to improve your business operations. Traditionally, human resource/legal, sales/marketing, accounting/finance, and information technology merely supported operations. Operations typically received raw product, processed it, and delivered it to the client. I will use a modified definition of that understanding in this series.
Defining a Business Operation
Each business, each industry operates differently.

• Manufacturing businesses operate production lines that machine, assemble, smelt, or extrude a product
• Insurance, banks, and finance companies process paperwork and electronic records
• Retail operations receive goods through loading docks, store them, move them to shelves, and out the door by way of a cashier
• Internet businesses prepare pages, shopping carts, program interactive elements and publish them
• Architects and engineers create ideas, draw designs and plans, test them, and finalize the blueprints or plans before building them

Clarifying Your Business Operations
The following questions may help you clarify how your business operates :

• What supplies, intellect, materials or other elements do you need to make, process, or create our product or service? (We will call the answers to this question “raw material” in the rest of the post)
• What do you do with that raw material to make process, create or add value so that your clients want to buy it?
• Who are all the people involved in touching, reviewing, modifying, or processing the product through the operation?
• What workstations, systems, or assembly points does it have to pass through to be finished?
• What have you not identified that should be added to these questions?

Ways to Enhance Your Business Operations
Each of the following steps might improve your operation. We will analyze each option over the next three weeks:

• Purchase and order raw product
• Streamline processing design or layout
• Use the proper equipment
• Identify and eliminate bottlenecks
• Reduce time spent on each section
• Outsource and drop ship
• Control inventory
• Ship or deliver product or services

Come back Thursday when we discuss purchasing and ordering raw product phase of operations