Category: Business Tip

Most organizations do not leverage the expertise and strengths that their suppliers have to offer.  Suppliers often will offer value added services to their customers that will help reduce their customer’s costs, enable improved efficiency, eliminate wasteful process tasks and improve delivery to end customers.  The extra value suppliers offer often results in added value to your end customers in the form of improved delivery time, improved quality and lower price.  One example is enabling a supplier to dropship finished goods in final packaging directly to customers.  This may eliminate repackaging, inventory management steps, reduce delivery time and reduce delivery cost.

Some businesses have developed high level strategies for growth and/or sustainability. That’s a step in the right direction, however, most businesses only use the strategies at the executive level and the other managers and associates are unaware of the business strategies. At a minimum, the associates in the company may be aware of strategic initiatives as a slogan, general mission statement or credo. Business strategies need to be planned and actionable for all associates and levels of the organization. One Operational Excellence tool for accomplishing this is the objectives tree.  The objectives tree enables strategies that result in high level objectives to be paired down as actionable objectives and project plans to all levels of the organization depending on function and specific missions. This way each operation is supporting the high level objectives and strategies synergistically enabling achievement of the long term vison of the organization.