Six hidden resource drains companies should be looking out for
There are many factors that can have an influence on successfully growing a business, from how well you understand and meet the needs of your market and the relationships you build, to making sound investment decisions and hiring the right skills to help you through. But despite the best efforts of business owners to strategise their way to the top of their game, some of the biggest barriers to growth lurk quietly between the cracks.
To help build a more watertight operation and accelerate growth, vWork chief executive Roy Moody looks at some of the most common resource drains to look out for and how to beat them.
Talent management
Improving your talent management processes can help save resources in several ways. From a productivity standpoint, you might consider evaluating the responsibilities versus capabilities of your existing employees to reveal whether any staff members are being underutilised according to their skills. And from a turnover perspective, taking the necessary time to hire the right people from the outset is critical because bad hiring decisions significantly increase the costs recruitment, training, and lost productivity.
Workplace culture can also play a vital role in achieving the maximum return on your talent investment. The reputation your business builds as an employer will have a direct impact on your success in competing with other businesses to quickly attract the best workers. And don’t be too quick to look outside the business to fill new roles as you grow; instead, take the more cost-effective approach of exploring opportunities to develop existing staff through training.
Customer service efficiency
The quality of your customer service, which includes excellent communication and transparency, is a critical point of difference – especially in the building and construction sector where the supply of goods can have a profound impact on broader building projects. But there could be some very easy wins when it comes to reducing the volume of incoming customer calls and queries which your staff must spend time answering and resolving. Every minute your staff spend dealing with customer queries is a cost to the business.
We’ve tackled this issue head on for businesses in the building and construction space with a dispatch solution that tracks goods deliveries and offers automated enroute communication and proof of delivery. Interestingly, one of our customers in the business of supplying insulation material reported a 75% reduction in calls to their dispatch team because of this automation.
Time management
You might find opportunities to put more hours back in the day with a simple review of how your staff are spending their time. For example, look at the nature and volume of meetings taking place across the workforce as well as who’s involved. Meetings that can’t be linked to productivity gains might be causing your business a significant, albeit hidden, financial loss. To put this in perspective, a one-hour meeting with seven people might seem like a flash in the pan, but it’s equivalent to an entire day’s work for one staff member. If this is replicated across the working week amongst different teams, you’ll be paying an entire annual salary to support these daily gatherings.
Explore how you can help individual staff members tailor their working day or week to become more efficient. A simple change in working hours to allow staff to better balance their work alongside personal commitments, or even permitting work from home days to reduce weekly travel time, could be all it takes to drive productivity.
Assess whether there are any opportunities to automate administrative tasks that take up valuable time. For example, automated invoicing following the supply and delivery of goods could save your team a great deal of time on manual accounting and record-keeping work.
Inventory tracking
If you’re in the business of manufacturing and/or supplying construction materials, real time transparency over goods entering and leaving your warehouse is paramount. Excess inventory – defined as a quantity of stock that exceeds the anticipated demand for the product – ties up funds that could be reinvested in other critical business functions, such as sales and marketing. Excess inventory can also cause a drain on resources in other less obvious ways, from unnecessary storage costs and higher insurance premiums to potentially increasing utility bills.
On the other hand, not having enough stock to meet the demand for products can result in missed opportunities to supply goods to new customers – especially in the construction space where timeliness of deliveries can be critical. And there’s also a very real risk that existing customers could switch to alternative suppliers in instances where orders are unable to be fulfilled promptly.
All these potential resource drains can be mitigated with a clear idea about what’s coming in and out of the business and how the flow of goods should be appropriately balanced against demand. A job scheduling and dispatch solution that automatically integrates with inventory management software could be a game-changer compared to more manual processes where it often takes days to reconcile sales, deliveries, and inventory.
Surplus office space
Business premises are typically one of the biggest overheads for companies in construction, which can include the costs of leasing arrangements, purchasing or building property, and general upkeep. Unsurprisingly, these costs are often proportionate to the space you occupy, so it’s wise to be frugal when considering the question of how much you really need, especially for administrative functions.
Investing in improving your workplace’s remote working capabilities through new technologies might enable you to introduce hybrid in-office and working from home arrangements for more staff – creating an opportunity to downsize your premises and save significant resources in the long term.
Non-essential expenditures
There are a few discretionary costs to look out for that can slip through the cracks and soon add up. While there are too many to provide an exhaustive list, the typical hallmark of non-essential expenses are those that can’t be linked to an identifiable ‘return’ or benefit.
Some questions you might ask include whether your digital marketing efforts are successfully reaching your target market and driving sales; is your investment in staff training bringing new applicable skills into the business for long enough to see a return; are private transport costs for staff always warranted; is your spending on an employee rewards program proportionate to productivity; and do you really need to hire external recruiters to onboard new team members?
About vWork
Founded in New Zealand, vWork is a job scheduling and dispatch software solution with more than 5,000 active users across ten countries. vWork’s technology uses integration to create game-changing links between job scheduling and dispatch processes and other value-add business applications creating an enhanced last-mile experience for dispatchers, drivers, and customers.