Everyone wants their business to be more efficient. One of the most popular and best ways for a company to become more efficient is to utilize lean principles. Lean is essentially a set of business methodologies that aim to increase your efficiency and eliminate waste. Many companies could afford to “trim the fat” which would allow everything to be done and managed more efficiently.
While it isn’t for everyone, lean management and optimizing various areas of your company can have huge benefits. In addition to increasing efficiency, it can also lower costs and be much more simple to deal with. This article is going to look at a couple of different tips that will help make your business lean and more efficient.
Hire Intelligently
Of course, as your company grows you will have to hire more employees to help out. However, it is important to hire intelligently. See, businesses evolve and change a lot, especially in the early stages. So the employees you bring in today might be different from who you need in a year or two. Because of this, it’s important to only hire when they are truly necessary. If you can simply spread the new work out among existing employees, that is often the way to go.
Having a ton of employees that you don’t really need is the complete opposite of lean. Despite this, many companies are paying multiple people for doing the work that a single person can likely handle. Also, when you do end up hiring people, it is important to get it right. The costs of hiring an employee can be high, and the last thing you want to do is make bad hires. If you do, it could lead you to the need to hire more and incur these costs all over again.
Optimize Your Application Portfolio
In the modern day, most businesses use at least a couple of different kinds of apps. These apps can help businesses do a lot of different things like manage projects, improve communication, handle accounting, and potentially so much more. However, most companies have way more apps than they need. Most companies don’t even use all of the different apps they pay for or have within their infrastructure.
Not only is this wasting money, but it is likely hurting your ability to be agile and could be overwhelming your IT department. As a result, it is important to practice application portfolio rationalization. This is where you go over all of the apps your company has and decide which ones should continue to be used, which should be replaced, and which should be completely eliminated. This can save a lot of money, on top of simplifying and speeding up your processes. While this practice can be a large undertaking, it is generally worth it for the benefits your company will receive.
Try to Make Important Decisions Quickly
While doing research and thinking things through can be important, so is making decisions quickly. In business, time is money. As a result, the more time your company takes to make important decisions, the more money you are wasting. You may never get “all” of the information you need to make a perfect choice, so sometimes just pulling the trigger is the way to go.
If every single business decision needs to go through manager after manager, nothing will ever get decided. You need to have a plan for how certain decisions are made vs. others, to ensure they get dealt with in a timely manner.
Hopefully, this article will help make your business leaner and more efficient.
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Founder Dinis Guarda
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