Getting Ready for the Holiday Rush Series – Achieve Operational Excellence

As the holidays approach you’re going to hit bottlenecks in certain business processes that you’ll want to improve upon. How can you “get ahead” and increase your profitability this year? Ultimately, you want to be able to improve the quality of goods and services, reduce costs, and enhance your flexibility. The best way to achieve these goals is by enhancing your operational methods.

What will your approach to operational excellence be like? First, you have to consider how your inventory management system  works currently. Chances are the communication between manufacturing and customer demand isn’t there. Often, you may feel constrained by inflexible processes and systems, while struggling to bridge the demand and execution gap. You will feel the impact of this even more around the holiday season, as orders start flying in and piling up. If you are not aligned with customer demand, your financial and delivery performance depreciates. Maximizing throughput and Return on Investment is the first step in increasing visibility and responsiveness to your operations. Some ways you can do this, in conjunction with your inventory management system are:

• Piecing together parts of different applications into seamless processes, streamlining the entire process
• Assessing your pain points and evaluating what business processes need improvement
• Separating each business process into a series of logical, implementable steps
• Evaluating which processes are core to your needs

To achieve the above, it’s crucial that you work from integrated applications. In doing so, you can measure the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are important to keep in mind as you continue to measure operational excellence and accelerate your business decisions for not only the holiday season, but the long run as well. Some benefits you will see as a result of this include, but are not limited to:

• Reduced operating costs and cycle times
• Maximized cost savings
• Heightened quality of products and services
• Improved customer service ratings
• Guaranteed compliance

At this point, you should be asking yourself, “What is stopping me from achieving operational excellence this holiday season?” Contact Third Wave today and learn how you can align your IT plans and operational business strategies today!