Productivity and competitiveness go hand in hand. To help your business succeed, it’s important to maintain and develop a competitive edge over other options your customers could choose. While there are many factors that contribute to growing your competitive advantage, strong productivity can certainly help you along the way.
Improve your bottom line
Productivity is achieved by using fewer resources to produce the same results. This can mean using less material to produce an output, reducing the time it takes to finish a project, or both. Monitoring the stock you're using and finding opportunities to cut down, or putting a time management system in place can help you reduce your costs of production.
By achieving this, you can lower your costs on each project, which will help improve your profitability. Also, by reducing the amount of time your projects take, you increase your capacity for more projects and accelerate your ability to earn more revenue. This increased productivity gives you more flexibility, and more resources to grow your business and stay on top of your competition.
Better delivery for your customers
Getting better and better at producing your products has a direct benefit for your customers. Keeping your customers happy makes them more likely to come back and refer others to your business, it’s a core competitive advantage to give you the edge in the market.
By reducing the costs and time to produce a product, you can pass on some of the benefits to the customer. For example, by taking less time on large projects, you are able to assist customers with urgent jobs. You can also pass on some of your savings by reducing your price or providing special offer deals that your competitors can’t match.
Greater productivity means better growth potential
Growing your business can be accelerated by improving productivity. Saving money and resources on producing your output can mean a greater budget to market to new customers, trial new products or offerings, or upgrade your assets. This allows you to grow your business while still producing your core offering uninterrupted.
Further, by increasing your productivity, you learn the tools, methods and processes needed for you to produce great projects at a low cost. These strategies can continue to be used as you grow your team and outputs, so that you maintain low production costs at any size. This can help you get an edge on your competitors who may struggle to compete on price or speed.
The right tools grow with you
Improving your productivity is not something you need to do alone. Having tools and systems in place to help you measure and improve your performance can help you to improve faster and more effectively than without tools. However, there are times when productivity tools are a waste of time, and that is when they aren’t built to grow with you.
Read our blog on how the right system can improve productivity
Your productivity tools should help you not only improve your performance but maintain a good performance as you grow your business. The tools that you adopt to help improve can be a long-term investment which help to benchmark your success as you grow. You should be able to track and ensure that your processes are working and that no improvements need to be made no matter how many team members or locations you add.
By focusing on how productivity can be increased today, you give yourself the tools to grow and improve into the future. If you have access to solutions that can help you improve, you have the potential to grow faster than your competition.
Want to keep learning? Here is a Forbes article with more information about how to improve your productivity.