A business’s operations play an important role within a company, and touch a variety of different points within a business. The way a company chooses to do business, plays a role in how they are viewed in the marketplace, the type of brand image or reputation they build up, and also on their operational efficiency and capacity. Each company has a different way they like to do things, whether it’s the way they hire people, the way they manufacture, or the chain of command they have in place.
The operations within a company play an important role in building the company’s infrastructure, shaping it’s values, and mapping out different pathways throughout it’s daily tasks. All of these affect the way a company operates, and act as pieces of their operational puzzle.
1. Company Infrastructure
The way a company chooses to operate, and the operations they have in place, play an important role in building and shaping a company’s infrastructure. A company’s infrastructure is important, because it’s the operational systems they have in place, the different procedures to go from point A to point B, or the different framework they have when new business is generated. All of these apply to a wide array of businesses and industries. Your operational systems might be how a new marketing client enters the door, the type of process they’re taken through, and what you need in order to start your work. It might be introducing a new product to your product line, and the different parts of ramping up production. Or it might even be, how you filter or sift through new potential investment ideas or opportunities. Within every business, in almost every industry, the systems and processes a company builds play an important role in the way a company’s infrastructure is built, created, and sustained.
2. Fuel The Company’s Inventory, Production, and Effectiveness
A company’s operations play an important part of a businesses structure, and help fuel a significant portion of it’s business. Company operations may be responsible for creating the product or inventory the salesman needs to sell, developing the work product the marketing team needs to promote, or the goods the supply chain department needs to keep moving. Each part of a company’s operations plays an important role in fueling the rest of the company, it’s production, and it’s effectiveness. Depending on the nature of your company, where a company produces value, or where value is created, might happen within the daily flow of operations, and helps to fuel the rest of the company or team that’s built around it. In finance, it might be the financial analyst who creates the financial model or underwrites the deal, while in marketing it may be the campaign manager who creates the copy, or draws the illustration. The rest of the company will have a hard time doing their job, without the necessary information or materials they need to continue producing sales for the business, bringing in deals or investments, or producing returns to keep the company going.
3. Shaping Company Values
The way company’s choose to operate, often plays hand in hand with the company’s core values, and fundamental beliefs. Company’s are often formed on the premise, or on the belief that there is a particular opportunity within the market, or by using a particular strategy they might be able to capitalize on a certain market segment. A lot of these core beliefs translate into their business. You might have a company that focuses heavily on the customer, and is more interested in keeping the customer happy, than in maximizing its profits. That carries over into the way the customer service team processes refunds, and allows customers to return goods or ask for refunds on a loose basis. Then, you might have a company who feels that they are for the customer, rather than others who aren’t. This message then is incorporated into a company’s marketing materials, and also into the message it utilizes in it’s advertising. It might also mean, that if a company is built on “Slow and Steady Wins The Race,” then odds are they are going to be more interested in being consistent and growing over time, rather than quickly scaling or growing their business. This carries down into the way the company operates. The company might not have an incentive program to maximize the number of sales in a quarter, but rather an incentive in creating a certain sales quota over multiple different quarters or years instead. There are lots of different ways a company’s values and core beliefs can be seen in multiple areas of the business, and displayed in a variety of ways throughout the company’s operations.
4. Build Operational Excellence
As company’s are able to operate, build, and produce, they’re also able to refine their craft, make improvements or adjustments, and continue to find ways to enhance their operational excellence. Operational excellence can be a great way for a company to create competitive advantages, stand out from their competition, or build their position within a marketplace. Operational excellence has the potential to have an effect on a company’s corporate finances, by driving down costs, increasing production, and enhancing your company’s effectiveness from an operational standpoint. As you’re able to operate and produce, you’re able to increase production capacity, reduce time spent on particular tasks, and enhance the operations behind a company. All of these have the potential to create added opportunity for the company, capture more market share, or continue to develop its underlying business.
5. The Beginning
If you’re a new company, your operations can be a great way for you to learn how you want to do things, what types of investments or allocations you might make in the future, or figure out different ways you can drive down costs, or increase efficiency down the line. Having the orders you do, or the business you’ve captured, can be a way for you to create an operational infrastructure, or work towards building operational excellence. Over time, as you’re able to continue to work, process orders, and generate more business, you can work to find new synergies, new ways to increase production capacity, and continue to build or develop your company’s market share.
In the beginning it might be tougher, or seem like a daunting task, but that’s most likely because you’re new, with not much experience, and oftentimes limited resources compared to the competition. As you’re able to operate, produce, and generate results, you can use your operations as a way to fuel your company’s development plans, or find new ways to grow or expand utilizing your existing operation.
6. Show You Areas of Improvement
Throughout the course of a company’s operations, you’re able to see where a company can improve, any friction points or bottlenecks, and any place where they can use additional resources as well. Within each business, the process of moving from one point to another, sometimes comes with a learning curve, a time to process, and particular difficulties along the way. Now some companies may be well versed, and know how to navigate these types of issues or dilemmas, but it can also be a way for companies to see areas of improvement. Companies can see these points of difficulties, and start to find ways to alleviate them, or to start looking for investments to make to increase efficiency. As company’s are able to generate income and revenue, they’re also able to begin to make new investments, or re-invest back into their business as well. Reinvesting back into the business can make a company more effective in its operations, reduce any inefficiencies they may have, or reduce the number of friction points they experience throughout the course of their operations.