If you think you’re overworked, you’re probably right — but your customers don’t have to know it.

You can speed up your productivity and exceed customers’ expectations without adding more work to your day, says Jay Arthur, author of the Lean Six Sigma handbook series. Simply organizing your workflow and eliminating redundancy will free you up to do the best job for your clients.

“Long lead times, slow turnaround times, unnecessary steps and sheer carelessness will cost you repeat business and referrals,” Arthur predicts. Use this guidance to cross over these productivity speed bumps:

• Make your products to order. Sure, you want your customers to have your products in their hands shortly after they make a purchase, but what you don’t want is a load of unsold product gathering dust as customers determine whether they’ll buy. Not only will you waste time creating the products, but then you must use your resources storing those items until a customer buys them. First steps: You must determine how much of your product customers purchase each week and then figure out exactly how long it takes to make your product. This will help you determine how much inventory you need to have on hand and when to begin restocking your shelves.
• Use up your back-stocked inventory first. Large warehouses and fully-stocked shelves can be a huge money drain, Arthur says. That’s because you not only pay for people to make an unused product, you also must pay for warehouse space and utilities, as well as people to manage the inventory. Also, if your inventory-management system isn’t top-notch, you could produce more of a product that sells slowly and less of one that sells quickly. Try this: Close down production for a week so that you are forced to delve into your inventory. Once your supplies are down to a manageable level and you’ve evaluated your storage needs, seek out a facility that offers less space and requires less money.
• Don’t move products around. When you overproduce, you most likely spend the bulk of your time rearranging your inventory to make room for what’s coming down the line. Whether you need to rotate stock so that older items are in front or you have to find a particular model for your customer, your warehouses are bustling with activity. The problem is all of this activity increases your chances of damaging or misplacing your products. Better: Now that you’ve decreased the amount of inventory you keep on hand, determine if there’s a storage method that requires less handling. For example, you may want warehouse staff to keep older materials on lower shelves to make those products easier to spot and grab.
• Group people with the equipment they need. You spend as much time commuting at work as you do on the road, Arthur says. “It’s not uncommon for people to walk the equivalent of over five miles a day in a 2,400 square foot space just to do their job,” such as going to another department to pick up printouts or moving from workstation to workstation to complete their tasks, he points out. Good idea: Redesign your workspace to better reflect your needs. For instance, your office may need personal printers rather than one central printer. Or, you may need to bring workstations together.
• Eliminate unnecessary processing. If your company requires you to perform certain steps just because that’s the process it has used for years, you’re probably doing a lot of work you don’t need to — and bogging down your day. Try this: Track your workflow for two or three weeks to pinpoint and remove the steps you don’t need — whether that means you stop running reports that you never read or gathering customer information that you never use.

Filed under: Customer Service Corner