Today’s Book: Operations Team Leadership by Graham Little

Let us imagine you have a great collection of product or services, enthusiastic employees, proactive vendors and eager customers! Then what could go wrong? Calculations!

When something goes wrong, the root cause almost ALWAYS leads to some error in estimations or calculations. Look back at your breakdowns. What did you calculate wrongly? Or, WHAT you did not even ACCOUNT for? Where did your estimates fail? What you could not even anticipate?

A number of businesses accelerate their way to scaling up production capacities, hiring large teams and even achieving desired revenue levels. But, at the end of the day, or more accurately, at the end of the financial year, it is discovered that the business is being run in a loss. To avoid this, some CEOs ensure Profit & Loss account in made on a daily basis. E-commerce businesses fiercely track unit economics.

In your case, what do you need to do? What needs to be fixed? What needs to be proactively identified. Here is one way, to quote from the book:

A good starting point for identifying opportunities for improving business processes is to identify the hassles encountered by team members in their job, especially those that recur, then identifying the hassles encountered by customers.

What do you think? Hassled at work? Team members messing up? Customers complaining? There could be a hidden goldmine in these troubles!

This book gives a lot of practical ideas on how to arrive at estimations, do rigorous costing, budgeting and detailed operation planning and monitoring across the entire supply chain with case studies in all chapters.

First half of the book is more on numbers and the latter part is more on operational planning including production philosophies and even new product planning.

Good luck towards maximizing profits!