The Values of Developing Shop Processes
Developing shop processes is one of the hurdles separating the most successful shops from the rest. One of the first hurdles is charging enough money to build a healthy business. It begins with valuing our skills, learning to estimate work, and then tracking the costs through the completion of a project to compare the results against the expectations. What is often revealed is that businesses are not making as much money as they think they are, and maybe not enough to continue to operate unless they address the delta between expectation and outcome.
Raising prices isn’t the sole solution to making a business healthy; however, the other half of this puzzle lies within the efficiency of the business. This is where developing shop processes comes into play. Some efficiency is gained through easy-to-follow and structured procedures, investments into better tooling, and a wide range of other objectives as well. By establishing well-defined processes, we can streamline operations, reduce waste, and enhance customer satisfaction.
This endeavor is ongoing indefinitely. Many businesses begin their decline when they believe they have invested enough into their processes and cease to pay attention to them. New technology is developed every day, and knowledge/experience can bleed away from our teams as staff members retire, take on jobs elsewhere, or are not given opportunities to mentor others and share this knowledge. Because of this, business efficiency is entropic and must be constantly monitored and corrected.
You may imagine that constant monitoring of efficiency paired with tooling investment would be expensive. You would be correct. This is the fundamental crux that creates the barrier for many small businesses. The first step is mindfulness and awareness, and the next step is a significant investment, consisting of both currencies that matter most, time and money. Beyond these investments, there is minimal downside a business faces when refining its processes.
We’ll step outside of this abstraction and share the obvious and less obvious benefits of this development process:
1. Increased efficiency:
Well-designed processes enable people to perform tasks systematically and optimally, reducing the time and effort required to complete each step. This leads to improved productivity and faster turnaround times. This is a benefit to both the business and the consumer. For both parties, time is money, as they say. For the business, faster turnaround time can open a few doors:
A business that can produce their work 10% faster than they used to, can now attain 10% more work in the same timeframe, increasing their overall revenue each year.
Work completed faster most often comes with savings, typically labor. Labor is expensive, and reducing it can positively impact the profitability of the work at hand. Businesses can choose to maintain their current production volume and earn more profit, or they can reduce pricing to maintain their previous profitability markers, making them more competitive in their marketplace and increasing their overall production volume.
Additionally, a business with long lead times can only take on projects that can support long lead times. A business with short lead times can take on projects with short and long lead time requirements, thus opening the business to more opportunities.
2. Consistency and quality control:
Standardized processes ensure that each task is performed consistently, maintaining quality standards throughout the shop. This helps minimize errors, defects, and rework, resulting in higher customer satisfaction, reduced costs, and, frankly, less frustration for everybody who works within the organization. Training is a significant expense for a business. Ensuring team members are consistently educated to complete their responsibilities reduces mistakes and reduces unnecessary friction in their workflow.
3. Clear responsibilities and accountability:
Well-defined processes clarify the roles and responsibilities of each employee involved in the shop operations. This promotes accountability and empowers employees to take ownership of their tasks, leading to better teamwork and outcomes. Clear goals and expectations are essential to a good work environment, and it’s no secret that happy employees are both more productive and less likely to seek employment elsewhere. Retainage is not only good for the morale of the organization, but it is also a direct preservation of knowledge, experience, and the investment of training that has taken place. In our experience, most people enjoy some level of responsibility, and all require accountability to be assured they are doing a good job. Without these two things, a team member cannot see the value in their roles if they cannot be clearly defined, and they are not easily held accountable for roles they don’t perceive as valuable.
4. Improved resource utilization:
Efficient shop processes enable better utilization of resources, such as equipment, materials, and manpower. This optimization reduces waste, minimizes unnecessary expenses, and maximizes the utilization of available resources.
5. Scalability and growth:
Developing shop processes with scalability in mind allows businesses to handle increasing demands and expand their operations smoothly. By having well-documented and adaptable processes, businesses can effectively onboard new employees and handle larger volumes of work. Having a process alone is not enough. To be effective, these processes and procedures need to be recorded and incorporated into training resources and reference materials. This is a pitfall many small businesses become entrenched in. A recorded process can become a clear road map toward delegating work, sharing responsibility, and forecasting future positions. As the organization grows, these processes can be adapted to suit better equipment, responsibilities can be further divided as more staff is recruited, and resources that have been saved can be further invested to continue improvement.
6. Continuous improvement:
Establishing processes encourages a culture of continuous improvement within the shop. By regularly evaluating and refining processes, businesses can identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement. This ongoing optimization helps drive innovation, increase competitiveness, and adapt to changing market conditions. Equally important, this attitude toward improvement of the organization can view inefficiencies as opportunities, rather than problems. In many ways, they are the same; however, a team is much more keen to identify opportunities that benefit the collective, rather than identify problems that they could be seen as complicit in. Externalizing this concept helps the team play more active roles in improving the business, sharing the responsibility with management, and creating watchful eyes at every level of operation.
To venture away from the general discussion, we’ll give some real examples to consider:
Material Processing Equipment: Saws
Saws are one of the most important types of equipment in metal fabrication and manufacturing. There are many kinds, ranging in size, price, capability, and style. Some saws are better equipped than others to cut material in “batches” (meaning they can cut multiple pieces of material simultaneously). These saws allow a business to develop a better material-cutting process. Cutting from several pieces of material simultaneously has the potential to create more material waste in the process and is likely to cause more wear and tear on consumable parts, like blades. That said, those potential negatives can be strongly outweighed by the significant increase in time efficiency. Cutting just two pieces of material together will roughly double the speed of this operation. Depending on the saw and the application, it may be possible to cut dozens of pieces at a time, improving efficiency by a much larger magnitude. The balance that must be struck is how quickly an investment like this can produce a return. Larger saws capable of cutting larger batches will inherently be more costly to purchase and, therefore, may take longer to pay off and generate a return on investment. Larger investments generally also come with larger returns. For those who can afford to wait on a return, larger investments are usually the right direction to take. Smaller shops often need to make smaller investments until they become bigger and capable of sustaining larger investments.
Quality Standards: Metal Finish Guide
A metal finish guide, like the one we have on our website, is not only a useful tool in setting proper expectations about quality and price with clients, but it is also a training tool and defined standard the team can be accountable for. It’s common to produce a range of different finish qualities to suit the needs of a diverse clientele. Having a finish guide provides a standard that is easily communicated between the sales and production team to ensure the expectations set with the client are realized in the completed work. This allows team members to work more independently, reduces unnecessary clarifying conversations, and reduces rework and quality control failures. Implementing something like this is primarily a cost in time and planning. A lack of material cost may make this easier for some shops to implement; however, in many cases, it is time that is in short supply, which makes defining and implementing specific finish criteria challenging.
Furnishings and Fixtures: Tables, Racks, Carts
Production shops require a blend of work surfaces and short-term and long-term storage. When a new material order arrives, perhaps it is all inventory stock to be consumed as needed over a long period, or it is all material that must be immediately processed for an active project. How this material is marked, stored, and organized will be influenced by the specific use of it at that time. Without the basic infrastructure to sort these materials, it can be difficult to maintain a tidy shop, find materials quickly and easily, and avoid excessive material orderings when inventory stock is available to be used. Investing in infrastructure like tables, racks, and carts is generally less expensive than equipment investments. However, it is also markedly less exciting for developing businesses, making it an area of improvement, that is often overlooked, in small shops. These changes may offer a smaller yield than exciting equipment or machinery, but the return on investment is consistent and amplified later with the addition of these investments. Tidy and organized shops can reduce wasted time and materials consistently, no matter the project or the equipment.
These examples help give more context to process development, and though the specifics may vary from business to business, the general principles remain the same. Developing shop processes brings numerous benefits, including increased efficiency, consistency, quality control, clear responsibilities, improved resource utilization, scalability, and a culture of continuous improvement. These advantages contribute to the overall success and growth of a business in the retail or manufacturing industry.
