How to Monitor Productivity and Connectivity Within Your Business
How to Monitor Productivity and Connectivity Within Your Business
Preserving connectivity and productivity has always been a crucial component for modern businesses to stay afloat and remain competitive in challenging market environments. In recent times, enhancing these two important aspects has often been overlooked. But if the right culture, focus, and energy is weaved into the company’s hierarchy and systems, connectivity and productivity can be restored and adequately prioritised.
In fact, connectivity within a business is fundamental. It is fair to say that “the whole outperforms the sum of its parts” and can, at the same time, truly boost productivity. This is vital as productivity allows organisations to keep up with competitors in what is a tough, fierce market. Moreover, the beauty of productivity is that it can help generate better-quality output at a reasonable cost, which makes for increased profits and success. As raw materials become more expensive and utility bills continue to soar, productivity can actively benefit the overall efficiency of your company.
Here, we explore how to measure and increase productivity in the ever-changing world of business.
Defining productivity
If you want to improve something, it is wise to define and understand it first. When it comes to productivity, there are four hierarchical perspectives to take into consideration. In this respect, Figure 1 lists an extra 15 factors that sit within the realm of productivity, all of which can have a positive or negative influence on change inside your business.
Figure 1 – KUMADUHAL’s four productivity perspectives and associated 15 features
In the sphere of engineered project delivery, this can usually be measured through impacts, targets, and outcomes. How is this achieved? Generally, by adopting historical performance data to establish a specific, planned outcome. Later, the achieved performance is calculated using the same tangibles.
Modern businesses are always on the hunt for alternative ways to enhance productivity. Improvements often include the introduction of innovative equipment and digital tools within the company. Hence, it is important to learn how new technology can shape and impact different areas of the business. For instance, it can play a significant role in influencing connectivity, managing workforce, accountability, follow-up, and good communication.
How to measure productivity
When measuring productivity, both tangible (handovers, deliverables, hours used or achieved, etc.) and intangible (welfare, safety, motivation, client satisfaction, etc.) elements need to be taken into account. Additionally, it is important to make sure that productivity is aligned with the outcomes and overall success values of your project stakeholders.
What’s more, productivity should be monitored and measured across all phases of your project. This means that you will be able to ensure all stakeholders are accountable and aware, at all times, of “down the line” impacts of their delivery performance.
Interestingly, this also aides in the identification of any potential downfalls of incentivising productivity. One of them, for instance, could be the neglect of sustainable procedures.
An effective way to measure productivity in engineered project delivery is to monitor it as part of a business life-cycle process, gathering historical productivity data for all various projects. To achieve this, it is important to carefully code your data to both create and preserve productivity “NORMS”. Then, these can be used to plan and price upcoming projects.
Embedding productivity tools, processes, and systems within a company can spur accurate, valuable success measures. It also offers businesses the chance to discover new opportunities to drive its efficiency. With all this in place, an organisation can make its way towards embracing innovation with confidence.
How to improve productivity
The key to improving a business’ productivity is to constantly assess, innovate, and make decisions on what achievable success looks like. What’s more, a company should always adapt to change and be objective about the outcomes. In order to do so, it is essential to build a culture as well as specific systems and processes, with the aim to:
• Create new, innovative ideas to shift your business towards your agreed strategic targets;
• Evaluate and pick improvement opportunities that will help you reach the best results;
• Establish plans and goals on how to design and implement those improvements;
• Introduce your new ideas in a timely fashion to lay the foundations for success;
• Pause, reassess, rework, or discard any innovation investments if they are no longer in line with the final target.
Benefitting from digital modernisation
Digitalisation isn’t only about the replacement of paper with PDFs, faxes with emails, or typewriters with computers. In engineered project delivery, it also acts as a way to improve documented assets (dossiers, files, drawings, and documents) alongside their digital twin (digital workflows, artificial intelligence, and meta-data).
In this respect, let’s consider the pre-commissioning, commissioning, start-up, and handover stages of a project. If there is a lack of transparency on effective productivity from the outset, there is a chance there will be adverse consequences at the end of the project. Instead, using an innovative digital management system can nip the problem in the bud. Here are a few features and attributes it should have:
• It should adopt a completions management system (CMS). A CMS can digitally store all tests and inspections required throughout the project. This is fundamental to both check and certify the integrity of equipment, components, interconnections, systems, and sub-systems.
• It should make use of a CMS to digitally format all approved handovers, from the vendors to the manufacturers. Moreover, a CMS can store handovers from pre-commissioning, commissioning, and operations.
• It should adopt a CMS that collates project tools and systems that are interconnected. By doing so, it will help use the same data for one, sole “source of truth”.
Hence, one of the most noticeable advantages of using a digital management system is that it allows suppliers to collaborate. But in what ways does it favour productivity? Let’s have a look:
• System suppliers can offer a helping hand in delivering a specific task on a project and learn more about the key data interfaces.
• Digital systems can be configured to achieve the agreed workflows, processes, and terminology of a certain project.
• Systems allow enhancing documented assets to their digital twin.
• Rather than relying on pen, paper, and manual admin processes, systems provide handier, digitised equivalents. What’s more, they can considerably improve productivity and efficiency in the execution and planning phases. Things such as paperless handover certificates, dossiers, check sheets, ITRs, and work packs (pre-commissioning WPs) can spur functionality.
• Systems facilitate communication in both the real and digital worlds. Programmes such as Teams, for instance, are the perfect tool for collaborations.
• Systems are also live and transparent and use dashboards on demand and reports that do not require subjective interpretation. This way, project teams are able to analyse and spot root causes, and act accordingly. All in all, systems can pave the way towards a project’s planned success.
Ultimately, productivity and connectivity are two essential components within every business. By offering some insights on how to monitor and improve both, we hope this guide provides you with useful tips on how to drive your company’s efficiency and productivity.
Sources
https://www.researchgate.net/p...
