Business efficiency provides long-term value

Effective Projects Provide Long-Term Value

Business efficiency, as I would like to define it, means a given business spends their money effectively on the intellectual capacity of an employee and continues recuperating value for years after the project has ended. This seems really basic, but companies do not realize the full potential value or have a method to transfer that value. I wrote procedures and Ethernet test plans; concepts that could empower employers, but in reality sit on a file server under utilized and those hundreds or thousands of pages would have tremendous value today at various companies. I think every project had Ethernet and needed an Ethernet test plan…something I originally wrote a career ago.

Companies want instant solutions to solve immediate project needs and will ship consultants from state to state; employees will get relocated over and over or project to project. Furniture I bought ten years ago have now cost about five times over from mover costs. I could have thrown all the furniture away before each move and bought new stuff for the price companies spent moving stuff around.

The only way I see to break this is for one or two companies and maybe one or two employees to accept change, review internal processes and recognize squeezing efficiency out of manufacturing costs will someday end and the only efficiency left will be the efficient use of brain power. Individuals will need to embrace change and over the next fifty years make it happen. No one person or company can make economies efficient without leading as individuals, by example, and show others real efficiency.

During a luncheon engagement I provided some historical details about the founding conception of Peak Imaginations by going into the details of the business inefficiency moving an engineer from one state and back again. My intent was to describe how spending money to get an engineer from Point A to Point A by way of spending $25k to go from A to B and $25k from B back to A is really socially inefficient and only short term effective. Families lose the social bonds needed from communities and communities never fully form or really never heal.

As the lunch progressed the guests were very willing to allow me the table and I went further to describe how technical video processing solutions I created fifteen years ago are now the same type of solutions needed by another employer that moved me.

This really irked him because then the feeling that I attacked a company he regards highly just occurred.

At that point almost all was lost and the point about business efficiency was lost. See in my mind I see the details of the video timing generators or some specific piece that I have to create for a new employer that is practically a duplicate solution to one 15 years ago. I see an analogy of the reinvention of the wheel and then the company spends three years making all the rest of the automobile to go around the wheel. Really where I lost my listener was at understanding that after a project ends the value an employee added with those monetary resources could live on.

You see I lost my listener, but it was the utilization of the intellectual resources from my earliest employers that have not retained value. The inefficient point starts with a new project and it was not that employer he thought attacked. I really was not attacking at all, but trying to show a 30 thousand feet concept.

Here is my tip. Before jumping into a new project decide what your market opportunity for the product is in time. Decide how your company will utilize that created material to gain future earnings after the product has become a commodity. You should not get out of the market completely since your company built that competency, but license all those procedures, test plans, concepts, and intellectual property.

Gain the most value from every dollar spent and continue to accrue value from the dollars those shareholders put into that project. Every procedure an employee creates has future value. Don’t let that material sit on a network server, but license the material and keep retaining value. This is business efficiency.

-Jeff

 

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