Flexibility and agility are essential attributes for modern industries facing a highly competitive business environment. These characteristics allow them to adapt quickly to different market conditions, consumer preferences, and trends.
Does your company have characteristics such as flexibility and agility?
Understand in this article why developing these differentiators takes your company to another level!
Why develop flexibility and agility?
The world is no longer the same as it was ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Cities have developed, new products have been launched in the market, traditional communication channels have been replaced, and customer needs and preferences have changed.
Companies that remain tied to the past are at a disadvantage and run the risk of going under.
As if the sharp changes over the years were not enough, different business models also need to keep up with the small daily shifts — the ones that happen without warning but impact companies even after they have restructured their way of working and their operations.
With today's landscape increasingly agile, digital, and connected, the need to become flexible enough to meet every demand and transformation is urgent. More than ever, companies need to restructure internal processes, mindsets, and even human skills themselves so they too become more agile.
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Making the company agile and flexible
The speed at which a company serves customers, manufactures and distributes its products, reshapes internal processes, and makes decisions is what classifies it as agile and flexible.
To achieve that speed, however, you need strategy. It is not enough to simply instruct employees or adjust machines to work faster. That can result in low-quality product and service deliveries, inefficient customer service, consumer dissatisfaction, and, of course, lost market share.
Below, we have selected "shortcuts" that, when integrated into the business strategy and put into practice, can help the company reach the speed today's business landscape demands:
Offering a varied portfolio of products is not just a strategy to sell more, but to reach and retain a larger number of customers. That does not mean, however, that the company should manufacture or distribute any kind of merchandise. You should assess which ones make sense in the business strategy and can be added to the production list without requiring major costs.
What is your company's segment? Which items have the most demand and turnover? What raw material is most used in manufacturing? What other products could be made with that same material and satisfy the customers who already buy from the brand?
E-commerce brought a variety of product and service options, but that alone has not been enough to serve today's demanding consumer profile. People now want to consume what matches their needs and preferences, going beyond the items companies usually offer.
What sets your products apart? What do they deliver that the competition does not? How do they help the consumer? Do the items meet the customer's real needs? If those needs change, how does the company intend to act to meet them?
Just-in-Time is a production technique that focuses on manufacturing products only when necessary — that is, at the right time.
In the past, many production methods focused on large scale, with industry manufacturing high volumes of items and keeping them in inventory until they were consumed. That, however, was not always favorable. The high storage costs, plus the financial losses caused by drops in demand, were considerable.
The Just-in-Time production method goes against that methodology, taking into account the orders the company actually has in its system within a given period of time.
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To keep up with the speed of the market and be truly agile, companies need to know what is happening in the world at large. This knowledge requires business leaders to take a macro view, focused on consumer behavior, trends, and the market itself.
Follow the news, monitor Performance Indicators (KPIs), access research, and study disruptive, innovative business models. The best way to react quickly to a change is to know exactly what that change is, how it will impact business operations, and which proactive measures to take to avoid or capitalize on its impacts.
There is no way for companies to become more agile while depending on manual, outdated procedures. Those that want to compete with other brands need to rev up their engines with instruments, tools, and mechanisms that automate processes, enable fast thinking, and enhance human skills.
There are many innovative technologies that can be applied to this end: Artificial Intelligence, Analytics, Big Data, Robotics, Cloud Computing, IoT, and ERP are just a few examples.
The race for speed has begun, and thousands of industrial companies are already prepared to stand out in it. What do you intend to do for your company so it can be flexible and agile and compete on equal footing with other big brands?
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Originally published in Portuguese at useall.com.br.