It is a very widely held belief in business that each station in a production line should be working as hard as it can in order to maximise its efficiency. This might be a car assembly line or an accountant's office processing tax returns using several different stages in the accounting...
The Google AdWords service offers you both a marketing media and a laboratory to test your marketing ideas and even the potential direction and viability of your start-up business. For a comparatively small cost, you can quickly get enormously valuable insights into your actual or potential market. Blue Belt
Every type of Enterprise faces the need to develop a Strategy and then implement it. 12Faces has been doing this in its own businesses for many years and we have developed a very practical approach which we share with you here. This is a blue belt article.
Takt is the German word for the baton that an orchestra conductor uses to regulate the tempo of the music. Takt time may be thought of as a measurable beat time, rate time or heartbeat. Takt time is the average time between the start of production of one unit and the...
Your enterprise may be growing at present. But, you can be certain that innovation and disruption will erode what have been successful services or products. We see this at work all the time. Years ago, videos came on a cassette tape. Then DVD's and now streaming services. Your enterprise will decline without...
How fast can you grow your business? This depends on how well you convert your sales into cash-in-hand. Is this conversion slow? You will need cash from other sources to fund your growth in sales volume and pay expenditures. Some expenditures will be for goods and services, others for capital items. The Cash Conversion Cycle...
The cost of labour is one of the largest overhead expenses in most businesses. Any inefficiency here is an expense that must be recovered from the potential Profit of the organisation. Labour tends to grow of its own accord and it is very difficult for the business operator to know just how...
Summary cashflow is the life blood of a business but it is a difficult thing to grasp as an abstract idea. "Is my cashflow OK?" is difficult to answer. Effective management of Accounts Receivables is part of the answer. The Accounts Receivable Daily Sales Outstanding (DSO) ratio, and its partner, the Daily Accounts Payable...
Throughout the 12Faces, we talk about several different workflow and inventory models and their respective merits. You can quickly gain an impression of how these models work in practice by playing a simulation game with a set of dice. This will demonstrate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various models...
A lot of Start-up businesses use a Ready-Fire-Aim process! They just start and cross their fingers it will work out. The Lean Start-up methodology takes a different and incremental approach so that you can systematically feasibility test the proposed new business. Blue Belt
