Look at the big picture
Another way businesses can learn to be more cost-effective is by changing the way they analyze their operations. There are many different parties and steps involved in operational processes such as product design or engineering, so it’s difficult to gauge how cutting costs in one area might affect another. To understand where costs can be streamlined, you need to look at entire processes as whole, complete puzzles instead of as their separate pieces.
“You may make a module less expensive, but then you have to service it out in the field,” Swidarski says. “So for us, it’s looking at all aspects of it and the intelligence you want to build in the module that may give you savings on the backend. That is even more important than saving $2 on the front end if you are going to save $5 or $10 on the backend by having a sensor that helps you have reduced inventory.
“Probably some of our biggest innovations come from our treasury. Our day sales outstanding in the United States have dropped from 60 and 75 days to about 30 days because of process improvements with less people. That’s really where we get the biggest gain. How do we handle everyday processes and look at them wholistically, rather than ‘my little piece of it.’ When you look at an order-to-cash process, where are the areas of ways you call pull out of that? And through that, you get cost savings, as well. We need to do that based on the competitive environment that we are in.”
By looking at the big picture, you’ll have a better sense of how different parts of a process interact and affect one other and, therefore, recognizing how to trim, alter or consolidate costs in one or more areas without sacrificing quality in others.
“There’s more to come out from a process-improvement standpoint than there is from working with suppliers and saying, ‘I want that for 3 cents versus 4 cents,’” Swidarski says. “That gets you a little bit. But it doesn’t change the process.
“It’s not only the design aspect of what’s needed in the marketplace; it’s what are the other aspects of what that device is doing and the connective tissue of it as to what the total cost is and how we attack that wholistically. So we’ve brought our engineers from our service organizations in earlier. We brought manufacturing into design. We brought software in and where we use to test serially, we now test entire pieces wholistically. It really has made a tremendous difference.”
