Video
Whatever their competitive position, industrial companies need to identify which factors are driving costs and where to target their efforts. Pierluigi Serlenga, a partner with Bain's Performance Improvement practice, describes a way for companies to diagnose problems faster, increase the transparency of functions across the company and develop a set of initiatives to improve performance.
Read the transcript below.
PIERLUIGI SERLENGA: Every company needs to improve their industrial performance, taking out costs from their operations, no matter their profitability or their competitive position. Performance improvement X-ray diagnostics is based on a number of functions, which are typically the cost elements of an industrial company. So when we work on it, we look at manufacturing, research and development, procurement, supply chain and logistics, and customer support. We typically find out that a strong emphasis needs to be put on selecting the most critical cost drivers that help, then identifying where the major gaps are and where the most important actions need to be targeted.
The major benefits of this approach are, first of all speed. You're able to diagnose your operations and to find out where the major gaps are in two or three weeks typically. The second benefit would be the transparency that you generate along the different functions in an industrial company, and the third would be to have a set of priority initiatives to launch from day one that can really improve dramatically your performance.
Operational Performance Improvement in Industrial Companies
How companies can recognize and exploit cost reduction and improvement opportunities.