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Business Operations – The lifeblood of a company
Business operations what is it ? Well business operations can consist of a number of departments and is commonly known as the “back office”. It can consist of distribution, demand planning, customer services, commercial administration and other departments. The main principle of business operations is to provide the organisation with value added services. It is there to enhance and maximise the assets of a company to ensure they are working to their best ability and are offering the very best return. Often business operations are generating a process that can be repeated many times in order to bring income into a company.
Its all about business!
Business Operations Directors have one simple aim and that is to create revenues for an organisation (and more to the point profits) that exceed their operational expenses. Well versed business operations professionals will know how to influence and change procedures and processes to ensure pay back is achieved as quickly and repetitively as possible. It is often the case (in my experience anyway) that productivity can be enhanced by a combination of people skills coupled with IT integration.
Operations
If you are a business operations director or manager take a step back from your day to day work (I know its difficult!) and take a look in to your organisation. I guarantee that you will see a number of improvement opportunities that were no so obvious because you were in the thick of the action. The secret to making operations slicker is often by making many small changes rather than a huge one. They are often more well received by employees, as experience has told us that without a good “change management” approach, large full scale changes can disrupt the rhythm of operations and more importantly put the business at risk.
Services
Make sure when looking at your business operations departments that you are resourced at the right level in order to meet both internal and external customer expectations. The aim is to deliver a quality service. It is an operations directors main objective to ensure full support for the customer and (within the bounds of cost control) to ensure the perfect service or product delivery takes place. Ensure when setting strategic budgets, into next year and beyond, that the aspirations of the sales director’s annual commitment plan is matched by the ability to deliver what is required.
Conclusion
It really does not matter if you are a new business operations director or manager or not, the main quality of making the departments within your business operations division work is heavily reliant on good common sense. Make sure you understand what is required by your market place and by the various other departments that are dependant on you. Create a reasonable plan to achieve these goals and at the same time take a step back to see how various aspects of your operations can be made more efficient. It could be through working practices or an investment in IT systems.
The main deliverable is that the cost of what you do is lower than the cash you generate. The difference between the two numbers is profit, the life blood of any commercial organisation.
Nigel Penhearow is professionally qualified sales and operations expert with in-depth knowledge of many business practices. Many of his articles are based on actual experience of putting theory into practice. You can find out more about Nigel by visiting his web site www.operations-director.com or you can link with him at LinkedIn by using the following link http://uk.linkedin.com/in/penhearow .
Business Operations