We rarely talk about trains arriving on time, even though this is most cases - at least in Switzerland. This is also true for companies: most of them are experiencing constant or even strong growth in turnover and volumes…
This growth in orders, volumes and/or personnel is often accompanied by underestimated challenges:
• How to increase staffing levels without destabilising the financial balance: with permanent staff, temporary staff, or both?
• How to increase activity or storage space while maintaining the right balance between fixed costs and potentially variable revenues?
• Can the organisational structure and division of labour be maintained during strong growth?
• Can the real estate, workspace, and facility management (FM) approach be maintained with a change in company size?
As the saying goes, you shouldn’t “bite off more than you can chew”, but you should know how to change the “gear of your bike” when the slope changes. For example, it may be useful to change premises, to outsource some of the administrative tasks (HR, legal, accounting, etc.) to specialised third parties or to change the management structure.
Focusing on Facility Management, the change in size of the company should be a good opportunity to review the processes, how the services are performed and who performs the services.
It often becomes difficult to manage everything internally and bringing in external forces is a solution. Without being the advocate of outsourcing, it must be recognised that specialists are often better able to add value than in-house staff, however competent and dedicated they may be.
My experience in this field shows that the main challenge comes from management who do not want to see the change: you do not run a micro-company like an SME, just as an SME with 50 people does not have the same logistical challenges as one with 300… This seems obvious, but one would be surprised at the answers given by some CEOs or logistics managers when asked…
Increasing volumes is an opportunity, but the challenges in terms of organisation and costs should not be overlooked. For example, in FM, we can:
• Flexibility in operational costs to be able to modify the canopy without too much “breakage” if necessary
• Outsource maintenance, cleaning, etc.
• Change technologies or tools and processes
• Relocate stocks if current premises are insufficient
• Renting certain machines rather than buying them
• Share some resources with other companies
• Modify workspaces by introducing a hybrid model
• Etc.
Discussing and being open to new approaches often leads to excellent solutions: the aim should be to pool risks and make the structure more flexible, not to reduce costs in the short term.
Have a good week, good thoughts, and good reading