What to Do When the Economy is Freezing?

Picture: the new Helsinki Käpylä (Kottby) Elementary School under construction in January 2024.

If your business is facing problems due to a freezing economy, chances are that this is a strong sign of long-term neglection of improving key processes in your company. This means that your business cannot cope properly with changed customer demands as the market shrinks. In such a setting your business needs to really shine to be successful. In practice, this translates into providing a more attractive overall offering to your customers: either more bang for the buck, less bucks for the same bang, or even more bang for less bucks. Sometimes even this does not help: you need to introduce a new, or at least sufficiently improved bang—and market and sell it sufficiently well—to please the customers and get a sufficient amount of money flowing in the right direction. After all, your business needs to be profitable to survive in the long run. Just cutting the price won’t thus do the trick, even if you would get the money flowing. You need to improve the time, quality and costs in all relevant processes, including also the process improvement process itself. Preferably before your business is at stake.

But how do you really deal with the bang for buck dilemma? Actually, the dilemma can be swiftly and cost-effectively solved just by a proper management of the process improvement yield level in key processes. It’s thus just a classical high-performance process improvement task. Why settle with a process improvement yield level of less than 3% than your key processes should be subject to a level at least 75%? Very few would drive a car, year after year, with a traction of 3%, or less. But when it comes to the company performance and the improvement of it, many do. Time to shape-up your improvement activities?