What Does Efficiency Mean to Your Business?

Efficiency is the kind of buzz word that every business uses. Most websites will use the word efficient or efficiency at some point as a way to signal to their customers… well, actually, what exactly are they trying to say?

Efficiency is now so overused that it has become almost meaningless. Customers now expect businesses to be efficient so pointing it out is almost a moot point. 

However, knowing what efficiency means to your business and unpacking the term for your customers is a good idea. They expect you to be efficient, but they might not realise that this means  for example that you have bespoke conveyors that have cut production time in your factory or that you have designed a piece of software for customers to access their data and orders. 

So, what does efficiency mean to your business?

High-Quality at Speed

Most people read efficiency as the ability to provide a high quality product in a short space of time: balancing speed and quality. Bringing down production times without impacting quality is often the main agenda for most business leaders.

So how should you talk about this? Well, you should point out the technology you have available to you from the software you use or have created to the production methods you use. You might also like to discuss the materials you have chosen as well as the design choices you have made.

Simplified Processes

Another major part of efficiency is simplifying your processes. Eliminating the steps you don’t really need to take and creating leaner products is another great way to bring your customers higher quality products without making them more expensive or taking longer to build. This is the model that Apple is built on. They predicted that people wouldn’t need disk drives and removed them – there was a minor backlash, then, hey, they were right! 

While people like products that do lots of different things, the reality is that simplicity is easier to use, easier to produce and easier to sell. So, before you start adding all the bells and whistles to your offering, sit back and be brutally honest about what you actually need – you’ll be surprised by how much surplus you can remove. 

Flexibility 

Flexibility is another buzz word across many industries right now but while employee flexibility is one thing, applying the concept to your whole business is quite another. Flexibility is all about creative problem solving. When you can be more flexible in your approach to problem-solving, you are more likely to strike upon a great idea that will benefit both you and your client.  

Efficiency is a vague and over-used word but the meaning behind it can easily be expanded and explained to your advantage. So, don’t just tell your customers that you are efficient, tell them what makes you efficient and what helps you to solve their problems.