Is Your Business Flexible? Conduct a Business Assessment to Find Out.

This is article is part of a series of monthly articles produced by Harbour Results for PMA’s MetalForming Business Edge e-newsletter. Click here to view the full collection of articles.

If 2022 taught us anything, it’s that our business needs to be flexible. We started off the year thinking volumes would be high, but then inflation, rising interest rates, supply chain issues, world crises and more happened. As we look at 2023, we feel it will be similar to 2022. Manufacturing will be fine, but there will be uncertainty and unpredictability along the way.

Knowing this, it’s critical to understand your business, identify gaps and determine how to be more flexible and efficient. To do this, you must assess your business. Top performing companies are assessing their business every 6-12 months.

Assessments can be done by an outside party, such as through the PMA Strategic Assessment Program (SAP) where three Harbour Results Inc. (HRI) consultants work with you to conduct interviews, review processes, and analyze existing data to help you understand the status of your business. But assessments can also be done internally. Grab a board member, or colleague, or create an internal cross functional team, take a step back from your day-to-day jobs and look at your business from a holistic approach. Question what you do and why you do it a certain way. This will force creative thinking about different solutions.

Assess everything – and we mean everything

Your assessment shouldn’t just focus on engineering or operations – it needs to take a hard look at ALL functions of the business, technical and non-technical. For example, the work environment and its impact on employee retention, engagement, and attraction. Do you have a proactive problem-solving culture where you ask for and people provide input, or do you dictate what everyone needs to do?

When the HRI team conducts an assessment, including the PMA SAP, we focus on nine areas:

• Engineering

• Finance & Administration

• Operations

• Materials

• Quality

• Program Management

• Management

• Sales & Marketing

• Human Resources

What to look for and ask

As you go through the assessment, question what you do and why you do it a certain way. What are the gaps? How do these impact your strategy? What needs to be done to close the gaps? Because in the end, assessing your business helps build a roadmap of tactics to achieve your commercial strategy, operational improvement strategy, talent strategy and more. 

But there’s other things to look for in an assessment. You may have less people, maybe even less skilled people on your team. How do you do the same amount of work? This is what a lot of businesses faced in 2022. In the first half of the year it was build, build, build, then in the back-half of the year, they realized they overbuilt and had to address an overage of product and people. It's all about the ability to flex up and down.

Prioritize your findings

It’s also important to remember not everything uncovered in an assessment is high priority. It’s like when your doctor tells you to cut back your drinking – you can choose to do something or not. But if you’re told your artery is blocked, you’re probably going to act immediately to avoid a devastating outcome. Use the same philosophy with your assessment results – address what needs to be addressed to avoid a major issue in the future.

The best piece of advice when it comes to an assessment is, don’t overcomplicate it. You want to understand where you were, where you are and where you are going. But you must be ready, willing and open to not only conduct the assessment, but act on what you learn from it.

If you’re interested in PMA’s SAP, an exclusive offer to PMA members, contact Laurie Harbour at laurie.harbour@harbourresults.com or 248-552-8400.