sidvic said:
Hi Guys.
Our company, a Plastics Injection Molding Automotive Supplier, has been trying to raise our profit level and be profitable once again. We (all salary) employees, have been tasked to come up with at least 2 cost saving ideas.
So I am stretching out there, to see if anyone has any ideas that might help. We have already done the cost reductions through re-cycling and hydro. Anything can help.
Thank you.
Sidvic: Really hard to say without probably getting some proprietary info from you and company size / competitive ranking, corporate culture.
Not making profits is not good and sometimes unpalatable decisions have to be made. Some ugly and not so ugly possibilities:-
From a macro business side:-
- Subcontract non-essential operations that are currently company run.
- partnership with similar business to share costs. Move equipment to shared building costs or perform work for another company that they'd like to do but can't because they can't take on FT employees.
- Ask the non-exempt employees to give something up in short term: a few days Holiday or renegotiate overtime. Same thing with salaried. (Bummer thing but if you are in a crisis, it is better to do this and keep your job).
- If you are loosing money on exchange rates (The loonie vs Dollar), buy currency options. Same thing if you are dependent on commodities.This is what Southwest do to hedge against oil costs.
From tactical side:-
- Look at your product portfolio. Is there some products that cost more that others ? Why is that ? Can you make a change to that or renegotiate a parameter that you are testing to or inspecting to end cusotmer doesn't require ?
- Can you enforce a lifetime buy on product that is near the end of it's business cycle (This will short term give additional orders for example aftermarket). You may find out that you are making more money on real old stuff but volumes are not there.
From quality side:-
- Look at predictive instead of preventative maintenance.
- Implement knowledge based testing. If sampling on every lot, consider moving to skip lots if data has not sourced any failures.
- Move to an outlier based system for reliability testings. Link product parametrics to quality/reliability and implement screens around them.