Financial Efficiency

One of the more positive outcomes of the current economic climate is that businesses are actively looking for ways to become more efficient. This has led to a number of customers asking how this can be translated directly to financial matters.

The management of the corporate finances is an obvious area for scrutiny and is the preserve of the Board and the Finance Department. However, what about everyone else?
If asked to rate people's financial efficiency it would be possible to categorise them into three broad categories:

1. Efficient
2. Indifferent/ignorant
3. Lazy (harsh but true)

The next two questions are:
"What does it cost to run a department?" and "Could that be reduced PAINLESSLY?"
If it is at all possible to put a figure to the answer then it is worthy of further investigation as the returns could be significant.

PTS has developed a programme to directly address this with rigorous inbuilt measures.

• Firstly, the programme makes people financially aware.
  
• It then provides a fertile environment for people to explore where they can make a personal contribution.
  
• Finally, it tracks the progress and reports the findings back to the organisation.

The programme seeks to provide two tiers of measure, hard and soft:

Hard: it seeks to provide a 10:1 return on investment
Soft: to increase knowledge of key financial measures and the creation of ideas for implementation.

The programme
Delegates receive pre-course joining instructions outlining the purpose, what will be covered, what is expected of them, the post course project and the fact that PTS will be in contact with them before the month is up to collect and collate the plans and the results.

The course covers the following topics:

• Investigate, with a view to reducing, unit cost
  
• Investigate, with a view to changing, product mix
  
• Review all overhead cost effectiveness
  
• Review the cost of how we currently service our customers
  
• A simple approach to cost review and reduction
  
• Discuss the implication on "profit" of discounts
  
• Discuss the implication on "profit" of extended and/or late payment terms
  
• Discuss the implications of errors, waste and rework
  
• Open forum for creative ideas

After the course, PTS will make contact with the delegates to collect and collate the results of the projects and present the findings to the organisation.

If customers wish any additional tailoring to be made to the course material for any specific delegate population, we can accommodate this. The programme is run at the customer's venue.

This is an excellent example of training delivering performance improvement where the improvement required is clearly identified and specific measures have been put in place.