As someone involved with a solar business, you probably know how to use resources effectively and sustainably, so there’s no reason not to make sure those same principles apply to how you operate your business.
Cutting Waste From Your Solar Business
Adrian Johansen
Making sure your business stays up and running on a day-to-day basis can be a full-time job. There are employees to manage, clients to keep happy, and budgets to balance. In the bustle of keeping things functional, determining whether your business is running efficiently often gets overlooked.
Taking a good, hard look at your business in terms of efficiency of money, resources, and time can be hugely beneficial for the longevity of your company. As someone involved with a solar business, you probably know how to use resources effectively and sustainably, so there’s no reason not to make sure those same principles apply to how you operate your business.
By focusing some energy on business-centric solutions, you can make your operations more effective, efficient, and less prone to waste. Lean supply chain management, which is all about streamlining processes and decreasing waste, is one of the most important things your business can focus on.
Wasted Time
Time can be wasted in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons. Perhaps your systems are outdated, creating extra work. Maybe you’re spending valuable time on unnecessary meetings or communications. Whatever the reason may be, making sure you use time efficiently is one of the most important things to focus on if you want to be successful.
Failing to update processes and over communication are two of the major ways businesses are wasting time. If a task that should take five minutes takes an employee 20 because you’ve failed to update your computer systems, that’s wasted time that could have been spent on something else.
Similarly, if you have daily meetings that run on endlessly and don’t actually accomplish much, consider how that time might be better spent. If you instead had a weekly meeting that everyone was prepared to present at, you might be able to allocate time more efficiently. At the end of the day, you want to design your business processes for maximum efficiency. While it might seem like updating systems and processes takes too much time and effort, the long-term payoff makes it unquestionably worth it.
If you need guidance in choosing what to update, collect as much data about your business’ efficiency as you can. Using data analytics software, you can glean some powerful insights about where your company’s strengths and weaknesses lie, as well as how you can overcome obstacles. Predictive analytics can help you forecast how quickly and to what scale particular investments in your workplace will pay off — and it can guide you when it comes to countless other decisions as well.
If you take the time to utilize technology that can help you save time, manage workflows, and prioritize quality over quantity when it comes to communications, you’ll likely find an increased efficiency that will make you happy you invested in bettering your business.
Wasted Resources
Wasted resources, especially in a manufacturing industry like solar, can be hugely detrimental to success. The manufacturing process provides endless ways in which to waste materials, so it’s up to you to make a conscious effort to come up with ways to reduce manufacturing waste.
Finding ways to repurpose things that would normally be destined for the trash is a great place to start. Turning food waste into energy is a great example of this. Something thought of as waste, such as extra packaging or leftover building materials, can instead be a resource or asset. Think twice before getting rid of something. Ask if it could have another use. As a solar business, you’re sure to have no shortage of renewable energy products to reuse, so you’ll already be one step ahead of the game in terms of not getting rid of unnecessary things.
The next step is to make sure your solar panel manufacturing warehouse stays organized. You want to easily be able to manage your inventory and parts while minimizing excess. A disorganized business inevitably wastes resources because it can’t keep track of what it has.
Finally, resources can be wasted when you fail to delegate or outsource a task that you don’t have the time or manpower to accomplish efficiently. Sometimes, it’s simply easier to hand the project over to someone else. While it can be hard to let go of control, this is extremely important so you don’t get burned out or waste precious resources on something that someone else could do better.
Wasted Money
Wasted money is perhaps the part of efficiency and streamlining that is most often discussed. Your business could be wasting money on a whole variety of things, like paying too much for workers’ compensation insurance or sinking funds into unnecessary investigations.
Workers’ compensation insurance isn’t the same thing as a personal injury claim. However, without it, you’re putting your business at risk for a lawsuit if an incident occurs. And in an industry like solar, where you have people on rooftops and other high surfaces, injuries can be all too common. Workers’ compensation insurance is likely required and could save your business from bankruptcy in the case of an injury, but you want to make sure you’re not overpaying.
Similarly, you could also be wasting resources on pointless workers’ comp claim investigations. The last thing you want to is to waste money on an investigation that’s going to go nowhere. As a business owner, you want to be sure you have the evidence necessary to detect fraud or injustice before opening an investigation. Never rely on a mere hunch; if you do, you’ll likely waste many resources in the process.
In order to maintain and grow your business, it’s essential that you focus on efficiency and streamlining. Wasted time, resources, and money can all cause harm to your business and your clients. By examining and updating your systems, looking to reuse things before you dispose of them, and searching for the best deals for things like workers’ comp, you’ll be well on your way to running your business like a well-oiled and waste-free machine.
The content & opinions in this article are the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of AltEnergyMag
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