Today's competitive market, it is difficult to maintain
stable relationships with suppliers, customers, brokers,
distributors, and even your own company personnel. Competitors
are stealing your best customers. To maintain the edge
entrepreneurs need to sychronise their production process,
capacity, and delivery schedule.
Layout
Plan out your work area keeping in
mind the requirement of your business. More often than
not the area available to small businesses is limited
and within that area all the work needs to be carried
out, right from storing the raw materials to the final
product. The space for each of these should be clearly
chalked out. The distance between one facility and another
or one machine and another should be fixed. Design the
work place so that there is least amount of repetitive
movements, the place is safe for workers and area
is properly allotted for each process. You (or your
technical adviser) should work out where exactly each
facility like raw material storage, individual machines,
packaging, finished goods storage and quality control
unit will be located. The flow of the production
process and the space requirement for material handling
as well as manpower requirement determine the layout.
Capacity
The total capacity of business needs
to be planned beforehand keeping in consideration the
market demand and future supply and demand condition.
While purchasing machinery the capacity should be such
that there should be provision for future expansion.
In the initial phase of setting up
an enterprise to establish the credibility in the market
make it a point to deliver in scheduled fashion.
There should be no or least amount of damage to the
product, if the product is fragile package and mark
it accordingly. Ensure that it reaches its destination
in time.
A new company or a small business
has limited financial, personnel, and capital plant/equipment
resources and is especially vulnerable to instability
brought on by rapid changes in customer behavior. One
way to ensure business success is to make quality number
one priority for all employees in your company.
Quality work and customer satisfaction
must be a commitment of all employees.
Improving quality and customer
satisfaction must also be a commitment of all employees.
Every company activity must incorporate
quality and customer satisfaction, including all communications
with customers and suppliers.
It doesn't have to cost more to
make quality and customer satisfaction your priority.
Significant changes may be required
to make quality and customer satisfaction improvements.
Small advantages in all company
functions can set your quality and customer satisfaction
apart from the competition.
Government of India encourages and
offers incentives to small scale industries to get ISO
9000 certificate. Govt. of India also helps them to
set up their own R & D centre.