Mr. Pancake, best dog ever, took a little trip to the vet this week. He was standing over to the side waiting for the nice assistant to greet him when she paused to take a stop watch off the hook…
Next stop was the examination room where he had a successful checkup! When it was time to check out the stop watch was still counting time. It was not in an obvious location, but it caught my eye… so I asked, “what’s up with the stop watch?”
And that’s when I learned about an amazing idea!
To monitor the businesses efficiency the clinic monitors the time. She mentioned that they can quickly lose track of time in the room. I thought this is brilliant. As a patient, well… I wasn’t exactly the patient (haha), but as the person who paid for the patient, I never felt rushed or like I was being timed. It was just as calm and relaxed as any other visit I’ve experienced. I have no idea if certain parts of the visit were sub-timed or if there were signals/verbal ques between the assistant and doctor to wrap up the session. But I will tell you this, time is money and as a consumer, I appreciate the business monitoring their services because I believe it saves me money! If you have a business where you are trying to determine if you have inefficient time or tasks taking too long it’s “time” to buy some stop watches and start timing!
Here’s an idea of how time efficiency can add up… At our marina we bought a new forklift to launch our boats into the lake. The forklift is part of a “launch on demand” business model. Well, the new forklift had sealed drums on the brakes. Therefore we could drive into the water without getting the brakes wet. This simple change sped up the time on our launching ramp by one and a half minutes per launch! With 100 runs on the ramp a day we save about 2 hours of launch time a day due to the new forklift! It was such a fantastic labor cost savings we paid to retro fit our other forklift.
You’ve got to seek out your time/labor efficiencies!
Action Step:
1-Buy some stopwatches
2- Start timing the labor intensive activities
3- Determine the satisfactory range for the activities, this gives you the baseline to determine where you can make changes!
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