When business slows, time to tweak

Many customers are back to emphasizing price over delivery, getting multiple quotes and not automatically sending us the work. This cycle requires an eventual tightening of payroll costs, expenses and operational activities. While a slowing cycle presents its own management issues and concerns, it still should be a productive period, offering shop owners and managers an opportunity to tackle matters often postponed during a boom.

If you’ve read my previous columns, you’re aware our company has been busy, adapting and evolving to stay competitive. In the course of many staff meetings and discussions, numerous good ideas have been mentioned, but with the workload, few have actually been implemented. This is mostly because we just didn’t have time to tackle them all.

In our case, we’re also into fabrication work, with its own demanding requirements outside the scope of machining. In other words, there’s always something that needs to be reviewed, updated, cleaned, finalized or any host of other past-tense verbs.

Lately, I’ve even returned to a couple of desktop stacks that emerged from previous brainstorming sessions. It’s taken quite a while, but maybe there’s time to complete these projects once and for all.

Good managers are able to shift gears and take maximum advantage of all business cycles, up or down. During a downturn, it’s their job to ensure shop personnel aren’t twiddling their thumbs, but are keeping busy with other important tasks.

Although many shops remain busy, if not swamped, there does seem to be a consistent theme among my contacts at other shops that work is steady, but not at capacity. This describes our current workload. While it’s been nice to see several large jobs finally get completed and shipped, the backlog isn’t filling up as fast. Of course, continuing to market and brand your shop makes sense and should never stop, but, regardless of that effort, sooner or later the economy slows and the demand for machined parts declines.