------------------ ARTICLE START ------------------ Bottleneck-oriented Business Management Simple and effective Business Management

In every enterprise there are, at every time, one or more bottlenecks, which have influence to commercial situation. Bottleneck-oriented business management has purpose to early track bottlenecks and to remove them, to allow an optimum of commercial development. To know at any time, what a business lacks of and to be able to add missing things, is today a determining competition advantage. Bottlenecks can be, e.g.:

* low sales proceeds * high due or overdue accounts receivables * low liquidity (Cash on Hand, etc.) * high amount of liabilities * low number of customers * too many new customers * too high capacity utilization * defective administration or management * and a lot more.

These example show that bottlenecks not only concern negative circumstances, but also can apply to positive commercial development. If an enterprise takes up many new customers, this results in new orders, which lead to other circumstances, like a possible excess in capacity utilization. In case excess of capacity utilization stays for a longer time, this may result in a lower employee motivation, because of a slump in working atmosphere within company, which then could lead to less qualtiy of work performed.

Due to a TIMELY reporting system many companies take care of reaching desired commercial development. However, a regular analysis of expenses or annual reports are not enough to control a business today. In today's dynamic markets these evaluations are too statical, too much oriented on past commercial development, which had been achieved. Also cost accounting only shows what has happened in past. The actual direction in which a business is running could not be seen.

Imagine a business to be a car. If you sat down in a car, do you like to receive information from instruments from last year or month? Probably not. You would like to have actual information about fuel tank content, coolant temperature and a lot more. Bottleneck-oriented business management should exactly bring most important and actual information about a business to you, including so-called early warning signals ( Screenshot abenetis ERS-Diagram).

Data oriented to past for early-warning-systems?

A working early-warning-system needs data which are not oriented to past, like from cost accounting or year-/month-end closeings. It needs data from so-called early indicators, which has to be gathered from different areas of an enterprise. Of course, figures from finance and accounting department belong into an early-warning-system, but they only have a subordinated role, because they are oriented to past.

Nowadays reporting must show present situation of a business. In many businesses expenditure of time for reporting rose considerably, due to today's flood of information. Aggravatingly added to this, is selection of really relevant business ratios, which allow an appropriate overview of actual business situation. Too often reports are prepared, which are not perceived by anybody, due to lack of necessary statements about business development.

Business trips can often take place at last minute. Something crops up that just absolutely has to be sorted out face to face. Which means if your job could potentially involve business travel, it’s essential to be prepare as much as possible in advance.

In general, all travel trips are being booked later and later, so unless there’s a major conference going on in your destination city, you should be able to find somewhere to stay. What can be more difficult to ensure is that it’s somewhere you want to stay and that it’s within your budget.

If you know your job is likely to involve travel, it’s worth planning ahead and setting up a new folder in your bookmarks so that you’re not hunting around search engines, desperately trying to find your preferred airlines and hotel bookers.

Start your search while you’re not rushed!

Make sure that you bookmark at least two of everything, in case site you use doesn’t have anything available for your trip.

For flights, choose one of sites that lists lots of different airlines. But remember that these don’t always list budget airlines, so bookmark web site of any budget airline that flies from your local airport.

When choosing flights, make sure that you check number of stopovers. This is easily missed when you are traveling at last minute. Stopovers can add hours to a flight time and they increase likelihood of delays on your journey.