In any business, there’s a spectrum of decisions that you have to make all the time, and they relate directly to quality versus quantity. And especially in industrial businesses, those choices end up with more significant impacts and consequences.
When you think about things like specialized materials and processes, risk considerations, long-term financial planning, and adapting with technology, you’ll note that particularly with heavy industry or chemical companies, mitigating factors will push you in one direction or another. If you let your decisions happen without foresight, you can end up in a place eventually without intending to.
Specialized Materials and Processes
It has become a very specialized world out there. Particularly with heavy industry and with computer processing, regulating the balance between quality and quantity has turned into an extreme event. Think about specialized chemical equipment, or factories that produce computer chips, or technology used for an oil refinery. All along the input and output processes of these industries, quality and quantity are observed in an obsessively detailed manner. Small irregularities can cause catastrophic consequences, especially where health and safety are involved later on a long line.
Risk Considerations
Risk considerations are another significant factor in industrial business decisions. Consider for a minute that a consumer would be willing to pay many times more for a piece of machinery that is guaranteed to work for ten years without flaw, rather than a piece of machinery that only has a guarantee for a short time. When you set up risk assessment for creating products, you have to think in terms of brand loyalty as well. If another company is going to offer a better balance quality and quantity, then they are eventually going to win out more of the market share.
Long-Term Financial Planning
It’s possible to get a quick profit if you’re willing to sacrifice quality to get a large number of something out there. This is often referenced as the “race to the bottom.” Whereas this might be a quick fix if you’re trying to show some financial solvency, in the end, it nearly always leads to bankruptcy and an inferior product. Be very cautious about trying to cut corners to cut costs.
Adapting To Technology
You can’t fight against the progression of technology. So if something in your industry changes, as efficiently as possible, you should try to adapt to it and absorb it into your processes. An easy example would be that it would make sense for the oil and gas industries to start incorporating more environmentally sound practices into their business models, eventually moving toward a more sustainable method. As technology improves the ability to convert sustainable energy into consumer energy, businesses would do well to work with it instead of against it.
Originally posted on December 8, 2017 @ 8:14 am