The Ultimate Guide To Managing Company Resources Efficiently

Every business should strive to keep its operations running as smoothly as possible. Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as it sounds, as it entails effectively optimising different business functions to their highest capacity.

From reducing costs to maximising productivity hours, there’s a lot of work that goes into balancing everything and managing these resources efficiently. And that’s not easy. Even just focusing on one goal—like cost-cutting—can take a tremendous effort to pare down.

If you’re struggling with the same problem, we hear you. Operating a business is hard work, a profitable one even more so. With this guide, we hope to help reduce that feeling of overwhelm and make the operational process feel easier for you.

Read through this step-by-step guide for a better understanding of how to manage your company’s resources efficiently.

1. Identify and Categorise Important Company Resources

The first thing you’ll have to do is to identify your company’s most valued resources. This involves knowing the ins and outs of your company and its most valued assets. The weight of the “resource” is typically based on what gets used the most within the operational process.

For service-based business structures like a parlour house, their most valuable resource could be the labour force. For factories and printing businesses, their most valued assets could be the machinery and equipment. 

It doesn’t need to be said that both labour and equipment work in tandem—but it’s important to know which one is most essential for business operations and then prioritise that for the sake of having a well-developed resource management plan.

In any case, get a good understanding of your business’s processes. Following that, divide them by category based on their type and role. For instance, you can divide them based on four categories: human, financial, physical, and technological resources.

Once you’ve done this, you’ll get a clearer idea of your business’s resource structure. This can help you quickly identify problem points and create plans of action that address key organisational issues later on.

2. Identify Operational Bottlenecks

Is there a process in your company that’s holding back your operations? You may be experiencing an operational bottleneck.

An operational bottleneck is a process in your operation flow where productivity slows due to operational constraints. 

For instance, in the parlour shop example, a bottleneck could be a barber shortage leading to long wait times—which can then lead to more customers being dissatisfied with the service and leaving earlier than intended. A call centre agency may experience a bottleneck if there are not enough agents to handle callers.

In a manufacturing example, it could be a stage in the production process that may cause a long backlog. This could cause the next production stages to become underutilised, which can mean a lot of capital spent but not a whole lot to show for it.

As a business, it’s important for you to recognise your bottlenecks and address them urgently. This is especially true if your business generates high enough demand to maintain a constant stream of customers. 

When demand exceeds capacity, prioritise fixing the bottleneck. If you’re unsure where your bottleneck is coming from, use data analytics tools and talk with employees to get an understanding of what’s happening in the field.

In fixing your operational bottlenecks, you can maximise your operations and maintain a smooth and optimal revenue flow throughout your opening hours.

3. Align Staff Goals

Another crucial aspect of ensuring that your company’s resources are efficiently dealt with is ensuring your workforce is on the same page on important company matters.

Communication is important to ensure that people don’t miss out on vital details on company direction and workflow. This is the case for both small businesses and large-scale companies.

To help facilitate clear communications, conduct regular board meetings with your managers and co-founders. Encourage a system wherein everyone gives regular updates regarding their progress.

On top of that, there needs to be assurance that managers and executives maintain a sense of transparency and set the right expectations for their staff. Make sure that communications are open and transparent across various departments. You may use communication tools like Slack for easy and quick communication.

By encouraging an open communication system, each staff member will know what’s expected of them and everyone will get updated on each other’s progress. In turn, this reduces the need for clarifications and back-and-forths that may postpone progress and halt active productivity to accomplish necessary tasks.

4. Find Ways to Reduce Costs

Money is undeniably one of the most important resources of any company. It’s the lifeblood of most businesses—and it’s in your best interest as the business owner to ensure that more of it enters your pocket and less of it exits.

There are several ways to go about cost reduction. For one, you can downgrade your subscriptions if you feel like you’re not maximising it to its highest potential.

Secondly, you could also consider leasing equipment such as cars instead of owning it outright and stomaching expenses. Read here to learn more about understanding what a lease is. 

You can also consider automating or outsourcing non-core tasks to others, reducing the need to spend full-time staff wages. 

Whatever plan you opt for, it’s essential to do so while ensuring that the quality of your output remains high. This way, you can keep your capital in good shape, giving you more freedom to expand your business and shoulder less flexible expenses.

Furthermore, knowing your cost breakdown also shows how your company allocates its capital. This makes it easier for you to visually see cost centres that may be holding your business back financially, thus creating better opportunities for you to track and make adjustments to keep your business afloat.

5. Use Project Management Tools

Another excellent way to align your company resources is by using project management tools. There are many online PM tools at your disposal, all of which are capable of helping teams plan, organise, and track their tasks and the tasks of others in real time at a glance.

Some examples of feature-rich project management tools include Trello, monday.com, and Asana. All these tools offer clean, colour-coded, and time-stamped monitoring features that all company staff can access to inform themselves about their tasks, deadlines, and the overall flow of their work.

This not only helps the staff performing the tasks, but it also helps those higher up in the chain of command to get a good idea of how their company is performing as a whole. 

By having a clear visual overview of ongoing projects, you and other executive members can quickly identify potential bottlenecks. This can give you all the data you need to make the call to adjust your resources accordingly.

6. Maintain High-Quality Equipment

For businesses that rely heavily on equipment, such as manufacturing and production-based businesses, the quality of their machinery and equipment holds an immense amount of importance.

When the equipment is operating to a high standard, this can translate to an efficient and productive workflow for everyone involved.

Conversely, if a piece of equipment is faulty or starting to slow down, this could negatively impact the production process—leading to an increased rate of faulty products, a slower turnover rate, and a slew of other manufacturing issues.

As such, it’s important to ensure that you get a piece of equipment that’s durable, reliable, and efficient. It’s totally valid to spend a little extra on machinery costs if the quality of the equipment shoots up significantly.

Regardless of your equipment’s quality or not, it’s also important to repair and maintain it frequently. Make part replacements if necessary—and use aftermarket or warranty to keep costs low. This way, you can maintain good control of your operational flow with little risk of interruptions.