At this stage, market competition in the machine tool industry is becoming increasingly fierce, and unfair competition and even price wars occur from time to time. The author believes that machine tool companies should pay attention to market order, improve efficiency by reducing costs, and ultimately enhance their own market competitiveness. This article uses company A as a case to talk about how machine tool companies can do a good job in cost control, hoping to give readers inspiration.
1. Problems in company cost control
Machine Tool Co., Ltd. is a professional and large-scale manufacturer of CNC machine tools. In recent years, through the continuous introduction of international advanced technology and equipment, it is committed to providing customers with the highest quality high-precision CNC machine tools. Since its establishment, the company has been in the dilemma of high operating costs, which can be attributed to the following four aspects.
1. Production issues
Most of the production testing equipment used by the company is imported from abroad, and some automation equipment is not equipped with dedicated maintenance personnel in China. When problems occur, professional scientific and technical personnel are required to fly from abroad to the factory for testing and adjustment. The long waiting time affects the entire production plan. Moreover, the automation content of some equipment often cannot meet the assembly conditions of the product in an unconventional state, and more time can only rely on manual operations. It can even be said that the impact of the adoption of some automated equipment on costs does not decrease but rises.
2. Procurement issues
Procurement is an important part of a company's production activities. It is interlocking and mutually causal. It can be said that it will affect the activities of many departments. Company A has more than 80 suppliers, but few have maintained long-term cooperation. On the one hand, due to the forced reduction of procurement prices, it is necessary to find cheap suppliers; on the other hand, based on the consideration of the procurement cycle, manufacturers that can supply quickly are easy to become the first choice. Two years ago, company A’s upstream data providers raised prices sharply, causing company A to switch to corresponding data from domestic second-tier manufacturers. However, due to the poor quality of materials from second-tier manufacturers, many problems have arisen in the products after production, which has brought huge losses to the company. The problems caused by random replacement of suppliers not only affect the product, but also increase the risk and uncertainty of the enterprise, and increase the cost.
3. Manpower issues
The company will undergo a major reshuffle every year in the replacement of personnel, and use the channel of layoffs to reduce the pressure on personnel compensation during the off-season of orders. At the same time, it will also adjust the positions of senior managers. Purchasing personnel are rotated once a year. The loss of senior management in various departments of the company is serious. Although the total turnover rate has decreased, the active turnover rate has been rising year by year, every year before the end of the year. The labor shortage phenomenon has had a serious impact on Company A.
The company’s hiring philosophy for senior managers has always been that “outside monks can recite scriptures”. Compared with internal training, its companies are more willing to pay more for hiring senior staff from foreign and domestic companies. This employment system will first The increase in explicit labor costs. At the same time, the loss of more than half of external executives has not only affected the organization and management decisions, but also caused great economic losses to the company due to the confusion of the management process and the loss of related important technologies caused by personnel turnover. .
The company has always planned corporate personnel based on the order output. Although this pipeline can avoid the consumption of labor costs from a short-term perspective, the layoffs and layoffs have caused employees to lack trust and sense of belonging to the company, which has caused more and more employees. Low loyalty will not only reduce productivity, affect the delivery time and product quality, cause the increase of the company's explicit and hidden costs, but also damage the company's reputation and image. A company's lack of personnel reserves has led to higher and higher labor costs.
4. Marketing issues
In recent years, the company's marketing expenses as a proportion of the entire sales revenue have been rising, accounting for more than 30% of the entire financial expenditure. How did this amazing figure come about?
It is understood that the company spends a lot of money on advertising and public relations travel, but this is not enough to move the market. This is a typical behavior of "throwing a big net to catch small fish", and real product marketing needs to keep up with the development of the times.
In addition, the entire marketing department has always had a "sales first" concept for marketers. As long as there is an order, it will do whatever it takes; as long as the order can be obtained, everyone can become a salesman. This undoubtedly caused a huge deviation in the orientation and strategy of the entire marketing department, and the utilitarian psychology was serious. In addition, most of the sales staff were transferred from other fields and did not have strong product knowledge and technology to support the development of the market. And digging is very limited and stretched.
2. Optimization suggestions for cost control
For machine tool enterprises, the cost control system is complex and affects each other. In fact, it is difficult to achieve effective control of every link. Therefore, we must focus on the most effective links for cost control and make breakthroughs. Targeted. You can start from the following four aspects.
1. Cost control optimization in the production process
The more modern enterprises tend to use automated production lines to reduce their dependence on manpower. This may be the consensus of enterprise modernization, but it is necessary to analyze specific issues and blindly adopt automated assembly lines to often backfire. It is not only because of the fixed content of the equipment that the corresponding working hours cannot be adjusted according to the product information and the uncontrollability can not deal with the special state of the product, thus wasting production time, but also because part of the equipment largely occupies the entire production site , Increase the product circulation time, for improving labor productivity, it can be said that the gain is not worth the loss. At the same time, the maintenance cycle of key equipment is too long, which will also have a serious impact on production plans and shipments. Using labor to replace part of the automated production line can not only directly reduce equipment purchase costs, but also avoid high fixed asset depreciation, equipment maintenance labor costs and waiting time.
2. Cost control optimization in human management
(1) Cultivate employee loyalty and increase the value of fixed assets
People are the most important participants in corporate activities. Corporate production may lack equipment, but it must never lack employees. Manpower should play the roles of employee supporter and change agent. The company should increase the training of experienced and valuable employees, cultivate employee loyalty, and reduce employee replacement costs. Company A’s corporate cultural thinking is not strong, and it does not know how to establish a sense of belonging among employees. In fact, the workers in the production field are real experts in the company. They know every key point in the work process, and are the first to spot every detail and make improvements.
To this end, the human resources department must establish a mechanism to encourage employees to put forward reasonable suggestions and innovative ideas, regard employees as human "fixed assets", and strengthen the phased training of employees, which will not only play a good role in corporate reputation and word of mouth, but also It is a great contribution to the cost control of enterprise human resources.
(2) Eliminate departmental barriers and strengthen team building
Internal cooperation between corporate departments is sometimes far less tight and smooth than external cooperation. Due to the classification of the organization itself, there are invisible barriers. For this reason, the most important task is to break down these barriers, carry out cooperation that escapes the authority and responsibility of the department, put the company's interests at the center, let the team members of various departments work closely to eliminate organizational boundaries, and find that it is beneficial to the entire value chain The beneficial part of the improvement.
The company should increase the construction of the organization, formulate detailed procedures for material procurement, technology research and development, product certification, post-sales, etc., and review each purchase and certification. This can reduce the problem of poor information communication and duplication of work, and avoid all kinds of intangible costs.
