It all got a little bit weird

I have written blog posts for years, some good, some bad, one even got featured on Linkedin, and was a predictive post on Windows 10 on the day they announced it, and boy has THAT article aged like milk.

A common theme is always trying to find a hook, or an edge, something in the public consciousness that I can pull back to whatever point I am trying to make. A slight of hand here, a little tongue and cheek there, relatable, funny, anything to get a click, as I blindly chased social validation.

However, at the moment, it seems a little bit twee to do it. Like the title says, everything is just a little bit weird. 

Fair warning, as this is a business blog post, at SOME POINT in the next few hundred words I have to pull it back to something relatable, with a hope you will get in touch and maybe we have a further conversation, that's the dirty little secret of a blog after all.

For those of you who hoped 2022 was going to see a return to something termable as ‘normal’ after 2020 and 2021, well, not quite. Some things got better, but some have gotten exponentially worse.

In the UK the fallout of covid contract awards, combined with Brexit, combined with partygate, beergate, it goes on and on seemingly. The war in Ukraine has turned the whole world on its head, driving up utility costs across the board and placing many dependent nations in a position of real food peril. The continued lockdowns in China, compounded by the increased oil cost, and the continuing rare metal/semiconductor shortage has made the supply chain reliability and cost about as predictable as next years weather.

Like I said, it is all a bit weird.

I like talking about cause and effect, a straight down-the-line look at the reality of things. Sadly, all of this is both cause, and effect, so I could go either way as it is all current, or at worst recent. For today let’s look at local business operations and the effect all of this is having.

I have met clients over the last few weeks, keeping my finger on the pulse of things, and it is a strangely common story. Cashflow, delivery timescales, ops costs. Not always in that order, but, more or less, this is it.

I know in my own house I have had two separate 39% increases in gas prices, with more expected soon. Electricity hasn't been AS bad, but I doubt I will see a reduction this side of 2023. Businesses are in the same boat and then some, utility bills are up astronomically, shipping times are longer, and costs are up in some cases 4-500%. I’ll say it again, all a bit weird.

So what can a business do?

I wax lyrical in another blog post about the aggregation of marginal gains, the little wins, the day to day efficiency that can shape an outcome given time. One of the big areas we are working with our customers is on machine utilisation and power consumption. In essence, we are giving business the meter statistics for all their big machines, whether they are using oil, gas, electricity, water, we look at it all, display it all, and cross reference against the utilisation of that device.

We aren’t working in obscure output either, we have built in the tariff you are paying by the time of day, day of the week, etc, so REAL costs are appreciated. Sounds simple, but that information alone lets managers maybe turn machine ‘a’ off or on an hour earlier, or later, than usual, cutting some pretty serious overheads. Some machines are not turned off correctly at night, left idling a little (like when you don't unplug your tv from the wall), again, money, and a surprisingly high amount of it.

There are, of course, literally hundreds of ways you are able to cut this, grow that, and make the business run a little bit smoother, faster, better. These news cycles don’t look likely to change much for a while, so getting ahead of these operational challenges now is what could make a huge difference whenever whatever ‘normal’ is returns. Now lets have that conversation.