MeasureProductivity

Markets and industries differ in productivity measures. Each market segment can adopt these methods to measure and increase research productivity.

Productivity differs from one market to another and from one industry to another. Various industries may have the same measures in productivity, but no two industries have exactly the same set of measures in its entirety. Markets differ in categories and each of them comes with corresponding measures in increasing productivity. It is important to keep in mind that no matter what system or market is being examined, output is but the only aspect that is being measured. Output can come in different forms. It may be the quantity or the quantity of the items produced.

There are different measures in increasing research productivity of a business. For instance, if the nature of your business is in manufacturing, the measure of your productivity can involve the quantity of products that you are manufacturing. The total number of products manufactured can be known as your productivity level. Let’s say your business is in furniture manufacturing, specializing in the production of high end chairs with hotels and restaurants as your main target markets. Your company is able to sell up to, say 500,000 chairs in a span of five years. When gauging the productivity of your business, the result would be that you sell an average of a hundred thousand chairs per year.

Moreover, if your business is service-oriented, that which includes restaurants, hotels, bars and others, you can measure your productivity by the number of customer turnovers. This includes new customers coming in and out of your establishment. And because data involved in gauging a service industry’s productivity is quantitative, measuring it is fairly easy. You can also measure productivity through customer satisfaction, which can be quantified through customer questionnaires and surveys. Customer survey forms should be able to convert data from qualitative to quantitative. This can be done with the use of tabular checklist.

Moreover, if your business is in sales, your productivity measure can be done by measuring the sales performance of an employee or the entire company. Instead of accounting even the smallest item sold, you may want to calculate the total sales amount in monetary unit. This way, it will be easier for you to know how your company has performed in terms of sales. Let’s take a salesman selling appliances, for instance. He is not particularly focused by the number of appliances he sells but by its price. As a way to boost his sales performance or perhaps take his position in the company to a notch up, his sales strategy may be to press you to get a pricier model.

It is inevitable in business for markets trends to mix and mesh with one another. And these measures can be used to boost research activities to further boost your company’s productivity as well. Whatever the nature of your business, you can actually mix productivity measures if you find that your business might need more than one of the said parameters. However, you should make sure that these data mesh well together so you would not have a difficult time comparing them.