Is There Something Other Than Time Tracking?

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When operating a business, many owners want to track the time component of their production processes. This makes sense, as it informs future estimates for following similar processes, and it helps get a general sense of modules in the processes which may or may not being operating at maximum capacity (e.g., this might be employees working hard or being lazy, or it might be an algorithm which is efficient or inefficient).

I think the ultimate goal, when dealing with time and how it relates to your business's production capacity (and your ability to talk intelligently about what's actually happening), is to simply be able to identify potential bottle-necks, and in being able to understand what a bottle-neck looks like and why it's holding things up, you will also have needed to really understand how to the whole process is working, and thus be able to better appraise and minimize future risk.

Could this be done better (i.e., is there a way we can save money on production costs to increase our profit without charging more)?

In answering this question, you must identify all dependencies for which the process in question relates. You'll need to identify the unique parts, measure their performance, compare their performance to some sort of standard, and judge if its performance capacity is adequately meeting your goals for the company.

Unique Parts

Performance Measurement

Some degree of measurement. Traditionally, this would be the amount of time something takes to execute, thus time-tracking is a regular practice in many businesses. But what other ways can performance be measured at this granular level? We can't say something like "return on investment" because that is measured as a function of cost versus revenue, and cost time is a factor of cost. I'm trying to imagine if there are other low-level metrics like time that could be thought of that might put us in a different (and hopefully more informed) state of mind in evaluating a component's performance.

Comparisons

How do other businesses' processes compare to our process? Can we identify any points that we could improve in our own processes? Do these improvements satisfy our goals? For example, if a process can be improved by employing slave labor, you still need to determine if that's an acceptable method for you ethically, which may require you using a less-optimal, but pro-ethical method instead, that, then, being the most optimal process (given ethical constraints).

Evaluation

If existing processes are more or less on par with competitors (or better), then perhaps time could be better spent looking for different areas of the business to work on and improve, like marketing or deciding to develop open-source projects, or making the tough call to terminate an employment. Obviously, if something is starring me in the face, I'll fix it, but there are many other parts of running a business which are important too, which aren't production performance optimization. If current performance is within tolerance of the competition, that's not bad, maybe there's other stuff I should be worrying about.

Conclusion

So. How can we achieve the ability to inform ourselves in this way and be in a position to make decisions based on production performance in a way that is least disruptive to the people that are parts of these processes? That is, if I can spend less time tracking my time, I can spend more time making stuff to sell (which would ideally bring more profit to the company). How else can we determine if something's working or not?