Productivity vs Productivity Plus

October 1-3 marked the dates for the 2007 Food Marketing Institute(FMI) Productivity Plus conference held in Dallas Texas. This conference, which is a working conference by nature attracts operational management as well as executive management from just about every major food retailer / wholesaler in the U.S. and as well has membership from across the world.

This years’ conference included topics ranging from hiring and retaining employees, to updates on upcoming governmental legislation, cost saving case studies, automation and several sessions on benchmarking, labor productivity, supplier collaboration and one that I presided over which was entitled; “Business Intelligence, Dashboard Technology.

It was great news to us that the room was packed with so many people wanting to investigate this technology that is now a reality, and to understand how to implement these cost saving measures into their organization. At this point, all leading companies have implemented operational systems to manage inbound, transportation, yard, warehouse management, outbound and store systems, but there is much ‘cream’ left at the top for additional cost savings. Allowing supervision and management to be “Alerted” to upcoming potential issues and averting the time waste and potential service level hiccup can add substantially to the bottom line of an organization.

Moving from a “Nice to Have” to a “Gotta Have” application and utilizing this latest technology for Dashboarding, Visibility and Business Intelligence seems to be the hot topic and is being adopted by the companies that truly pay attention to the metrics and bottom line of their organization. The “Plus” in Productivity is coming your way soon!