eBook: 7 metrics for every Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Exec

Mechanical and industrial supply executives find themselves under increasing pressure to react to new and emerging market challenges and opportunities. In this eBook preview, learn the top 7 metrics every mechanical and industrial executive should know and measure.

NB: This is an excerpt from our latest eBook: '7 Metrics Every Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Executive Should Know and Measure '. To download the full eBook, click here.

Many mechanical and industrial engineering executives face the painstaking and frustrating process of manually manipulating data in excel spreadsheets, pulling together reports from ERP systems, or consolidating several sources of information from different business areas. Following these processes are the only way they can get a clear view of business performance – a time intensive method as you may already know.

Mechanical and industrial engineering leaders are now beginning to leverage their company data to gain more comprehensive ‘snapshots’ of company performance, enabling stronger strategic decision making based on fact, rather than ‘gut feel’ or intuition. When you can see it, you can do something about it.

With the emergence of concerns around Brexit, import and export trade issues, skills shortages and general political instability, there is a growing emphasis on managing risk and remaining competitive.

In this eBook, we discuss seven metrics every business should be conscious of, and discuss how best to amplify efforts to stay ahead of the competition.

Key metric 1 - Sales revenue

Being able to quickly see and analyze sales information relating to customers, products, branches and sales reps is key for any business when benchmarking against targets and operational efficiency. The issue of skills shortage emphasizes a further importance of maximizing resource value and motivating staff to remain competitive, and eager to succeed and grow your business.

Key measures for sales may include value, profit, quantity and product mix. Are your customers buying industrial hoses but not the complementary couplings? Are they purchasing select products from your core ranges but secretly cherry-picking complementary items from your competition? Often it is difficult to tell.

Being proactively forewarned and ‘alerted’ to what is happening can pinpoint straightforward adjustments that significantly improve performance and awareness across your sales team and business.

Key metric 2 - Customer buying habits

By understanding what customers are buying – and more importantly what they should be buying but are not, you will be able to spoon feed opportunities out to your sales team so they can identify where there is potential to increase profit through effective cross and up selling.

Cross-selling and up selling are effective ways of increasing revenue from existing accounts. Economic instability can result in a shift in demand for your products and services. It can be even harder to acquire new customers, so there is huge relevance in maximizing the value of every transaction.

For example, your customers may consistently purchase bearings from you, but lubrication is sourced from an alternative supplier.

Armed with this intel, you can quickly identify opportunities and generate specific marketing campaigns to push different products (up-sell) or ensure complementary products are offered by your sales team.

This may naturally lead to the identification of deficiencies within your pricing structure, highlight supply chain inefficiencies or perhaps draw attention to the fact some customers simply lack awareness of your full range of product offering.

In this eBook preview, we have discussed just two metrics your business can focus on to improve profits and performance.

Download the full eBook for mechanical and engineering executives by clicking the image below.