Weaknesses is an Opportunity for Improvement

September 18, 2009 | Posted by lmfoong

Weaknesses is an Opportunity for Improvement, Do you agree?

I have posted several articles how to use SWOT Analysis template to identify the four SWOT factors i.e. Strengths; Weaknesses; Opportunities and Threats. Also explained in the template there unique differences among all the four SWOT factors. However, there is still common issue arise when deal with these four SWOT factors. When you identify weaknesses, you tends to avoid it.

How to identify weaknesses?

In your business or operation,  you easily identify weaknesses in your business systems. You can track them from your customer feedback or complaints, response to your customer enquiries, fullfilment of customer orders, quality level, rejects/reworks, overtime etc… There are so many areas in the value chain that you can possibily identify poor performance. All these poor performance are essentially weakness in your business value chain.

Use SWOT Analysis template to categorise the performance issues

Once you have listed the many performance issues like those stated above, you can use the  SWOT Analysis template to categorise them in the SWOT four factors. Look at the performance issues critically and at a different angle, you will be able to categorise than into the four guadrants of the SWOT factors separately.

Example:

you consider the External Factors : Threats different from Opportunities. And taking the Internal Factors: Strengths and Weaknesses differently. Perhaps you heard of someone mentioned that: Every Threats is an Opportunity! What about Weaknesses identified? Are they also an opportunity? Yes, it is an opportunity for Improvement. Let me quote a recent case in the Inventory control System an a manufacturing plant I dealt with as follows:-

Typical example of Weaknesses derived from an Inventory Control system.

It has been months that the inventory accuracy of a manufacturing plant was less than satisfactory. I was assigned to work with the team there to resolve this inventory accuracy problem. As a result of the inaccuracy in the inventory, the profit reported in the Financial Report every month varies as such it is not able to determine the real story of the Profit & Loss account.

The Approach:

My initial approach was to parked myself to the factory and understand the situation. I conduct audit, interviews and briefly had develop a strategy to tackle this inventory inaccuracy problem.Based on my passed experience with inventory control system, cycle count is a common practice. The formula used to calculate invnetory accuracy need to be understood and agreed by the management.

Formation of Inventory Team

Although I was assigned to look into the invetory accuracy problem, I took a team approach with an idea to form a team to work on this project. A team was formed consist of heads of the following departments:-

1. Purchasing
2. Inventory control ( Store, FG warehouse )
3. Production

We did a cycle count to the inventory, we discovered that majority of the variance were due to lack of data entry for the transaction to the components. After investigation, it was noted that many of the transaction were not done was due to lack of resources such as manpower, computer terminal, component staging method. And a whole lot of weaknesses in the warehouse.  All these weaknesses were not new, according to the staff who worked for last two years in the section. The question is knowing these are the weaknesses, why they still exist even after similar discoveries during the last three rounds of cycle count

Let’s thing about, if we leave the weaknesses as they are, everything will remain unchanged, right?  Unless, we do something about it, we can expect stock inaccuracy will not go away. On the other hand, if we take these weaknesses as an Opportunity for Improvement, then we will look at these weaknesses differently.

This was what the team has done. An executive was assigned to the warehouse to evaluate the situation. Firstly, he look at the weaknesses stated in the SWOT Analysis template and figured out how to move it towards the Opportunities quadrant and he figured out how to turn the weaknesses into an opportunity for improvement.  Secondly, he felt that something must be wrong in the inventory system such that it ended up such a situation.

After three days of hands-on investigation, he understood why the warehouse staff did not do the inventory transaction promptly. There were several occasions when executives of other department called up the warehouse staffs and wanted him to send sample components to their office. That took up his time as opposed to performing his assigned duties in the warehouse. The assigned executive corrected the practices and had put a procedure to ensure the warehouse staff are not being asked to transfer components to outside the warehouse. This procedure had immediately relief the staff from wasting time running around. This new procedure took care of one part of the resource problem i.e. the staff has no time to update the inventory transaction.

In Conclusion

If you discovered internal weaknesses but do nothing about it, you are not doing any justice to you and your organization. Avoiding these weaknesses will not make a business or operation better. In fact, it may deteriorate.
With this example of Weaknesses, you can actually flip it around and turn Weaknesses into an Opportunity for Improvement. Refer to the four quadrants of SWOT Analysis template, I am sure you can relate to similar situation (threats) and turn them around to become an opportunity as well.

Categories: weaknesses as opportunity | Tags: opportunities, opportunity for improvement, strengths, threats, weakenesses | 1 Comment »

Comments