Productivity is not a topic for the future. It is a metric you can measure this month.
The debate about technological transformation takes place on conference stages. The decision is made on the factory floor, in the warehouse and in the service vehicle.
For a mid-sized company, what matters is not which technology is making headlines. What matters is output per employee, lead time from order to delivery, error and scrap rates, and setup time per changeover. Four figures. You either know them or you do not.
If you know them, you can usually identify the bottleneck within a week. It is rarely where the innovation debate points. More often, it is an installation that is manually retooled three times per shift; a warehouse where people search instead of pick; orders entered twice because two systems do not communicate; or technicians spending half a day each week on reports.
That is the uncomfortable news for anyone waiting for the great technological leap: a significant share of the attainable productivity gain lies in unglamorous automation, better warehouse technology and tools that do not date from the last decade. It is difficult to illustrate but easy to substantiate.
Switzerland compares well internationally on labour productivity, but its growth is slow. [Evidence: FSO or SECO data on labour productivity] In a labour market that offers hardly any additional skilled workers, this is not an academic statistic. Growth through additional headcount is simply no longer an option for most businesses.
What remains is this: every employee must be able to work with better tools. And those tools require capital.
The financing structure determines whether sound insight leads to action. A one-off investment competes with everything else in the budget. A monthly instalment competes with what the equipment saves, and for a genuine bottleneck that calculation almost always works.
A metalworking company leases an automated system and processes more orders with the same team. No transformation. Just one bottleneck removed.
Do you know your four figures, or are you still debating technology?
Category: Leadership
In most SMEs, financing is discussed after the order has already been signed.
The sequence is surprisingly common: need identified, specifications prepared, offers compared, supplier selected, investment approved. Only then is the finance department or fiduciary adviser asked how it will all be paid for. Financing appears as settlement rather than design.
By then, the most important design option has already been lost. Cash-flow effect, balance-sheet effect, term, residual-value risk and risk allocation all depend on the financing structure, which can then only adapt to a fixed decision rather than help shape it.
This has consequences beyond the individual case. Anyone who considers financing only at the end will almost automatically use the familiar structure. In most companies, that structure has never been reviewed. It simply evolved over time: this is how the father did it, this is what the main bank knows, and this is how it appears in the last financial statements.
In an environment where banks assess applications more selectively, attach greater weight to collateral and take longer to decide, this sequence is risky. [Evidence: current survey of SME access to credit] A commercially sound investment may fail for lack of financing even though a different structure would have worked. It also regularly causes companies to consume their entire credit line for an asset that could have been financed differently, leaving no room for the next project.
The alternative is unspectacular but effective: review financing options in parallel with procurement. What happens to our liquidity over the next 24 months? What does this investment mean for our credit capacity on the next project? Which structure fits the asset’s usage cycle? Which risks do we want to carry ourselves?
That requires a few weeks’ lead time and changes the decision surprisingly often, rarely in amount but frequently in structure. It also moves the topic to where it belongs: the executive agenda, not the settlement process.
A food producer considers leasing, a bank loan and self-financing in parallel before ordering a new packaging line.
A question for executive teams: at what point in your investment process does financing enter the discussion, and who introduces it?
Energy efficiency has a marketing problem. It is too often presented only as a climate issue.
For a company, it begins with something simpler: cost management.
In September 2026, SECO continued to identify high energy prices as a significant risk to the Swiss economy. SECO
The Swiss Federal Office of Energy also points out that economically attractive efficiency measures remain underused in Swiss companies. It explicitly links higher energy efficiency with stronger competitiveness. SFOE
This matters particularly in industry. An older machine may still operate reliably. But if it consumes substantially more energy per unit, it carries a permanent cost disadvantage. That disadvantage moves with the energy price.
This is the strategic value of efficiency. A company cannot control the electricity or oil market. It can decide how much energy is needed for each unit of output.
Energy efficiency therefore resembles an operational hedge. A new machine may reduce energy consumption, maintenance and scrap at the same time. Its investment calculation should include all those effects, not just the purchase price.
If the upfront investment is the obstacle, financing over the useful life can place the instalment alongside the recurring efficiency gain.
The cleanest ESG measure may be the one a CFO would approve even without the ESG label.