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?