Guest Column

Optimising resources

How to optimise the use of resources? With resources becoming scarce everyday they have to be put to good use to reach the organisational goals. By Iyer Subramanian

Iyer Subramanian

An organisation is known not only by the people it has but also the way it utilises its resources. The resources are available to us in the form of people, money, time, methods, energy, materials and equipment. They are limited in supply and if any organisation has to flourish, these resources have to be put to good use to reach the organisational goals.

• All resources are limited in supply. No supervisor has all the resources he needs. He has to use his discretion to get the right combination of resources by doing the right thing, first time, each time and every time in order to maximise the results.
• If the top, middle and supervisory management thought processes synchronise and if the channels of communication flow smoothly up and down, the results flowing out of utilisation of resources can bring about amazing results.
• The resource in the form of people will produce results only if their remuneration, designation, pays scale, working environment, fringe benefits are taken care of. They have to be recognised, appreciated, and rewarded as well.
• Money as a resource is of paramount importance. Employers, employees both work for money. Profit maximisation, lowering costs, defining and attaining quality standards for products and services, developing strategies to maintain a good corporate image sets the ball to generate more money.
• Time is the biggest resource, once lost it never comes back. Every job has a specific time frame. Utilisation of more time for a specific task might label you as an inefficient employee. Similarly, not producing results or the inability to achieve results in a stipulated period of time might brand you as an ineffective employee. Allot time sequence for different types of work, according to the importance of the work.
• Method study helps the supervisor and organisation to produce same output using fewer resources or enables to produce more with a proportionately less increase in the inputs thereby reducing the waste. In other words, it is a systematic and critical recording and examination of existing and proposed ways of doing work, as a means of developing and applying easier and more effective methods and reducing costs.
• The energy, enthusiasm, zeal present within an employee has to be capitalised fully for the purpose of the company's productivity. The supervisor concerned has to lead his people so that they start contributing effectively. Leading does not imply that people have to follow you, it is primarily influencing people. How good a supervisor is in influencing people determines his actual worth in terms of productivity of his department.
• Effective utilisation of resources in right proportions, right quantity, and right quality by the right employee in the right department, determines the right output. When speaking of right output, what one means is that a lot of emphasis is placed on prevention rather than rectification. Abundance of natural resources is not a requirement for prosperity. The actual wealth of a nation depends on its people who effectively use these raw materials.
• Capital utilisation determines how effectively a human being utilises capital apart from his individual attributes and working environment. In doing so, it is extremely important to know as to what functions are better performed by men and which are better performed by machines. Repetitive jobs, routine jobs, precision jobs, are better performed by machines and these jobs necessarily need to be done through utilisation of capital.

Every employer and employee knows how to utilise their resources well, but in spite of their meticulous and detailed planning they fail to achieve the expected result. It may be because the product produced or the service rendered to the clients may not be up to the mark in terms of quality and the quality compared to the price quoted or the product produced. The service rendered may have consumed exorbitant cost compared to the input which has gone in to the production of the product. In both these cases, the resources at the disposal of the employer have not been ideally utilised.

Assuming the resources are utilised in an optimally, the mathematical equation would look something like this:

Utilisation of raw materials + synchronizing thought process of the representatives of employee and employer in terms of communication + recognition, appreciation, rewards apart from pay and allowances, fringe benefits, good conducive environment to work with + effective usage of time, money and methods + energy, enthusiasm and drive an employee puts in while carrying out his work + ideal combination of men, machine and environment used = Results in high quality product.

In other words, if the customer feels happy, delighted and amazed after using the product or if there is a huge demand for the product produced it means that the resources at the disposal of the employer has been put to optimum use.

(The author is a senior professional with over two decades of experience in the hospitality industry and is currently a professor with Anjuman-I-Islam's college of Hotel Management & Catering Technology, Mumbai. He can be contacted on iyerpdkgnm@yahoo.com)