The Canadian furniture industry’s profit performance – in relation to the profitability in overall manufacturing – depends on the kind of financial indicators chosen. The two most commonly used profitability indicators are:

– the rate of pre-tax profits to total assets (or rate of return on assets)
– the rate of pre-tax profits to total revenues (or pre-tax profit margin)

The furniture industry’s rate of return on assets has exceeded the same ratio among manufacturers in general in each year since 1997. In 2004 the rate among furniture manufacturers averaged 7.5%, well ahead of the 6.2% prevailing among manufacturers in general.

The rate of return on assets moves in step with the general business cycle. In fact, the rate declined significantly from is peak level of 13.2% in the boom year of 1999.

Pre-tax profits as a rate of return on total sales among furniture manufacturers exceeded the same ratio among manufacturers in general in 1999, 2001 and 2002. However, the relative strength of furniture manufacturers with respect to this measure does no longer prevail at the present time. The rates of return on sales among furniture manufacturers were well below those of manufacturers in general throughout most of the 1990s and again in 2003 and 2004.

The rate of return on sales – like the rate of return on assets – rises and falls with the stage of the business cycle both among manufacturers in general and among furniture manufacturers. In the furniture industry the rate declined from its peak of 7.4% in 1999 to a cyclical low in 2003, but rose again in 2004 to 4.9%.

With the growing competion from imports from low-cost countries, we fear that the fiancial health of the Canadian furniture industry may deteriorate in the years to come.

With so many businesses taking so many drastic cost cutting measures, it is strange to see how few of them really look deeply into the benefits of time management. Effective management of time is like effective management of any other resources - it can save your company a huge amount of money if it is properly implemented. With the huge cost of outsourcing and moving operations overseas, it seems like every measure should be taken at home to improve efficiency before such a drastic solution is proposed.

Of course, performance management is nothing new. Although the modern understanding of the benefits of time management is a little bit different than as it was originally conceived, the concept still goes back about as far as Henry Ford and the invention of the assembly line. Back then, workers were clocked to see how efficiently they were putting together cars. Various steps were taken to improve the program constantly, resulting in less work for the same product.

The benefits of time management are easy to see on an assembly line. In an office environment, however, time management benefits can be a little bit less apparent. This does not mean that they are not important! These benefits will show up in the books, but it will take a while. After all, the tasks that people have are usually a little bit less concrete. Rather than manufacturing a car, you have to type up financial reports, communicate with clients, and do other similar business tasks.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of time management is on the individual performance and job satisfaction of any particular worker. Without effective time management training, increased job duties can seem overwhelming. After all, when a worker is used to getting a certain amount accomplished in a single day, adding additional tasks on is never welcome. To do that without giving them training on how to accomplish other tasks is not only unrealistic, it is also unreasonable and unfair. This training is that it allows you to provide a way to ease workers into taking on additional responsibilities. If you provide them with adequate training, they will be able to cope. If not, you can often lose some of your best, most seasoned employees to greener fields. No matter what employee benefits you offer, if you stress them out too much, or stretch their time too thin, they will leave for another company.

Email is one of the greatest innovations of the online world, but if you’re not careful it will suck up your time, and be a far detriment to your business than a benefit.

Here are some tips for taming the email beast.

Turn It Off

During the day when you’re working, turn off your email client. You don’t need to be connected to everyone at all times of the day. If you leave your email client running while you’re trying to work, as soon as that next new message comes in, you’ll get distracted. The constant barrage of new incoming email will break you concentration and make a project that would normally take only an hour of focused attention take four or five times as long.

Check It Infrequently

Once you’ve managed to turn your email client off, resist the temptation to keep turning it back on all day. Checking your email once or twice a day is plenty – really.

Schedule Email Time

If you typically get a lot of email correspondence that you need to reply to throughout the day, then schedule half an hour or an hour as replying to email time. Take care of all the email you need to reply to at once. You’ll find that by being able to put your focused attention to taking care of email, your replies will be thought out better, and you’ll be able to get all of your email taken care of far more quickly and efficiently.

Spam Filters

A good spam filter really can be a productivity tool. Fortunately, they’re readily available and surprisingly accurate these days. Put one on your inbox so that you’re not spending your time trying to filter out all the spam before you ever start replying to the legitimate emails.

Get A Personal Assistant Or Customer Support

If you really get a lot of email and a lot of it doesn’t require your personal attention – i.e. someone trained in your business could just as easily reply to it, then get yourself a personal assistant or customer support person who will take care of almost all the email and only forward the essential messages to you. This will free up your time to focus on far more important tasks like finding more customers and making money.

A PDA -- personal digital assistant -- is a system that makes it possible to increase to overall productivity of an organization. A restaurant is only one place where the tool could be used. The introduction of a PDA in a restaurant will impact the organization in various ways.

There are many functions and many different PDA’s, a restaurant requires one that uses:

* A simple product or service catalog
* An order unit that is able to accept the order of a client
* A communicating function that delivers the order to the kitchen
* Billing information that summarizes the order details and send these to the cashier

The PDA will have to communicate with other systems. In the first place with the kitchen, but also with the bar. Both this communication can only be done through an interface. If both organization work also with systems these interface will integrate both the PDA with the other system, otherwise the interface will have to be a simple user-interface; like a printer that is able to print the order from the client. The ticket will be used as a work order and after the kitchen order is finished for this client the agent (the waiter) will be signaled. Also in this case the interface can be as simple a Ok-sign marked with a pen on the printed order. In the same way the bar will sign-off drinks that has been “delivered” at the bar and distributed by the waiters. A simple paper interface will be sufficient here.

Information in the system will change from order to transaction once the orders have been delivered. Once the clients have finished their consumption the transactions from their table and served by the waiter will be summarized and sent to the cashier. This is where the last client-function is processed.

The impact of the PDA in this organization results mainly in:

* Interfaces. First of all the interface between the client and the waiter entering the data, but also the interface between the PDA and the kitchen, bar and cashier. Starting with the most simple interface would be recommendable as interfaces add much complexity in business. Printing is a simple and effective interface.
* Information management: prices, product details and catalogs need to be updated on a daily bases.
* Resource management. Not all waiters will like this type of work, where the younger generation will fancy this new gadget. Implement the technology without pressure, starting with who wants. When hiring new employees, PDA experience could be an extra benefit (or selection criteria).
* Relation with the client. Some clients will be offended, especially when there is a problem and the waiter is lost with the tool. Such incidents should be prescribed: what to do when the technology fails?

This last aspect is one that seems minor but in the end will bring the biggest change. The style of your business / organization. Technology could transform your business -- in this case -- from a traditional restaurant into a new modern establishment. Most other elements in the change are quite straightforward, interfaces, information management, resource management. The style element is less straightforward.