Small Irish businesses have until November 22nd to apply for productivity vouchers valued at €2,500 each, to help them become more efficient, productive and profitable. The vouchers are available as part of the Productivity Challenge, a new national programme being run by Local Enterprise Offices around the country.
The productivity vouchers can be used to engage expert consultants to help you assess a business’s value chain and operations. This can cover supply chain management, internal business and production processes and operations, right through to logistics and distribution networks. They can also be used to support the development of a more effective, capable and efficient workforce through relevant training.
“We were producing 490 bottles a day and we got an order in for more than 15,000 bottles in a month,” says founder Eoin Bara. “We had to go back to the customer and say we couldn’t do that at such short notice and could only give them 7,000 bottles. That was about a month before our year end and it would have made a real difference. We just said to ourselves that we couldn’t let it happen again.”
That came as a bit of a shock. “We asked ourselves how we were doing so badly but it wasn’t that, it just took someone impartial to come in and identify the areas for improvement and make recommendations. We made each change straight away as soon as it was recommended. They were all small things; four seconds here and five seconds there. Things like changing the physical layout of the line, shortening the line and so on.