Business Productivity Glossary

12th December 2024

Our brand is based on helping companies be as efficient as possible. And we carry this across into our own business.

We pride ourselves on getting to the nitty-gritty and removing the jargon. So here’s our glossary of common industry terms to help simplify the world of business productivity.

• 5S – A technique aimed at reducing disorder and enabling colleagues to work in an efficient environment. Read more – How The 5S Technique Helps Business Productivity
• Benchmarking – Stacking up key metrics from studies of your business with relevant comparators to give insight into your efficiency and improvement opportunities. Discover more about benchmarking
• Business roadmap – An effective way of strategising how and where to improve company efficiency. It outlines precisely how you intend to achieve your business goals by showing all your productivity improvements in a plan that delivers ongoing efficiency improvement. Read more – Using A Business Productivity Roadmap In Your Yearly Planning
• Customer experience consultant – Helps to make sure that the experience you deliver to your customers is aligned with your brand values and strategy. Discover more about our customer experience consultancy services
• Efficiency – Completing a task in a way that it is fast, organised and effective
• Efficiency analysis – Diagnostic tools that make a big difference by identifying thousands of hours for businesses to trim off their processes. This creates savings and highlights opportunities to reshape how time is spent. Discover more about our efficiency analysis 
• Electronic shelf edge labels (ESEL) – Found in retail stores, these are dynamic labels located at the front of a product shelf – they are updated electronically to suit requirements, reducing the waste that comes with paper labels, but also creating a much quicker process when updating stock information
• Labour standards – The time taken to complete a given task, often used to calculate the resource needed to complete the task at scale
• LEAN – Focusing on your customer to create needed value with fewer resources and less waste, and to gain a competitive advantage. Read more – The Principles Of Lean Methodology and Eight Examples Of Waste
• Methods-Time Movement (MTM) – The most established of all predetermined motion time systems (PMTS). A deep dive movement analysis system that uses a video of process analyses work methods to establish standard times for completing tasks. It’s a great way to accurately measure time splits that are too quick for direct observation and for minimising non-essential movement and waste. Discover more about our movement analysis services
• Non-value added – Time and activities that are not seen or appreciated by your customers, and that do not contribute to providing a service. Read more – Focus On Non-Value Added Activities
• Operating model – How you set up your operation to deliver the company’s strategy and business proposition
• Organisational design – Ensuring the structure of your organisation is aligned with your business objectives, helping to achieve business goals but also to improve both efficiency and productivity
• Parkinson’s Law – Articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. In other words, the time taken to complete work reflects the amount of time available to complete it. Read more – How Parkinson’s Law Can Improve Your Business Productivity
• Predetermined Motion Time System (PMTS) – A method of analysing the basic human movements that are used when carrying out a manual task, such as reach, grasp, release, move etc. MTM is a great example
• Process improvement – A way of enhancing, refining and improving the steps carried out to complete a specific task
• Process mapping – A way to visually represent the steps required to complete a task when redesigning your business processes. Discover more about our process mapping service
• Productivity – Using time and effort as efficiently as possible to produce high quality work and achieve a specific goal
• Quick-wins – Simple, sometimes smaller, tweaks and changes that will instantly improve a business’ operations. Discover more – Short-Term Cost Cutting Is Not The Long-Term Solution
• Role study – Measures how specific job roles spend their time by shadowing individuals as they go about their regular work. This can be over single shifts to create a ‘Day-in-a-life’ view of a role, or a longer ‘Week-in-a-life’ analysis to pick up the rhythms and routines of the working week. Discover more about our role study service
• Self-checkout (SCO) – A system used in many retail stores where products are scanned by the customer and paid for using an technological system, and requiring little to no interaction with employees
• Shrink – When inventory is lost because of things like employee theft, employee error and damage, shoplifting, vendor fraud, and administrative errors
• Six Sigma – A methodology to enhance business processes by reducing defects and errors, cutting back on variation, and improving both quality and efficiency. Learn more – Benefits Of Adopting Lean and Six Sigma Principles
• Time and motion study – Measures the time it takes to complete tasks so that businesses can optimise colleague numbers and processes, to ensure there is the right number of colleagues for the workload. Discover more about our time and motion study service
• Waste – Anything that doesn’t add value to a business and its operations. Waste can refer to time, money, rework, unnecessary movement etc. Generally speaking, process obstacles which prevent a business from providing value to the customer 
• Work study – A way of assessing specific methods of working in order to measure input versus output, and to determine both efficiency and productivity
• Workforce management – Deploying your team resources to meet the workload demands, often achieved with clever software
• Workload labour model – A flexible tool linked to your unique budgeted tasks and times. It enables businesses to have the right number of people available to complete their tasks. This can then be used to schedule people in the best way to meet the demands of that business. Discover more about our workload labour model service

Do you have a question about a business productivity term we haven’t covered? Give our experts a call.