Measures of Productivity Categorized by Business

Productivity varies from market to market and industry to industry. Different industries may share similar productivity measures, but no two have the same set of measures all the way through. In this article you will find several different Market Categories and recommended corresponding productivity measures. One thing should be kept in mind: no matter what market or system is being scrutinized, only one thing is being measured and that is the output. Output can take several different forms it may be the bulk of the items produced or the value of those produced.

If your business is in the manufacturing industry, your productivity measure can include the volume of the product that your are producing. The total number of product you produce in a year may be considered as your productivity level. An example of this is in the furniture business, a small Italian company specializes in the production of baroque style high end chairs. The company manages to sell up to 300,000 chairs in 3 years time, their main markets being hotels and restaurants. When measuring the productivity of the company it would result that they sell an average of 100,000 chairs a year.

Another industry is that of the service industry. This industry can span hotels, restaurants, bars and other service oriented establishments. If your company belongs to this category then your can have as productivity measure the number of client turnovers- it is when new customers arrive and leave in your facility. Since this is a quantitative data, measuring it is easy enough! Another productivity measure here is customer satisfaction. This can be quantified with the aid of customer surveys and questionnaires. The survey forms formulated should have the facility to transform qualitative data into quantitative ones. This is often achieved with the aid of a tabular checklist.

If your company is in sales, you can measure productivity my measuring the sales performance of the entire company or an employee. This can be achieved not by accounting every little object that the clerk has sold but instead calculating the total amount of sales in monetary unit. This makes it much easier to determine how the company fared in sales. An example of this is a salesman in a department store selling barbeque grills; he is not motivated by the number of grills he sells but by the price of the grill. So, don't wonder why he is continually pressing you to get a more expensive model. The man is just trying to improve his sales performance and upgrade his position with the company.

In business, it cannot be avoided that markets trend to mix and blend into one another. If this is the case and you find that you need more than one of the mentioned measures to determine productivity. You can blend productivity measures but, what you have to keep in mind is that you have to see to it that the blended data are compatible with one another and you would not have a hard time in comparing them.