Ana Riley is a business owner from Adelaide, South Australia. She owns a small manufacturing and importing company called Valise Designs, and believes in motivating teams and optimizing business processes.
Valise Designs customizes, designs, develops and manufactures promotional items. They also cater to the promotional and marketing needs of Australian companies. The company is also known for creating customized protective covers for machinery and equipment, and they also manufacture clothing.
Through Valise Designs, Ana Riley owns a remote production team in Asia. She says that some members of her team come from an underprivileged background, making her role fulfilling because she gets to empower her staff and grow a thriving business as part of a team.
Ana Riley is involved in the overall management of the business, but is mainly focused on marketing, account management and logistics.
Much of Ana Riley’s experience comes from operations management, and in today’s interview, she has agreed to share her top tips with us.
Here are Ana Riley’s top tips for operations managers:
1. Invest in people. People are the lifeblood of a company, so it’s important to invest in them. According to Ana Riley, you can never go wrong by providing support, training and development. Appropriate motivation and rewarding employees can go a long way. Managing human capital can be a challenge, but when you focus on being the best manager possible, you build rapport and your team will go the extra mile to support you and your business.
2. Nurture relationships with customers and business partners. Ana Riley says it’s important to consider all contacts in the supply chain network as partners. Framing your business relationships this way will promote the idea of everyone being part of a big team and that they share a cohesive goal. Riley recommends using opportunities to unify partners and team members to work towards common goals.
3. Analyze research and identify the key performance indicators. It’s important not to overlook performance indicators. This is important to adopt strategies that are acceptable and suitable to different areas of the organization. If you want to optimize business and be an effective operations manager, you shouldn’t fear delving into the performance indicators and developing solutions based on them.
4. Maximize resources and streamline processes. In Ana Riley’s experience, she tries to identify the strengths and weaknesses of her team and business so that she can optimize workflow and production. She then does her best to develop and implement strategies and processes that increase productivity. Another priority is eliminating or at least cutting costs where it’s possible.
5. Be open to change. Ana Riley says that you should try to accept change whenever possible. By welcoming advanced technology and expanding networks by collaborating with corporations in similar industries, you can accelerate the growth of your business and form strategic partnerships. She recommends testing alternative solutions for implementing technology to enhance customer service and to cut costs.
For more information and for tips from Ana Riley, you can visit her personal website on Operations Management in Australia.
