NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

Before you start

Nothing sold less

Every line grew. Every line was defensible. The business lost money and no report showed it.

The pattern this volume exists for looks like success on every surface an operator normally watches.

Units up. Revenue up. Average order value up. Win rate up. Nothing sold less than last year. And the business made less money, or lost it.

It happens through accumulation rather than through a single bad decision. A discount authorised to close a quarter. A specification extended to win an account. A delivery promise shortened to beat a competitor. A payment term stretched for a large customer. Each one was individually justified, individually approved, and individually too small to require analysis.

None of them appear anywhere as a cost, because the reporting counts revenue and counts direct cost and does not count the operational consequence of the concession. The extra week of engineering time, the express freight, the support load of a customer sold something adjacent, the working capital tied up in ninety day terms.

The remainder of this volume is a set of instruments for finding those costs before the year end does it for you.

Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything

One Help decide what a competent operator is expected to know The eight domains carry equal provisional weighting until practising operators say what the work actually is. Takes about eight minutes. Two Check whether you are eligible About a minute. No account, no email field, and nothing you enter is kept.

Read the standard in full, free and in the open, before you pay anything or give anyone an address.