Time-Based Competition

Time-Based Competition (TBC) demonstrates the power of time management and how companies can use it to gain a competitive advantage.

For companies that make the best use of time as they respond and adapt to changes in the market and other possible conditions and obstacles, they will gain an adaptive advantage. But time-based competition is about more than just viewing time as a critical resource; it’s about time as the basis of strategy.

How Does Time-Based Competition Work?

The adaptive advantages of time-based competition can be gained in all facets of a company’s value chain. To become time-based competitors, companies must execute organizational and structural changes in three key areas:

1. Innovation and Product Development. Lastly, companies must bring out products faster than their competitors when it comes to innovation cycles. When a company reduces its new product development and introduction cycle, they gain an immediate advantage by bringing the product to market first, helping to shift the balance of power in the industry and forcing competitors to react.
2. Manufacturing. Companies use different methodologies to improve their speed and flexibility, such as just-in-time and lean production, smart manufacturing, 4.0 Industry, etc. The goal is to have fewer employees to produce more goods in less time, with lower costs. By reducing or eliminating time delays, it produces a time-based competitive advantage.
3. Sales and Distribution. The further step is to optimize sales and distribution channels to prevent the loss of any time-based gains from the improved manufacturing process. An example of this is a company only shipping what they sell, meaning fewer storage requirements and fewer employees being needed since there is no inventory.

Reducing, or even eliminating, time delays in all three of these areas allows best-in-class companies to flatten costs, improve quality, and work closer to their customers, producing a time-based competitive advantage.

Time-Based Competition 2.0

Today’s companies must not only strive to execute predictable activities faster, but they must also be able to learn how to do new things more quickly and effectively.

Imperatives for Success

Succeeding in this environment demands that managers shift their mindset and develop new capabilities, such as cultivating and measuring rapid learning, balancing the exploitation of existing opportunities and business models with the exploration of new ones, demonstrates and breaking free from yesterday’s successful business model.

Conceptual

·   Responsiveness 

Time-based competitive action analyses each element of time used and questions the right to use it. The focus is on responsiveness, which refers to the ability to satisfy customer requirements quicker than competitors. Satisfying customer requirements has various interpretations, such as filling an order from shelf stock, assembling to needs, engineering to order, and bringing a new product to market. 

Short cycle management incorporates numerous “Just In Time,” “Lean Production,” “Total Quality Control,” 4.0. Industry and “Total Productive Maintenance Management” principles, selected to complement one another. Those principles can be used to dramatically improve competitiveness by simultaneously improving processing cycle times, cost, quality, and capital requirements. The operational principles employed all share cycle time (elapsed time) as the standard measure of performance. Cost. It is important to establish the relationship between time and money. 

·   Quality

The relationship between time and quality is also vital. Doing everything faster means eventually have time to do the work again if something went wrong the first time. If we work slowly, we cannot afford the time for rework. Quality is inextricably linked to customer satisfaction, which is a number one requirement of time compression management. Achieving the required quality standard the first time is preferable, but this does not mean rushing the job and cutting time out.

Time compression management may mean deliberately taking longer on tricky aspects to ensure that “getting it right the first time” is achieved. High-quality, low-cost products are simply becoming the price of admission to some markets. Likewise, customers are beginning to think in terms of total enterprise cost, quality, and responsiveness. 

These changing needs are on a conflicting course with current and past trends in traditional manufacturing enterprises. Meeting this challenge depends on an enterprise’s ability to identify and shorten the above three primary business cycles of new product introduction, the value-adding pipeline, and customer service.

Benefits of Time-Based Competition 

Direct benefits :

• Decreased cycle time and reduced costs 
• Increased profits and accelerated growth

Indirect benefits :

• Increased value differentiation
• Increased variety and flexibility
• Strengthened relationships with customers
• Enhanced barriers to imitation

Conclusions

Competition expressed in response time is known as time-based competition. Companies engaged in time-based competition seek to reduce the amount of time devoted during each stage of the general cycle by eliminating non-value-adding from activities, shortening time, and efficiently coordinating value-adding activities. 

When response time to consumer needs is shorter than the one demonstrated by rivals, the company can achieve a greater competitive advantage and, frequently, tends to be dominant and is expressed in speed, which contributes to short delivery time, lower costs, higher quality, flexibility, and credible delivery.