Investing in SME productivity growth by developing their performance management capability

This proof of concept (PoC) project, which was part of the Business Basics programme  evaluated a set of interventions with some innovative productivity tools to assist a cohort of twenty small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) in the wider Leeds city region to improve their long-term productivity prospects through the development of performance management capability, based on four distinct but interlinked performance management (PM) practices for productivity. These include having a systematic and holistic view of productivity and the associated metrics, and how to analyse these to identify which areas require to focus on for productivity improvement. 

This project leveraged the regional social and economic networks of manufacturing SME’s, by creating a collaborative expert ‘quartet’ of Accountants, a commercial bank manager, management consultants and University academics to recruit SME participants, develop and deploy the productivity tools, and design the interventions. The interventions were contrived to incorporate an ‘intervention gradient’ from being Quartet led to co-production of effort, culminating in the production of a Productivity Improvement Plan (PIP) by each SME. 

The evaluation of the project has now been published here showing that the productivity tools and associated interventions do contribute to a development of the performance management capability.  

The PPDI diagnostic tool and the deployment of this with expert led dialogue, and the construction of a data extraction protocol had the strongest impact on the ability of the SME to develop their own Productivity Improvement Plan. The research highlighted that there is likely to be suboptimal capability in the SME manufacturing sector, particularly in project management of productivity improvement initiatives and addressing these gaps is critical to the development of productivity within those businesses. 

The insight from this research and the productivity tools developed have now been utilised in the new programme, Business Productivity Service, which was launched recently by the Mayor of West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin. Leeds Business School is in the delivery partnership, in conjunction with the commercial organisation Exemplas, for this flagship service providing our expertise and support based on this research. 

This is enabling productivity development of our SME sector in the Leeds City region and highlighting how Leeds Business school is having positive impact on the regional economy.