[ Blog ]What Is Reactive Decision-Making Costing You?
Cementing Profitability: Smarter Business with Performance Management
A Blog Series by Ramy Sedra
There’s a simple pattern I’ve seen time and again in ready-mix operations: something breaks, someone reacts, and the cycle repeats.
It might be a production delay, a plant outage, a job that ran over budget, or a customer complaint that exposes a service issue. In each case, the response is immediate, tactical—and often too late to prevent margin erosion.
This is reactive decision-making. And it’s more expensive than most producers realize.
The Hidden Cost of Being Reactive
When your business runs on after-the-fact reporting, every decision is one step behind.- Margins leak silently because cost overruns are only flagged at month-end.
- Customer satisfaction dips because problems are addressed after they occur, not before.
- Operational inefficiencies persist because no one sees them in time to act.
In a recent survey of industrial executives by PwC, 56% said they’re still relying on backward-looking reporting to manage performance—even as markets become faster, leaner, and more data-driven1.
For ready-mix producers, where lead times are short and cost pressures are high, this approach is no longer sustainable.
What Causes Reactivity in Ready-Mix?
- Disparate Data Systems: Financial, operational, and sales data are often housed in different platforms, making real-time visibility nearly impossible.
- Lack of Contextual Analytics: Traditional reports show what happened, but not why it happened—or what to do next.
- Manual Processes: When KPI tracking relies on spreadsheets or email threads, the opportunity to act quickly is lost.
- Firefighting Culture: Teams are so focused on solving today’s problems that they rarely have time to ask, “How can we prevent this from happening again?”
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What Does Proactive Look Like?
Business Performance Management (BPM) systems can help shift your organization from reactivity to proactivity by:
- Surfacing anomalies in real time—like unusually long delivery times or declining customer profitability
- Providing cause-and-effect analytics so you understand not just the symptom, but the root cause
- Triggering alerts and workflows when a key threshold is breached, enabling early intervention
- Aligning teams around forward-looking KPIs, such as forecasted margin leakage or job-level cost-to-serve
The goal isn’t to replace experience or instinct—but to augment them with data that arrives early enough to make a difference.
From Lagging to Leading
Ask yourself:
- Are we discovering problems after they’ve already hurt the bottom line?
- Do our reports help us prevent issues—or just document them?
- Are we spending more time reacting than optimizing?
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Further Reading:
A useful companion on this topic is “Competing on Analytics” by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris. It explains how leading companies across industries are shifting from reactive to anticipatory strategies using performance data.
Concrete sets fast. Your decisions should too.
Producers who shift from lagging indicators to leading actions won’t just avoid problems—they’ll create competitive advantage.
Footnotes
1Source: PwC Industry 4.0 Survey (2023)
At C60, we offer a solution to these challenges and more. The C60 Opportunity Platform provides a holistic understanding of a company's operations, presenting actionable insights for decision-making. With our software, producers can identify opportunities in dollar terms and make data-driven decisions. Contact us today! Email sales@c60.ai or call +1 (760) 219-8718 or 1 (514) 909-9231.
