There are two indicators that are fundamental for tracking the investments a company makes in its projects. These are CAPEX and OPEX, terms widely used when making corporate decisions.
- CAPEX is an acronym from English that means capital expenditure. It is used to designate the financial resources employed in the purchase of production items — such as machinery expenses, for example.
- OPEX is the acronym, also in English, for operational expenditure. It designates a company’s expenses made with machinery maintenance or services that directly assist in its production.
Understand in this text how directing your investments with these indicators can help your company grow.
A new way of producing
The concept of OPEX also works with the premise that a company does not need to own everything it uses to keep producing. Instead, it can lease machines or outsource services in certain areas. This becomes even more important in a scenario with limited resources, where it is necessary to reduce costs.
Many companies already adopt IT outsourcing, an investment that makes projects in this area more flexible and suited to each company’s reality. It is possible, for example, to work with suppliers to provide data storage infrastructure, resolve incidents, and even manage contact with the end customer.
Thus, expenses with system maintenance and the difficulty of finding qualified labor for certain functions no longer weigh on the budget, and processes become more agile. This is what makes OPEX so strategic for a company.
The decision of where to direct investments depends essentially on the nature of the business, the goals to be achieved, and company management. Check it out below!
How to direct resources to CAPEX and OPEX
Growing companies usually employ a considerable volume of resources in their production. Thus, it is natural that their CAPEX and OPEX indicators are higher than their revenues, for example.
This is the opposite of what happens in companies that have been in the market longer or have a more conservative strategy. In general, they present revenue indicators superior to CAPEX and OPEX, since they are in a cycle of results from investments made during their expansion phase.
Thus, to understand if a company is employing resources properly, the ideal is to consider first what context it is in and what its intended objectives are.
Then, it is time to evaluate whether resources are being well utilized, in order to pave the way for the realization of these plans and the company’s longevity. If adjustments are needed to optimize costs, one measure may be to review investments destined for CAPEX and OPEX.
Now that you better understand these concepts, see how AES Sul achieved a 30% savings in OPEX with a maintenance service automation platform!
