It takes a lot for a business to succeed. The public can be fickle and even a strong marketing campaign doesn't guarantee sales and success. Sometimes new ideas can inject a critical perspective into your business plan. They can make you look at your existing schema with a new set of eyes, sometimes literally, and can facilitate positive change. There are many ways to create new ideas to keep your company running efficiently.

1. Employ KPIs

Key Performance Indicators provide quantifiable measurements and help teams to focus on what is important. KPIs will tell you whether you are meeting your objective in any area that it evaluates and why or why not this is so. If you manufactured potash, for instance, and were trying to figure out how to boil down production according to potash uses, KPIs could offer analytics that would show you where to increase production and where to cut it.

Performance tracking can be complicated and KPIs reduce this great volume of information into key indicators. It will look at the performance of a given system to recognize changes over time. KPI uses trends to offer predictions that you can use to plan your next moves, with the benefit of objective data in your hands.

2. Listen to Your People

David Geffen, Jim Skinner and Dan Adler all started their illustrious careers in the proverbial mailroom. You have the benefit of having several potential voices under your umbrella that view your business from different perspectives. You might have weekly, monthly or quarterly meetings in which you request information from all voices that have something to offer. You would also want to ensure that employees feel comfortable reporting up to their managers because often epiphanies come on the heels of action.

3. Establish and Maintain Trust

If you want honesty, you need to help your people understand that they don't get demerits for saying the wrong thing. A good leader exhibits leadership characteristics, like empathy, intellectual and emotional intelligence, humility and vision and ideally these characteristics saturate every layer of the company, from the boardroom to the mailroom, as it were.

4. Look In on Your Competition

To compete is to understand the competition. If they are using an order management system, for instance, with great results, consider how it might apply to your company's needs. Among elements that you'd want to examine are what they pay their employees, who they get materials from and how much middle management they employ.

You may find a streamlined version of your own company out there that maintains quality while earning big profits. It's up to you to find out how they get it done, take what you can use and nurture any new elements that you put into your system.

5. Focus On Your Customers' Experience

At the end of the day, you want happy customers who feel valued and respected. Putting out a good product that can always be found is a great start. These days, though, with so many choices, consumers look for other reasons to choose one company over another.

If, for example, you have two new products on the horizon, but production costs demand that you only produce one of them, why not leave it up to the consumers? You could use social media to hold a competition between the two items, making a new marketing campaign in the process. Studies show that not only do people enjoy being asked, but they will also answer en masse. When you get the final results, run with them. What could be more of a market indicator than your customers telling you to produce this product and they will buy it?

New ideas can augment your productivity and your brand name's visibility and separate you from the pack. Embracing change can be scary, especially when the health of the bottom line is at stake, but it can also facilitate a company's ascension to a higher level of success and viability.