David Marshall
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Is Manufacturing Output Really Going Up?
- October 9, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
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There’s all kinds of talk that the manufacturing economy is heading for a recession, even as manufacturing output is on the rise. But you may be wondering how we even know this, especially as the rest of the economy seems to be doing so well, including having low unemployment in the U.S. When it comes
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When Should Companies Adopt Manufacturing Automation?
- September 25, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing
We’ve already decided that manufacturing automation is eventually going to be a commonplace manufacturing method. But when and how much is up to each individual company. Will they embrace it quickly and try to transform the entire company? Will a new company try to build itself on manufacturing automation? Or will older, larger companies slowly
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Manufacturing Automation: Don’t Laugh at the Bear That’s About to Eat You
- September 18, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing
Manufacturing automation is changing the workplace and changing our jobs, and we can’t ignore it or pretend it’s not going to happen to our industry. It happened before in the 1970s and ’80s when simple robotic arms began handling some of the tedious lifting and placing of heavier and unwieldy objects, like car doors and
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What Is Standard Costing in a Manufacturing System?
- September 11, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Measurement
If you’re new to manufacturing, you’ll soon learn about a standard costing system, which is the standard cost of an item including material, labor, and overhead. This creates an inventory value, which is not the selling price of the inventory, but the production costs of it. For example, if it costs you $150,000 to make
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The Importance of Networking at Every Opportunity
- September 4, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership
I spent a lot of time at the Center for Creative Leadership and the Darden School of Business, networking with and learning from a lot of great people. People who were doing important work for a number of different government agencies, large corporations, and wide-reaching nongovernmental organizations. The faculty put us through the wringer most
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Are You Serving on a Good or Bad Board of Directors?
- August 28, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management
As someone who has served on a board of directors at different times, I pay attention to corporate and nonprofit boards. A few weeks ago, I received an email newsletter from a fellow named Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures about his experience with boards of directors and the two types of problematic boards. He
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Is There Ever a Time ROI Shouldn’t be the Driving Force Behind Decisions?
- August 21, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
The return on investment (ROI) is a good benchmark for business decision making. Will your new piece of equipment achieve a positive ROI? Will expanding your sales territory? Will hiring a new employee? The problem is, ROI shouldn’t be the only deciding factor in making business decisions. In some cases, it shouldn’t even be the
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Improving Productivity Reduces a Factory’s HR, Onboarding Costs
- August 14, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
Improving productivity throughout your operation, especially on the manufacturing floor, can have an amazing ripple effect throughout your entire organization. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how we were able to improve productivity by measuring our results on the floor and in our accounts receivable department. We were able to save a lot of
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Improve Productivity in the Back Office
- August 7, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Measurement
When you embrace measurement as a way to improve productivity of your manufacturing processes, you’ll find all sorts of problems you never knew existed. When we started measuring everything at Robroy, we not only found different problems and issues in different facets of our manufacturing facilities, we discovered that there was a 16 percent rejection
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Improving Productivity Ripples Throughout the Organization
- July 31, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Measurement, Productivity
Last week, I wrote about how improving productivity can reduce the need for hiring new people (Increase Productivity to Reduce the Need for Hiring). So we devised a new way of strapping and stacking the conduit to avoid the problem, and that eliminated the recovery process because we had almost no imperfect pieces. By reducing