David Marshall
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Managers Should Train With Employees
- May 8, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
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A few months ago, I talked about the importance of manufacturers providing training for their employees, especially if they were adopting new technology and processes. You could send your people off to a training school or your vendor partner to learn the new technology. Another option is to pay some of your vendor partners to
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Can 3D Printing Change Your ABC Analysis?
- April 24, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Manufacturing
Companies that regularly perform an ABC analysis on their products may be able to change how often they cut their products and reduce their inventory if they could embrace 3D printing. It would help them reduce the amount of inventory and raw materials they store, which could make some nonprofitable items profitable ones. Here’s how.
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Creating a Caring Company Culture Where You Can Have Retention
- April 17, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
When I think of company culture, I think of a company’s office environment, the attitudes of the people, and the general emotional atmosphere around the building. It’s the feeling of camaraderie and the drive to get things done. It’s the relationships and whether people get along. A company culture can tell you a lot about
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Developing People Within the Organization to Handle Higher-Qualified Work
- April 10, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
When you’re trying to recruit highly-skilled employees for a highly-skilled job, you have to look everywhere you can. However, those candidates are not always available for you to just pick one out of a pile of résumés, ready to start work at a moment’s notice. In a lot of cases, you can focus on developing
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Don’t Poach, Approach: Recruit Talent from Your Vendor Partners
- April 3, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management
As the American manufacturing industry faces a continued shortage of skilled workers, I remember how we used to find recruit talent for Robroy and its different divisions and subsidiaries: We would recruit employees from our vendor partners and suppliers. By recruiting the talent from our partners, the ones who supplied us with the services or
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How to Use Digital Transformation and Evolution In Your Manufacturing Company
- March 27, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Manufacturing
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of serving on a panel — Digital Transformation and Plastics Manufacturing — at the Plastics Executive Conference in Naples, Florida. The panel was moderated by my good friend, Nanette Gregory, senior partner at NSG Consulting, and I was joined by Rajiv Menon, founder of Informulate; Gary Stein,
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Panel Discussion: Digital Transformation and Plastics Manufacturing
- March 20, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Leadership, Manufacturing
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of serving on a panel at the Plastics Executive Conference in Naples, Florida. The panel was entitled Digital Transformation and Plastics Manufacturing, and it was moderated by my good friend, Nanette Gregory, senior partner at NSG Consulting. I was joined by Rajiv Menon, founder of Informulate; Gary
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Making a Case for Technology Skill Schools
- March 13, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing
In Indiana, there’s a rather unusual vocational school called Driver Solutions, a truck driving school where students learn how to properly drive a tractor-trailer rig in three weeks. Students who qualify, and can pass the different drug and health tests, will not only get a job immediately after they graduate, their schooling is paid for.
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How We Used Automation to Increase Productivity, Reduce Errors, and Reduce Waste
- March 6, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Innovation
Several years ago, when I was the president of Robroy, we were faced with a problem of how to deal with an old business that was run down, obsolete, and had an employee retention problem (we would lose 20% of our workforce every time we conducted a random drug test). This was my world without
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The Downside of Digital Transformation
- February 27, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Measurement
While I’m generally high on digital transformation in this blog and talking about the upsides and positive benefits that come from it, I’m well aware that there are downsides to digital transformation. For one thing, artificial intelligence is not the panacea to all of your problems. You can’t just get an AI package, dump all