Business
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Forever to Build, Lost in a Moment
- May 3, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
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“To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.” I’ve always been a big fan of Winston Churchill, and as I was growing up, I adopted several of his quotes as philosophies to live by. This month, I’ll discuss four
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How We Managed a Factory Fire in Texas While I was in Dubai
- April 5, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Safety
Always hire good people. If there’s a problem, they’ll take care of it. Several years ago, I was in Dubai on a business trip, and I had just gone to bed. It was 10:30 pm local time, an 8 hour difference between me and our factory in Texas. The phone rang and jolted me awake.
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How I Doubled Output By Cutting Head Count by Nearly Half
- March 15, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Manufacturing, Productivity
When I first started with Robroy, we needed an awful lot of cleanup, not only because the facility was dirty, but because there was a lot of nepotism in the organization that resulted in an awful lot of unproductive people working for us. Nepotism is never a good idea in an organization, and we had
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Optimizing Productivity Through Plant Workflow Measurement
- February 1, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
In a manufacturing operation that measures everything, it’s especially important to measure the operational time of your plant and its associates, to ensure they’re being as productive as possible. Some people call this measurement “time keeping,” but that term can also be confused with associates clocking in and out in the course of a normal
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Good Customer Service Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
- January 25, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Measurement
An organization needs a good customer service department, but their job could be a whole lot easier if the organization itself focused on “never having to say they’re sorry” as well. I don’t mean adopt an uncaring attitude that ignores a customer’s issues. I mean deliver a quality product on time at a fair value
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What’s the ROI of Fixing Your Downtime?
- January 18, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Measurement
In previous articles, I’ve discussed the importance of measuring and monitoring your plant workflow, in order to find any problem areas, whether it’s an associate, a machine, or a process. When you’re measuring plant workflow, you’re not only looking for productivity numbers to make sure you’re meeting your projections, you’re also looking for problem areas,
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Can a Warehouse Management System Fix Your Inventory Accuracy?
- December 14, 2016
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Innovation
A warehouse management system may seem like a panacea to a lot of problems, but they can’t fix anything. They can’t fix your inventory management issues, or solve your accuracy problems, or make shipments take less time. Not until you have done two important steps: Changed your organizational behaviors. Reviewed, validated, and changed all processes
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Improving Culture = Increased Productivity
- August 25, 2016
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Measurement
At one point I found out that 40% of all our invoices that were sent to customers came back as debit memos. That means there was something wrong with it, and it needed to be fixed on our end. If we wanted increased productivity in the back office, we had to figure out why this