Management
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No More Company Cars
- June 5, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
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I’ll admit, I hate the idea of company cars. They’re a royal pain in the ass and they cause a lot of problems and strife within a company. One thing I did whenever I started in any new leadership role at a company was to eliminate the company cars completely. After all, we were in
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Onboarding People Should Be About Finding Information
- May 22, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Productivity, Safety
When you’re inducting new people into your organization, it’s not uncommon to present them with a lot of information, reading of the manuals, showing them how to operate the company software, and to actually perform their job. In fact, the first few days of most onboarding processes are all about the rules, policies, and procedures
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Empower Your People to Become Leaders When They’re Not
- May 15, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
I think I’m going to upset a lot of people with this one, so let’s see what happens. One way to empower your people to become leaders when they’re not managers is to eliminate the concept of DEI. Before I get a lot of hate mail, hear me out on this. I don’t mean that
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How to Stay Competitive in a Global Market
- April 24, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Management
We are truly in a global market these days, and the cost of production in the United States makes cheaper overseas production much more attractive to a lot of buyers. Despite the push to “Buy American” and other campaigns, overseas manufacturers are slashing costs and paying their workers a less-than-optimal wage. That makes it a
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The 5 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) Every Manufacturer Should Measure
- April 17, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing, Productivity
Every manufacturer keeps track of their output and how many units they’re making and selling each month. (At least I hope they are! I’ve seen some operations where that’s a valid question.) But not every manufacturer measures the same KPIs, but they’re absolutely critical to keep track of on a monthly, weekly, or even daily
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New Tech Doesn’t Always Solve Old Problems.
- April 10, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
Last week, I talked about how I made sure our organization had the right discipline when it came to adopting an inventory management system. My concern was that if we didn’t have the right processes in place and the discipline to stick with them, then a new piece of technology wasn’t going to solve the
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How Managers Can Keep Unions on Their Side
- March 27, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
I had a rule as a manager that I would never take union leadership by surprise. If anything, despite the traditional “management versus the union” conflict, I always believed they were an important part of my team. For example, if I was ever thinking of initiating a new process or major idea, I would share
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How Do You Plan for a Disaster or Crisis?
- March 13, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Manufacturing, Safety
Planning for a disaster for your business is never fun, and it can even be a little depressing. That’s because planning for a disaster or crisis is basically dreaming up all the scenarios that can befall your business and then imagining the worst-case scenario. Then you have to come up with all the things that
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Perform an Annual ABC Analysis to Find New Profits
- March 6, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
According to the Pareto Principle (also called the 80/20 rule), you’re wasting a large portion of your time on items and customers that don’t actually have an ROI for you. That is, 20% of your customers bring in 80% of your results, and 20% of your inventory brings in 80% of your sales. Conversely, 80%
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How Can You Address the Skills Gap and Workforce Development?
- February 28, 2024
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing
It’s getting harder and harder to find skilled workers for the manufacturing segment. Too many recruiting strategies are based on hiring people away from other companies, keeping them for a couple of years, only to have someone else hire them away from you. If you want to address the skills gap and improve your workforce