Manufacturing
-
3D Printing Set to Disrupt the Construction Industry
- June 27, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing
No Comments
I always thought there were a few industries that were disruption-proof. I mean, nothing is disruption-proof, and nothing is too big to fail, but there were a couple that, before it happened, seemed like it was too big and entrenched to have anything happen to it. At one point, we thought the news industry was
-
How Will 3D Printing Change Manufacturing and Warehousing?
- February 14, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing
I saw a funny tweet a couple years ago that said “I bought a 3D printer and printed out another 3D printer. Then I took the first one back.” We’ve come a long way from the beginnings of 3D printing, when you could pretty much only print out small plastic objects with a $2,000 “home”
-
What Role is Automation Going to Play Over the Next 20 Years
- February 7, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Manufacturing
Believe it or not, automation and robotics are going to improve our economy and our employment numbers, and can even help improve the education of our workers. U.S. unemployment is low, we have a vibrant economy, and we’re likely to have selective immigration, which means if we’re going to continue to grow, we need to
-
Industrial Engineering is a Lost Art
- November 22, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Manufacturing
This month’s blog posts seem to be all about remote work. And this week isn’t any different because I was thinking about my friend, Bob Blair. Bob is a retired industrial engineer, who only ever came out of retirement to do some work for me and Robroy. Otherwise, he spends half the year in Canada
-
How the Right Materials Management Person Saved Us Millions of Dollars
- September 27, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing
When you say materials management to a non-manufacturing person, they often have visions of moving boxes around or driving raw materials around the factory on a forklift. When you say materials management to a manufacturer, they often think of the most important person in the building. The Materials Manager is quite literally responsible for the
-
Do You Have a Disaster Plan for Your Manufacturing Company?
- September 6, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Manufacturing, Safety
With Hurricane Harvey passing just a couple hours southeast of me, and Hurricane Irma hitting Florida, I have been wondering what businesses in the affected area have done to protect their data and information from disaster. I’ve heard stories of businesses that have had to shut down because they lost their financial and client data
-
What a Collapsing Bridge Taught Us About Continuing Education
- August 30, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Manufacturing
Robroy specializes in anti-corrosion products, which generally are installed in applications that “have imperative.” Whether it’s corrosion resistant non-electrified electric systems, fiberglass liners that go inside oil field tubulars, or fiberglass enclosures that house electronic and electrical and data equipment, Robroy made it. When I say the products “have imperative,” it means that failure is
-
The Importance of Measuring ROI in Manufacturing
- July 5, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Measurement
For the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about important leadership qualities, and how being persistent and decisive was key in automating one of our oldest, dirtiest, and most hazardous manufacturing processes. (We were hand galvanizing certain pipes, and the galvanization chemical contained arsenic!) So we tore out all the hand-operated process and built up
-
Does the Office Make the Person, or Does the Person Make the Office?
- June 1, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing
There’s a leadership problem in this country that often has to do with people being promoted because of their technical expertise and not their leadership qualities or people skills. They assume they’re a leader simply because their job title says Manager or Director, only to find that no one respects them. I think of this
-
Move From Failure to Failure With a Smile
- May 24, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. 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 quotes that have guided me over my professional