Manufacturing
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Industrial Engineering is a Lost Art
- November 22, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Manufacturing
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Three Major Benefits From Changing Our Factory Layout
- March 29, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Manufacturing
A couple weeks ago, I talked about how we made some changes at Robroy when I first took over as president and COO. One of the first things we did was to do completely change our factory layout. When I first got there, the company and the plant was 40 years old. When the plant
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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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Use Plant Workflow Measurement to Manage EPA Requirements and Reporting
- February 22, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Measurement, Safety
In a previous article, I talked about the importance of plant workflow measurement to determine a plant’s productivity, such as a machine’s downtime or an associate’s total productivity. With a plant workflow system, associates can self-manage their own performance, and you can be alerted early to potential problems with machines, before a breakdown ever occurs.