Manufacturing
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Should Manufacturers Pay for Education to Shore Up Skilled Labor Shortage?
- August 8, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Management, Manufacturing
No CommentsThere’s a skilled labor shortage in this country, but not the kind that you might think. While there are still plenty of people to fill regular manufacturing jobs, there are high-paying, skilled labor jobs that are going unfilled because the companies can’t find enough people with the degrees or training to actually do the work.
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How Can You Reduce Your Transaction Costs?
- July 18, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
In the non-manufacturing world, a transaction is an easy process. When you buy a shirt, you give money to the store, and they give you a shirt. That’s a transaction. In the manufacturing world, a transaction is a more involved process. A customer sends a purchase order that orders 1,000 shirts (normally, economists like to
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How Do You Measure the Cost Benefits of Safety?
- July 11, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing, Measurement
You often hear about the costs of accidents and injuries to a company, and those are usually based on a specific incident or accident. For example, if an associate injures herself on the job and has to seek medical attention for $10,000, then the cost of that accident was $10,000. You also hear about cost
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Why You Should Measure Your Scrap Output?
- July 3, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Productivity
In the past I’ve talked about the importance of measuring every part of a manufacturing company, from machine output to associate productivity. I’ve even said the back office people should be quantifiably measured too, including departments like HR and Purchasing, and even the executives. That also means measuring your scrap output. While it may seem
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3D Printing Set to Disrupt the Construction Industry
- June 27, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing
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
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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”
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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
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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
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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