Measurement

  • How Do You Make Data-Driven Decisions for Manufacturing?

    • October 28, 2020
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing, Measurement
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    A row of car doors in a factory. Being data-driven doesn't always mean ?????

    There’s a big push in a lot of different industries, especially in marketing, that they have become solely data-driven. They look at all their past performances and make decisions about new initiatives based on what their old efforts did. They either throw more resources at a flagging campaign (or product) or drop something that just

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  • My Four Non-Negotiables: #3 – Productivity

    • March 25, 2020
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Management, Measurement, Productivity
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    Productivity can only be improved if you measure everything first.

    Over the years, I have developed a management philosophy I call the Four Non-Negotiables. For the next couple weeks, I’ll share what each of them are and what they mean. This week is about Non-Negotiable #3, Productivity As you manage your organization’s Safety, and the Housekeeping is well in hand, you want to look at

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  • How Do You Decide to Allocate Resources and Staffing? (Hint: Measurement)

    • February 12, 2020
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Management, Measurement
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    An old picture of a factory from the 1950s. To allocate resources properly, you should be measuring everything first.

    There are times where you have to allocate — or reallocate, as the case may be — your money, staff, and resources to solve a particular problem. Maybe you have to do a crash inventory where everyone has to stop what they’re doing and everyone has to focus on counting everything in the warehouse. Or

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  • The Hardest Thing We Ever Tried to Measure

    • February 5, 2020
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Management, Measurement
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    Measurement gauges

    In the past, I’ve talked about the importance of measuring everything your factory does from the number of units produced to the number of hours a machine runs to the amount of scrap you produce. You should also try to measure everyone in the back office too, including HR, the accounts receivable department, and even

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  • What Signals a Recession?

    • October 16, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Measurement
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    3D graphic representing a recession bar graph and line graph.

    I believe we’re in a global manufacturing recession, it just hasn’t been fully reported yet. If you look at the quarterly earnings reports of the U.S. stock exchange, we don’t see that many companies that are showing top-line revenue growth, or they’re only showing very minimal revenue growth, which could be part of a price

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  • What Is Standard Costing in a Manufacturing System?

    • September 11, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing, Measurement
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    A factory warehouse filled with inventory. A prime example of ??

    If you’re new to manufacturing, you’ll soon learn about a standard costing system, which is the standard cost of an item including material, labor, and overhead. This creates an inventory value, which is not the selling price of the inventory, but the production costs of it. For example, if it costs you $150,000 to make

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  • Is There Ever a Time ROI Shouldn’t be the Driving Force Behind Decisions?

    • August 21, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Management, Measurement
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    A green ROI button on a laptop. There are times you need to put other factors before ROI.

    The return on investment (ROI) is a good benchmark for business decision making. Will your new piece of equipment achieve a positive ROI? Will expanding your sales territory? Will hiring a new employee? The problem is, ROI shouldn’t be the only deciding factor in making business decisions. In some cases, it shouldn’t even be the

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  • Improve Productivity in the Back Office

    • August 7, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Digital Transformation, Measurement
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    New technologically-advanced machines can help you improve productivity in your factory.

    When you embrace measurement as a way to improve productivity of your manufacturing processes, you’ll find all sorts of problems you never knew existed. When we started measuring everything at Robroy, we not only found different problems and issues in different facets of our manufacturing facilities, we discovered that there was a 16 percent rejection

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  • Improving Productivity Ripples Throughout the Organization

    • July 31, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Measurement, Productivity
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    Last week, I wrote about how improving productivity can reduce the need for hiring new people (Increase Productivity to Reduce the Need for Hiring). So we devised a new way of strapping and stacking the conduit to avoid the problem, and that eliminated the recovery process because we had almost no imperfect pieces. By reducing

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  • Increase Productivity to Reduce the Need for Hiring

    • July 24, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Measurement, Productivity
    No Comments
    A forklift in a giant warehouse of tires in metal racks. Pictures like this make me shudder when I think of how companies have high inventory levels.

    Unemployment is low enough in this country right now that businesses (especially manufacturers) can’t find enough people to fill open slots. While you can always train your existing people to fill the new slots, you can come at the problem from another direction to increase productivity. This means you can produce more with fewer people

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