Measurement
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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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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
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
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
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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How Measuring Our Process Changed an Industry Standard
- May 15, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Measurement
For manufacturing to be consistently accurate, you have to be measuring every point in the process. If each measurement point is not met, the product is a reject because it will not give you the result you’re expecting. So consistent, persistent measurement through the process becomes absolutely essential in order to achieve consistent, persistent excellence.
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The Downside of Digital Transformation
- February 27, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Measurement
While I’m generally high on digital transformation in this blog and talking about the upsides and positive benefits that come from it, I’m well aware that there are downsides to digital transformation. For one thing, artificial intelligence is not the panacea to all of your problems. You can’t just get an AI package, dump all
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What Life Was Like Before AI and Digital Transformation
- February 20, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Measurement
For some executives, it’s hard to imagine life before artificial intelligence and digital transformation. There’s always been automation and computers helping facilitate decision making and measurement. But I know that pre-AI world all too well, having spent most of my career in that part of the manufacturing history. The result was often poor quality, stifled
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How To Make Sure You Made the Right Business Decisions
- February 6, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Measurement
One of the great things about being president of a company is that you can, within reason, do whatever you want. You don’t have to ask anyone or get permission. Of course, that depends on the magnitude of what you want to undertake, but for the most part, you get to call the shots and
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What Do You Need on Your Measurement Dashboard?
- January 9, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Measurement
I’ve long been a proponent of measuring a company’s efficiency by measuring each employee’s productivity, output, and even their costs. Whether it’s an associate on the floor, an associate in the Accounts Receivable office, or even the President and COO of the entire company, you have to know how well the company is performing in
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The Secret to Managing Discipline in a Large Business Setting
- October 10, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Measurement, Productivity
Managing discipline in a large company starts with the hiring process. I’ve always believed in hiring slow and firing fast. But I also had a rule that nobody could be fired without my permission. What that meant was any issue that looked like it could end in termination would elevate to me so a manager