Measurement
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The Person Closest to the Problem Often Knows How to Solve the Problem
- July 14, 2021
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing, Measurement
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A recent article in IndustryWeek, Once Led Through Fear, a Small Manufacturer Reimagines Itself, got me to thinking about who I often relied on to solve problems in our manufacturing plant. Last week, I talked about how as a manager, I had learned early on to ask people to “show me” whenever they were dealing
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How Can You Increase Revenue Without Increasing Orders?
- January 20, 2021
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement, Productivity
Your orders have leveled off and hit a plateau, but your operating costs are on the rise, which is cutting into your profitability. How can you increase revenue even while your average number of orders processed and units moved are remaining flat? One of the ways you can do that is just by increasing your
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How Data Collection in Digital Manufacturing Can Help Prevent Lawsuits
- November 18, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
When you measure everything in a digital manufacturing facility, you get pretty good at data collection. Not only does digital manufacturing mean you can easily replicate the same piece without any deviations in quality, there’s plenty of data that tell you exactly how well you’re doing it. At our Duoline facility where we made fiberglass
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Sometimes You Need to Fire Your Customers
- November 4, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
I found an old email from a friend, Richard Coyner, who said: “I cannot tell you how many times I have said over my career ‘Don’t bother measuring something if you are not going to manage it.’” There’s an old saying that you can’t manage anything unless you do measure it, but it will take
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How Do You Make Data-Driven Decisions for Manufacturing?
- October 28, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Measurement
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
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
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
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
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
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