Measurement
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How to Avoid Business Debt
- August 29, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Measurement
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Business debt is the one killer to a company’s bottom line, and you need to avoid it whenever possible. If you’re not careful, you can get in over your head and spend most of your profits trying to dig out from it. Whenever I had a position of leadership in any organization, I always brought
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How to Maintain the Right Inventory Levels
- August 15, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Measurement, Productivity
A serious problem facing many manufacturers is tying up cash reserves by keeping too much inventory or too many raw materials on hand. Finished products don’t move as quickly as you thought, or you made more than you needed “just in case,” or you bought a lot of raw materials because you got a bigger
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How Can a Department Like HR Measure Itself?
- July 25, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
Plenty of people understand how relatively easy it is for a manufacturing operation to perform objective measurements on its output. Each machine is capable of performing X number of actions per hour, and each associate is also capable of producing X number of units in that hour. You can measure units produced, downtime, and even
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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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How Do You Reduce Workers’ Idle Time?
- January 17, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
I read recently that workers’ idle time is costing the U.S. economy over $100 billion per year. And there’s no one reason it’s happening — employees may goof off, they may take longer on breaks and lunch, a machine may break down, their managers may inefficiently assign work, or it just may be the nature
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How Much is Worker Idle Time Costing You?
- January 10, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
I recently read in the Wall Street Journal that workers’ idle time — the time workers spend not being productive — is costing U.S. employers $100 billion per year. (This doesn’t include needless meetings, which I’d guess are costing another $100 billion, but that’s just me.) Some examples of idle time can include chatting around
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Make Smart Layoffs With Objective Measurement
- December 27, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Measurement
While I never had to make any layoffs in my career, I’ve seen them happen, and often without any real plan to help the company further. I can say that while I’ve never done a layoff in my own career, I have reduced the workforce to help it run at peak efficiency, like firing third
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Leaders Can Lead More People Through Measurement
- December 20, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Measurement
I sometimes think we have too many middle managers clogging up the business world. I look at companies that do big layoffs of their middle managers and wonder if they were actually that effective to begin with. If a company decides they can do away with 20 percent of their workforce, and the managers are
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How Do You Keep Up Company Morale?
- October 18, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management, Measurement
Company morale can have more dramatic rises and falls than a roller coaster. You’ll have your seasonal ebbs and flows, highs before a big product launch, lows after a major crisis or periods of poor performance, as well as the occasional holiday-related highs. But you can also have pockets of high and low morale throughout
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Performance Evaluations Waste Time and Money
- October 11, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
Annual performance evaluations are generally useless. I actually did away with them because I found people would generally work extra hard two weeks before the evaluation, and counted on management not to remember all the things they screwed up along the way. But if you have an effective daily, weekly, and monthly measurement system, you