Measurement

  • Good Customer Service Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry

    • January 25, 2017
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing, Measurement
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    manufacturing plant

    An organization needs a good customer service department, but their job could be a whole lot easier if the organization itself focused on “never having to say they’re sorry” as well. I don’t mean adopt an uncaring attitude that ignores a customer’s issues. I mean deliver a quality product on time at a fair value

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  • What’s the ROI of Fixing Your Downtime?

    • January 18, 2017
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Measurement
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    If you can measure your machine's downtime, you can determine the ROI of repairing versus replacing.

    In previous articles, I’ve discussed the importance of measuring and monitoring your plant workflow, in order to find any problem areas, whether it’s an associate, a machine, or a process. When you’re measuring plant workflow, you’re not only looking for productivity numbers to make sure you’re meeting your projections, you’re also looking for problem areas,

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  • How Document Management Improves Productivity, Lowers Costs

    • December 21, 2016
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Innovation, Measurement, Productivity
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    Rows of filing cabinets. Document management rendered these a thing of the past.

    I remember during my career, years ago, when everything was done on paper. We saved all memos, letters, and faxes sent or received. Saving all that correspondence was a major undertaking, as was the paperwork we kept whenever we hired someone. Add in the normal paperwork of a manufacturing operation, and things really started to

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  • Cut Your Bottom 10%: Using an ABC Analysis to Find Your Lowest Performers

    • November 13, 2016
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Measurement, Productivity
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    If you’re familiar with the Pareto principle, and use it in some of your business decision making, maybe you should be familiar with the ABC Analysis. The ABC Analysis is an offshoot of the Pareto principle, and is useful in identifying the successes in your business. Let me explain. The Pareto principle — also called

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  • Understand Your Company’s Process to Set Goals and Objectives:

    • October 17, 2016
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Manufacturing, Measurement
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    nstead, we need to measure different aspects of a plant's work on a minute-by-minute basis, including parts produced, associate productivity, and so on. This is all part of the plant workflow.

    Previously, I discussed the importance of companies and their employees setting definite, measurable goals and objectives as a way to measure their productivity, progress, and improved skills. I said that basic goals like “improve sales” are too generic to actually be useful. A better goal would be to “Improve current sales revenue by 10 percent

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  • Improving Culture = Increased Productivity

    • August 25, 2016
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Measurement
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    Fancy line graph on world map. Increased productivity doesn't always mean working faster, it means solving problems upstream.

    At one point I found out that 40% of all our invoices that were sent to customers came back as debit memos. That means there was something wrong with it, and it needed to be fixed on our end. If we wanted increased productivity in the back office, we had to figure out why this

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