Productivity
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Why Hiring is Going Down While Output or Skilled Labor Hiring is Going Up
- December 11, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Productivity
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Depending on which news source you read, manufacturing jobs are on the rise or they’re dropping faster than gravity. Some states are seeing major layoffs, while other states have hundreds, or even thousands, of new job openings for manufacturing labor, especially skilled labor. The overall trend seems to be on an upward slope for a
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Philosophy of Constant Cleaning in a Factory
- November 20, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity, Safety
A friend was recently telling me about when he worked in a restaurant. When there were only a few customers, his manager used to say, “If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean,” which is something I’ve heard myself over the years. It’s an important sentiment in some situations, like waiting tables at a
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Who Should Lead and Fund Retraining, Government or Business?
- November 13, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
During the Obama administration, the federal government put a lot of money into retraining and education for workers who had lost their jobs due to the 2008 recession. And while I think it was a good idea for the government to help fix the economy in this way, I wondered if government was really the
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How Do You Recession-Proof Your Business?
- October 23, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Innovation, Productivity
Trying to recession-proof your business is like hurricane-proofing your house. Now, we don’t get many (actually, any) hurricanes in Central Texas, but I’ve got friends in Florida who tell me all about it. They tell me the hurricane-prep is almost comical to watch: Five days before a major hurricane will make landfall, all the people
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Is Manufacturing Output Really Going Up?
- October 9, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
There’s all kinds of talk that the manufacturing economy is heading for a recession, even as manufacturing output is on the rise. But you may be wondering how we even know this, especially as the rest of the economy seems to be doing so well, including having low unemployment in the U.S. When it comes
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Improving Productivity Reduces a Factory’s HR, Onboarding Costs
- August 14, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
Improving productivity throughout your operation, especially on the manufacturing floor, can have an amazing ripple effect throughout your entire organization. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how we were able to improve productivity by measuring our results on the floor and in our accounts receivable department. We were able to save a lot of
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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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Customer Confidence is Lost or Gained on Product Quality
- May 29, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about how my old company changed an industry-standard method of production and acceptance of product quality by creating our own homegrown manufacturing process and instituting a policy of measuring every step of the process including cleanliness of the raw materials. Before that time, the standard reject rate was
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How We Helped the Oil & Gas Industry Save Millions
- November 14, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Productivity
When it comes to innovation, some companies look for problems to fix and then fix them. That doesn’t mean they create the problems. Rather, they look for a problem or a pain point that people might have and then figure out a way to solve it. Then they market that solution and hope the people