Productivity
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How to Maintain the Right Inventory Levels
- August 15, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Measurement, Productivity
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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 You Reduce Your Transaction Costs?
- July 18, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
In the non-manufacturing world, a transaction is an easy process. When you buy a shirt, you give money to the store, and they give you a shirt. That’s a transaction. In the manufacturing world, a transaction is a more involved process. A customer sends a purchase order that orders 1,000 shirts (normally, economists like to
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Why You Should Measure Your Scrap Output?
- July 3, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Productivity
In the past I’ve talked about the importance of measuring every part of a manufacturing company, from machine output to associate productivity. I’ve even said the back office people should be quantifiably measured too, including departments like HR and Purchasing, and even the executives. That also means measuring your scrap output. While it may seem
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Nepotism Destroys Company Culture & Productivity
- May 30, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
If there’s one thing I don’t like about companies is nepotism. If you’re in a family business, nepotism is a productivity killer. And it was certainly the cause of a lot of my headaches when I first started working at Robroy. In those early days, we were running three 8-hour shifts in the factory, and
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A Successful Company Needs Intrapreneurs
- January 31, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
A friend once told me he thought the people who were troublemakers were the ones who made the best entrepreneurs. They were the ones who got in trouble because when they saw problems, they found ways around them, or they challenged the authority figures, rather than toeing the line and accepting the status quo. These
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I Don’t Believe in Remote Work for Employees
- November 15, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Productivity
This one is going to make me unpopular, especially with today’s modern marvels of broadband technology, video conferencing, and our ability to multi-task and work anywhere in the world. I don’t believe in remote work for employees. (Not a big shocker, I’m sure, since you already read the headline.) But I believe that if you’re
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How We Turned a 10-Day Inventory Process Into a One-Day Process
- April 12, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
It’s an inventory cage match! Justin Case versus Justin Time Can you imagine running a factory or business where it takes you 10 days just to do a basic count on your inventory? One of the problems is you might count something on Day 1 only to have to recount it because it’s been used
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How I Doubled Output By Cutting Head Count by Nearly Half
- March 15, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Manufacturing, Productivity
When I first started with Robroy, we needed an awful lot of cleanup, not only because the facility was dirty, but because there was a lot of nepotism in the organization that resulted in an awful lot of unproductive people working for us. Nepotism is never a good idea in an organization, and we had
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The Time I Locked My Own Son Out of a Meeting for Being Late
- March 8, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
I’m one of those sticklers for timeliness. You know, “early is on time, on time is late.” That idea was drummed into me very early on in my career. It means if you have a meeting at 10:00 a.m., you don’t show up at 10:00. You show up at 9:55 so you’re ready to start
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Optimizing Productivity Through Plant Workflow Measurement
- February 1, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
In a manufacturing operation that measures everything, it’s especially important to measure the operational time of your plant and its associates, to ensure they’re being as productive as possible. Some people call this measurement “time keeping,” but that term can also be confused with associates clocking in and out in the course of a normal