manufacturing

  • How Much Should Manufacturing Be Concerned About the Environment?

    • January 15, 2020
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Leadership, Management
    No Comments
    Manufacturers should be concerned about the environment, whether you're an ardent supporter or not.

    Like it or not, whether you believe in climate change or not, the manufacturing industry should be very concerned about the environment, period. I certainly understand a lot of industry is living with legacy technology, dealing with machines that are 50 – 60 years old but are still operational. And legacy tech does not recognize

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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
    No Comments
    An automated factory is part of the reason manufacturing productivity is increasing.

    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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  • How Can Lenders Help Small Businesses to Grow and Succeed

    • November 6, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing
    No Comments
    Big pile of cash. Lenders can help small businesses succeed by making loans easer to get at lower rates.

    I’m not a fan of business credit or companies taking out big bank loans in order to buy a piece of equipment. When I was the President of Robroy, I always made sure we had the cash available to purchase machinery, and that there was an ROI to replace what we had spent. However, there

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  • Why Not Just Cut Everyone’s Hours During a Downturn?

    • October 30, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Management
    No Comments
    A tube bender. Preparing for a recession doesn't just mean cutting people's hours.

    When you see that an economic downturn is on the horizon, just like the one we’re seeing now, the knee-jerk temptation for many managers is to start making layoffs and staffing cutbacks. “We need to reduce expenses by 10 percent, so let’s just cut 10 percent of the workforce.” That works in the short run,

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  • How Do You Recession-Proof Your Business?

    • October 23, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Innovation, Productivity
    No Comments
    Empty shelves at a grocery store in Florida. Preparing for a recession is like hurricane preparedness.

    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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  • What Signals a Recession?

    • October 16, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Measurement
    No Comments
    3D graphic representing a recession bar graph and line graph.

    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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  • Is Manufacturing Output Really Going Up?

    • October 9, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
    No Comments
    A factory warehouse filled with inventory. A prime example of ??

    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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  • Manufacturing Automation: Don’t Laugh at the Bear That’s About to Eat You

    • September 18, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Manufacturing
    No Comments

    Manufacturing automation is changing the workplace and changing our jobs, and we can’t ignore it or pretend it’s not going to happen to our industry. It happened before in the 1970s and ’80s when simple robotic arms began handling some of the tedious lifting and placing of heavier and unwieldy objects, like car doors and

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  • What Is Standard Costing in a Manufacturing System?

    • September 11, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing, Measurement
    No Comments
    A factory warehouse filled with inventory. A prime example of ??

    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

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  • Customer Confidence is Lost or Gained on Product Quality

    • May 29, 2019
    • Posted by: David Marshall
    • Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
    No Comments
    Ribbons from the state fair. I wish they gave these out for product quality; we surely would have won a few.

    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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