manufacturing
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Industrial Engineering is a Lost Art
- November 22, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management, Manufacturing
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This month’s blog posts seem to be all about remote work. And this week isn’t any different because I was thinking about my friend, Bob Blair. Bob is a retired industrial engineer, who only ever came out of retirement to do some work for me and Robroy. Otherwise, he spends half the year in Canada
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Workers Affected By Safety Rules Should be the Ones Creating Safety Rules
- September 13, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Safety
Last week, I talked about the importance of having a disaster recovery plan, including offsite data backup storage, while I was at Robroy. We updated our plan every year, exercised our tornado and fire drills at least twice a year (so the emergency lighting could be double-checked and replaced). We even had people certified in
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The Importance of Measuring ROI in Manufacturing
- July 5, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Measurement
For the last few weeks, I’ve been talking about important leadership qualities, and how being persistent and decisive was key in automating one of our oldest, dirtiest, and most hazardous manufacturing processes. (We were hand galvanizing certain pipes, and the galvanization chemical contained arsenic!) So we tore out all the hand-operated process and built up
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Move From Failure to Failure With a Smile
- May 24, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. I’ve always been a big fan of Winston Churchill, and as I was growing up, I adopted several of his quotes as philosophies to live by. This month, I’ll discuss four quotes that have guided me over my professional
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Three Major Benefits From Changing Our Factory Layout
- March 29, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Manufacturing
A couple weeks ago, I talked about how we made some changes at Robroy when I first took over as president and COO. One of the first things we did was to do completely change our factory layout. When I first got there, the company and the plant was 40 years old. When the plant
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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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Use Plant Workflow Measurement to Manage EPA Requirements and Reporting
- February 22, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Manufacturing, Measurement, Safety
In a previous article, I talked about the importance of plant workflow measurement to determine a plant’s productivity, such as a machine’s downtime or an associate’s total productivity. With a plant workflow system, associates can self-manage their own performance, and you can be alerted early to potential problems with machines, before a breakdown ever occurs.
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Improve Productivity and Morale by Reducing Interruptions
- February 15, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Manufacturing, Measurement
There are a number of factors that go into improving productivity of your associates, and by extension, your plant workflow. Not only do you get more things done, but you can make your associates happier to boot. Keeping associates productive throughout their shift with as few interruptions as possible actually enhances morale, and makes their
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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
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Good Customer Service Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry
- January 25, 2017
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Measurement
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