measurement
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Use Inside and Outside Experts for a Major Undertaking
- September 13, 2023
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Innovation, Leadership
No CommentsManufacturing CEOs and COOs often deal with company-wide changes and projects that can affect how the entire business operates. One question we often dealt with at Robroy was whether to enlist the services of external experts during these challenges. The decision to bring in outside expertise can be a game-changer. There were times, like when
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The Importance of Data Analytics in Decision-Making for Manufacturing
- July 26, 2023
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Measurement
If you’re going to make smart decisions, you need to make smart measurements. If you’re not measuring everything all the time right now, and if you haven’t given thought to what the most important things are, then you will just move from crisis to crisis with no way of ever figuring out how to fix
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How Do You Manage a Disruptive Employee, Especially in a Union?
- November 10, 2021
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Leadership, Management, Safety
One of the most difficult things to do in a manufacturing operation is to fire union employees. Unions have historically played an important role in establishing workers’ rights and guaranteeing their safety. But there are some workers who take advantage of the union and hide behind it when they’ve been doing poor quality work or
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The Annual Performance Review Is a Terrible Waste of Time
- July 21, 2021
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
The Annual performance review is a terrible waste of time and a terribly inefficient method of creating improvements in your associates. For one thing, if you are measuring everything in your operation, from the associates working on the floor to the back-office staff, they know when there’s a problem almost immediately. They don’t need to
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How Can You Increase Revenue Without Increasing Orders?
- January 20, 2021
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement, Productivity
Your orders have leveled off and hit a plateau, but your operating costs are on the rise, which is cutting into your profitability. How can you increase revenue even while your average number of orders processed and units moved are remaining flat? One of the ways you can do that is just by increasing your
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How Data Collection in Digital Manufacturing Can Help Prevent Lawsuits
- November 18, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
When you measure everything in a digital manufacturing facility, you get pretty good at data collection. Not only does digital manufacturing mean you can easily replicate the same piece without any deviations in quality, there’s plenty of data that tell you exactly how well you’re doing it. At our Duoline facility where we made fiberglass
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Sometimes You Need to Fire Your Customers
- November 4, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
I found an old email from a friend, Richard Coyner, who said: “I cannot tell you how many times I have said over my career ‘Don’t bother measuring something if you are not going to manage it.’” There’s an old saying that you can’t manage anything unless you do measure it, but it will take
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How Do You Decide to Allocate Resources and Staffing? (Hint: Measurement)
- February 12, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
There are times where you have to allocate — or reallocate, as the case may be — your money, staff, and resources to solve a particular problem. Maybe you have to do a crash inventory where everyone has to stop what they’re doing and everyone has to focus on counting everything in the warehouse. Or
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The Hardest Thing We Ever Tried to Measure
- February 5, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
In the past, I’ve talked about the importance of measuring everything your factory does from the number of units produced to the number of hours a machine runs to the amount of scrap you produce. You should also try to measure everyone in the back office too, including HR, the accounts receivable department, and even
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Improve Productivity in the Back Office
- August 7, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Measurement
When you embrace measurement as a way to improve productivity of your manufacturing processes, you’ll find all sorts of problems you never knew existed. When we started measuring everything at Robroy, we not only found different problems and issues in different facets of our manufacturing facilities, we discovered that there was a 16 percent rejection