productivity
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How Can You Increase Revenue Without Increasing Orders?
- January 20, 2021
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement, Productivity
No CommentsYour 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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My Four Non-Negotiables: #3 – Productivity
- March 25, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement, Productivity
Over the years, I have developed a management philosophy I call the Four Non-Negotiables. For the next couple weeks, I’ll share what each of them are and what they mean. This week is about Non-Negotiable #3, Productivity As you manage your organization’s Safety, and the Housekeeping is well in hand, you want to look at
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How I Created The Four Non-Negotiables That Defined My Leadership Style
- March 4, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing
Over the years, I’ve developed a management and leadership philosophy that has served me well as I progressed further in my career. As I moved further up my career ladder, I saw problems that I was able to fix by calling on these solutions. They became so important to my style that I started calling
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Look to Retirees to Shore Up Your Labor Shortage
- February 19, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing, Productivity
As the labor market continues to tighten, and it’s getting harder to hire skilled and experienced labor, it will behoove managers to take a different view on hiring people over 65 on a consultancy basis. There’s a lot of experience sitting on the sidelines that’s not being utilized, and it’s contributing to the American labor
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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
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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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 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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Managers Should Train With Employees
- May 8, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
A few months ago, I talked about the importance of manufacturers providing training for their employees, especially if they were adopting new technology and processes. You could send your people off to a training school or your vendor partner to learn the new technology. Another option is to pay some of your vendor partners to
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How We Used Automation to Increase Productivity, Reduce Errors, and Reduce Waste
- March 6, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Innovation
Several years ago, when I was the president of Robroy, we were faced with a problem of how to deal with an old business that was run down, obsolete, and had an employee retention problem (we would lose 20% of our workforce every time we conducted a random drug test). This was my world without