productivity
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Is Manufacturing Output Really Going Up?
- October 9, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Manufacturing, Productivity
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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
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What Life Was Like Before AI and Digital Transformation
- February 20, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Digital Transformation, Measurement
For some executives, it’s hard to imagine life before artificial intelligence and digital transformation. There’s always been automation and computers helping facilitate decision making and measurement. But I know that pre-AI world all too well, having spent most of my career in that part of the manufacturing history. The result was often poor quality, stifled
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Four Strategies for Reducing Workplace Injuries
- September 12, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Manufacturing, Safety
When you run a manufacturing facility, one of your biggest concerns could/should/will always be workplace injury. Manufacturing, with all of its moving parts and massive machines, are a risky place to work. And you can talk about safety all you want, but that doesn’t mean your workers will necessarily be safer. When I was at
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How Can a Department Like HR Measure Itself?
- July 25, 2018
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Measurement
Plenty of people understand how relatively easy it is for a manufacturing operation to perform objective measurements on its output. Each machine is capable of performing X number of actions per hour, and each associate is also capable of producing X number of units in that hour. You can measure units produced, downtime, and even
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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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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