Management
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What Goes Into a Disaster Recovery Plan?
- February 26, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management, Safety
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We’ve had enough natural disasters over the last several years, that any company that doesn’t have a disaster recovery plan is just begging for a company-ending problem to hit them. A disaster recovery plan is the way your company can survive terrible tragedies, like a fire that sweeps through your building, a tornado or hurricane
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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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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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How Much Should Manufacturing Be Concerned About the Environment?
- January 15, 2020
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
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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Don’t Fall In Love With Your Deals
- December 24, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
As a manager or a salesperson, you’re going to have plenty of opportunities to make all kinds of deals, partnerships, and financially-beneficial arrangements with other parties. Whether it’s a project you’re going to sell, services you’re going to buy, or even the purchase of, or merger with, another company. The problem is that many of
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How Do you Get Your Staff to Buy Into Your Goals?
- December 4, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Leadership, Management
When you’re a leader, getting your staff to buy into your goals and overall vision is not just a transactional event. You don’t just offer them something in exchange for supporting you. It’s not their job to automatically buy into your vision. And you can’t just do it because you’re the boss. That’s not leadership,
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Philosophy of Constant Cleaning in a Factory
- November 20, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity, Safety
A friend was recently telling me about when he worked in a restaurant. When there were only a few customers, his manager used to say, “If there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean,” which is something I’ve heard myself over the years. It’s an important sentiment in some situations, like waiting tables at a
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Who Should Lead and Fund Retraining, Government or Business?
- November 13, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Management, Productivity
During the Obama administration, the federal government put a lot of money into retraining and education for workers who had lost their jobs due to the 2008 recession. And while I think it was a good idea for the government to help fix the economy in this way, I wondered if government was really the
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Why Not Just Cut Everyone’s Hours During a Downturn?
- October 30, 2019
- Posted by: David Marshall
- Category: Business, Management
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,