Most of us hire people to fill a slot — a given role. That happens all too often because we hire in a reactionary mode, to someone leaving or to sales growth. We talk about cross training, but often don’t provide it for a number of reasons: no time, will have to pay person more, or not sure what we will need are just a few. If your company talks about sales mix impacting productivity or other measures like on-time delivery, it often reflects a lack of flexibility or agility with our work force. ...
Jun 21, 2023•3 min
When I worked for TRW in the 1980’s, the company required everyone with purchasing responsibilities to take the Chester Karrass negotiating course. At that time it was 100% focused on the assumption of a zero sum game, where whatever the other “side” got came directly from you. Win-lose. Since then companies have come to understand that successful suppliers are required by successful customers, and vice versa. Win-win became the order of the day. Unfortunately, that understanding itself often eb...
Jun 14, 2023•5 min
Phil Spector was a very successful music producer and songwriter, who was also convicted of murder and serving a long sentence when he died in prison. Talented people can be bad people. Talented bad people can also do good things. Phil Spector produced the famous Ike and Tina Turner song “River Deep – Mountain High.” He knew how controlling Ike was, so he created a unique contract for this work, paying Ike Turner $20,000 to stay away while giving credit to both Ike and Tina Turner. That seems li...
Jun 07, 2023•4 min
Why would a senior employee keep tricks of the trade secret from others? For one reason only: a lack of confidence. Someone who acknowledges his own talent and thinking skills would not be intimidated by others having the same abilities. Someone committed to team success would ensure knowledge is public — that is, known and available to many — and not private — that is, known only by himself. In this podcast I provide examples of how and why to ensure the knowledge of your organization is not lo...
May 31, 2023•4 min
A few years ago I volunteered to support the Continental Cup activities in Cleveland. This is an international sporting event that included 2500 youngsters from ages 8 to 18 from 12 countries competing in a variety of sports. My first day, I was an electronic scorekeeper / clock operator for basketball games, seated next to a young man who was to keep track of individual statistics, team fouls, and team time-outs on paper. I received 2 minutes of training on the equipment; not sure he received a...
May 24, 2023•6 min
A majority of adult Americans do not vote in our elections. Why is that? Simply because they don’t believe their vote matters. They believe nothing will change anyway. Voting within your company happens. Any idea what the participation rates are? They are 100%, regardless. Some votes are simply more visible than others. Why do some not vote in other countries? One recent Russian immigrant told me he never voted in Russia because he didn’t want to vote to support the existing government and he di...
May 17, 2023•7 min
An effective operation may have bad days, but they are a rarity. When you walk through operations, is the angst palpable? Clearly that swamp monster environment should be prevented, but it may happen anyway. How many times and for how long do you find that operational stress acceptable? How many times and for how long do your employees tolerate it? Is meaningful progress being made and are employees involved in that? Manhandling a mess may shape-change the mess, but it won’t replace it with effe...
May 10, 2023•5 min
Even the best of us can benefit from cold water to the face occasionally. In mid-2022 I finally quit making excuses and enjoyed a 3-week trip to Greece, Türkiye, Montenegro, Croatia, Italy and Slovenia. What shook me out of my “I don’t want to contract Covid” inaction was a friend’s story that he had recently returned from the Polish-Ukranian border assisting refugees. Fully vaccinated and masked, why was I sitting on my hands? If I drive a car, walk across the street, and eat indoors at restaur...
May 03, 2023•5 min
Excerpted From: © 2021 Manufacturing Mastery: The Path to Building Successful and Enduring Manufacturing Businesses; Taylor & Francis, Author: Rebecca Morgan “I have long advised clients that together we will identify and implement new strategic capabilities as quickly as they can handle. One of those strategic capabilities is always the ability to effectively create and integrate value-adding change more and more rapidly. Why would any business choose to improve its competitive position mor...
Apr 26, 2023•7 min
Your people are no doubt working hard to do a good job. The question is: Have you given enough structure for them to know what a good job really means? Usually the weakness in that is a lack of sequenced priorities from leadership. How do they even know if they’re working on something that matters? Employees cannot make good decisions if management cannot sequence the list of multiple priorities. Giving employees a list of more than one priority, without sequencing, abdicates responsibility. If ...
Apr 19, 2023•6 min
While the worst of the supply chain fiasco of 2020-2022 is behind us, elements certainly continue to challenge us daily. What we should have done then and what we can do now is communicate the truth among our supply matrix. We call it a supply chain, but the reality is all players in it service other customers and many of them serve other markets. The increasing number of variables due to that fact makes coordination even more critical to effective capacity management. Supply chain personnel hav...
Apr 11, 2023•4 min
Wouldn’t you love to see an organization that was fully aligned across all functional arenas? We talk about specific excellence, like Nordstrom and service or Amazon and speed, but do you know of any organizations in which every single person in every corner of the company is aligned on organizational priorities and strategies? Do you think Nordstrom and Amazon are fully aligned internally? The “town hall” meeting in which you communicate the current strategy via PowerPoint slides is ineffective...
Apr 05, 2023•5 min
In the late 1970s, Ken Olson, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, had very different predictions for the future of computers. Mr. Gates gave his new company the mission of “every desk, every home” while Mr. Olson said there was no reason for a home to ever have a computer. How could two leaders of the early computer hardware and software industries see the future so differently? The art of the possible is indeed an art, not a science. While sc...
Mar 29, 2023•6 min
In my lifetime the US economy has experienced bank and savings and loan failures, inflation and full employment, a 20% prime rate and a Fed Funds rate of 0.0%, multiple recessions, and wild political swings in tariffs, tax rates, and regulations. In my lifetime, my country has participated in many wars, eradicated some diseases, had a pandemic, and experienced thousands of large protests for various causes. In my lifetime, travel became common, gadgetry a life requirement, and our lives have ass...
Mar 22, 2023•6 min
As fast as the world turns these days, it is not easy to stay abreast of the latest concepts and management trends. While it is important that you not let the world pass you by, it is also valuable to leverage some tried-and-true tools. TWI (Training Within Industry) and the Coaching and Improvement Katas are behavioral tools that can increase the effectiveness of your entire team quickly and safely. If you’ve ever taken a martial arts class, you’ve been introduced to the concept of kata. The te...
Mar 15, 2023•5 min
You’ve all heard that great strategy with poor execution is no better than poor strategy with great execution. Operational effectiveness requires excellence at both levels. My writings and podcasts have long focused on the strategic aspects of operations, specifically how to build a manufacturing business that endures. This episode reminds the listener of the laws of math and physics that impact near term execution. The book Factory Physics was written about 30 years ago, and updated several tim...
Mar 08, 2023•5 min
Partner. Relationship business. It all sounds so good. But then reality slaps you up the side of the head. In a true partnership, can one company unilaterally change the terms of the contract? Well, no. But then few espoused partnerships are true partnerships. The larger company always has more money for lawyers, if it comes to that. The money they use to pay those lawyers may well be yours, which only makes it worse. The smaller company can also have a finger on the trigger. While meeting at hi...
Mar 01, 2023•6 min
I’ve invested the vast majority of my long career in operations. I find it fascinating. Regardless of industry, operations includes the technologies, processes, materials, and procedures that delivering value on each order involves. Many would look at those words and see no similarities between making mac and cheese for millions of consumers and making aerospace parts for a limited number of engines. Yet my transition from operations of the first to the second was fast and easier than you might ...
Feb 22, 2023•9 min
We manufacturers know that we are responsible for the outputs of cost, quality, product performance and delivery; we also know that many others in our organization impact those as much as we do. Being outstanding in those four outputs is necessary but not sufficient for our futures. In recent years we’ve come to realize that the definition of outstanding for each of those outputs is more demanding than previously. And yet, they are still not enough. The three additional outputs of your operation...
Feb 15, 2023•6 min
Why are some manufacturing businesses a hot mess, while others are a great place to work as you provide exciting value to the market? A business is a living organism, and as such, understanding what makes them healthy and what makes them sick is instrumental to success. Here are seven levers that apply within all manufacturers; each is addressed as part of the operations strategy, which is in place to execute the business strategy. The business is impacted by each, both individually and collecti...
Feb 08, 2023•6 min
Manufacturing has played a major role over time in advancing automation, computerization, digitization, and more. Our industries are amazingly different now than they were 15 years ago, much less 30. In December of 2022 the company OpenAI released an online product called ChatGPT. Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ve at least heard of it. You may not understand what it does, and very few understand how it works. It is, however taking the world by storm. The question for you is, does ChatGPT...
Feb 01, 2023•5 min
There are business buzzwords, and then there are important business concepts you cannot afford to ignore. Resilience is one of the latter. Resilience emanates from effective risk management. If you don’t have a viable and ongoing risk management process, start there. In risk management, the first steps are always to identify the majority of risks, assign each probability and severity, and through that scoring list them in order from highest to lowest. That guides the priorities of risk managemen...
Jan 25, 2023•7 min
It was not that long ago that most manufacturers and distributors carried entirely too much inventory. The drag on cash flow was never offset by lower costs or higher performance. When we figured that out, we began to lower inventories. By adding some technology, whether RFID or barcodes or enhanced ERP software, we made it easier to reduce inventories and increase performance. By beginning to pay attention to some of the concepts of the Toyota Production System we put in visual pull systems tha...
Jan 18, 2023•5 min
Strategy is one of those important business concepts that many cannot recognize, develop or implement, yet businesses that endure have mastered. “Growth” is not a strategy, nor is “increase profits.” Those are goals or objectives. Strategy describes the boundaries, priorities and activities within which those will be achieved. For example, a growth goal may have a supporting strategy of selling more to current customers, expanding geographically or into adjacent markets, or reliable introduction...
Jan 11, 2023•6 min
The business model in manufacturing and distribution has long been own it, sell it, get paid for it. For most of those companies, it still is. But our world is changing. The concept of ownership has a very different place in our thinking, as does the concept of value. The potential enabled by rapidly advancing technology is integral in changing thinking about optimal business models. When I worked for Perdue Farms in the late 1970s, my first major assignment was to build and implement a feed for...
Jan 04, 2023•8 min
Are you a pneumatic tube operator? A COO is not a COO is not a COO. While the title Chief Operating Officer should indicate range of responsibilities, it does little to describe them. Same for a Buyer, a Plant Manager, or an New Product Development Manager. These titles have very different meanings in a $5M, a $100MM, and a $1B company. They also have very different responsibilities in a contract machine shop, a pharmaceutical business, and an international defense Tier 2 contractor. And they ha...
Dec 28, 2022•5 min
When a recorded message for customers is considered a snide comment you’ve failed. Yet the way to fix that is not to prevent customers from calling you. Each day another company quietly moves from a call center to a contact center. That is the official method of precluding customers from actually talking with someone who could help them. While AI and bots are better than they were a year or two ago, they are still a long way from actually answering the majority of questions your customers have w...
Dec 21, 2022•6 min
The Cleveland Clinic is widely recognized as one of the best medical systems in the world. And its delivery of medical services deserves that recognition. But its costs are unnecessarily high, its critical medical resources wasted, and its doctors and patients needlessly irritated by its short-sighted approach to scheduling. Scheduling, an organizational weakness since the mid-1970s based on my own experience, appears to be viewed as a cost center rather than the path to effectiveness. The Clini...
Dec 14, 2022•8 min
A number of manufacturers have announced plans to leave China, primarily due to the upheaval in Hong Kong and impacts of the government’s “zero covid” policy. But what’s the destination? If a leader does not completely understand why his operations strategy involves leaving one location for another, how will success be measured? Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and other popular southeast Asian manufacturing locations may be little better than China. Government uncertainly? Port challenges? ...
Dec 07, 2022•6 min
As we advanced from craftsmen through the industrial revolution, Henry Ford decided the best way to make automobiles was a 100% vertically integrated business model. In 1917 his River Rouge plant brought in iron ore at one end, and shipped out finished cars at the other. That’s one type of supply chain, one he found very difficult to execute. Most of us used the term “purchasing” to describe locating, buying, and bringing in the materials and components required to make our products. Buyer, Seni...
Nov 30, 2022•10 min
