I was a collegiate boxer, and with that came a rigorous training regimen. There is nothing enjoyable about dieting and early morning sweat-suit cardio sessions. In order to stay motivated, we had a saying, “We train constantly because somewhere out there someone else is doing the same.” You do not...


Why Standardize Your Production Process
I spend my days talking to manufacturers, all of which are constantly looking to improve productivity. This often initiates the popular debate between batching and single piece flow. Even as an advocate of Lean Manufacturing, I’ll admit that for some places it doesn’t make sense. However, there is one advancement...

Benefits of Going Paperless
In the traditional manufacturing facility, instructions are often laminated pieces of paper that are either hung or held in a binder. When revisions occur, each of those instructions must be destroyed and updated, and there is no record of how many copies have been made and where they might be...
Trustworthy Manufacturing KPIs
Get Trustworthy Production KPIs Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are useful metrics to evaluate your operators and process. How can you ever improve if you do not know how well you perform? Though a great difficulty in measuring KPIs is that they often can negatively impact your staff’s performance. The typical...

Finding Production Waste
You can’t plan a schedule or estimate cost without knowing how much labor is required to make a product. This data has traditionally been collected with clipboards and stopwatches. The selected time is simply the average of the data sample. From a distance this works wellâ—âsome production runs will be...