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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
January 2019 #11234 Page #36
Employee Hires, Equipment Investment, and Making Changes
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Todd Drummond
nother year has come and gone, and what an invigorating year it has been for most companies. Net profits after taxes for most component manufacturers were in the high teens to mid-twenties—at least for those who do not allow for never-ending excuses. Once again, it is time to reevaluate the game plan. Here are three key issues component manufacturers are dealing with this coming New Year.
Do not let your ego or others’ egos get in the way of implementing the best ideas. Time and again, too many of us use yesterday’s logic to blind us to what could be possible today. When we allow our egos to get in the way, we all get the same results. Many talk a good game about how they are making improvements, yet the same problems keep coming up. Do the solutions to the following problems continue to elude you? • Employee Hires – You cannot find enough skilled and reliable people to staff all the needed positions. • Equipment Investment – It looks like you need to make heavy investments in expensive equipment to meet expected growth and drive down your manufacturing costs. • Making Changes – Implementing new ideas and improvements seems to take forever and often never happens.
The idea that one can fill all the positions with talented personnel and have a low turnover even in areas with a low unemployment is a blind spot for many companies. If your company is constantly hiring, has high turnover, and never seems to have enough skilled and reliable people, this a definite sign that employee relations need to be changed and improved. You will only get the same results unless you are willing to change your practices, and change will only come from listening to and learning from others. Consider the example of one company’s manufacturing employee practices. The ownership placed a great deal of decision-making authority in the expertise of people within sales and design groups and ignored the opinions and desires of the employees in the shop. In other words, this was a classic case of fiefdom syndrome, in which the so-called experts in the office always knew better than those in the shop. By elevating one group over another, you lower the other group like a teeter-totter to satisfy individual ego and self-interest. Everyone in the shop felt they were second-class employees, and they had every right to feel this way. The results were predictable to a guy like me, who spends a great deal of time on this subject during consults. This particular company’s productivity output and net profits were marginal at best, but they felt the results they were getting were on the high end of the spectrum. These so-called experts did not know how poorly their company was performing because their belief in their own greatness blinded them. Please do not let your ego blind you, and do not elevate yourself above all others. It is a rule of mine to always learn something from each new client and not allow my ego to blind me to better ideas. Just Continued next page
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