When I was growing up in manufacturing a primary point of friction between leadership and production workers was “quality or quantity.” Leaders did not understand what was so irrational about their expectation; the two should not be mutually exclusive. The production workers, however, who worked with existing processes, couldn’t see
Attracting the Best Candidates
As manufacturers are searching high and low for employees, it is crucial that we not make bad hiring decisions out of a sense of desperation. A warm body is not what you need. Today weâll dig into how to attract candidates who can help you create a future that you canât even predict well right now.
Technology is the future of manufacturing, yet we need other than technologists.
We need to identify those who can help us learn, change, and grow as an organization.
Machines make better machines than people ever will. And conversely, people make better people than machines ever will. Hiring people for repetitive and low-thinking tasks is an extremely short-term strategy. No one will be happy with that. Trying to automate judgement, creativity, passion, and fascination with learning will fail.
While the integral role of supply chain, which includes inventory decisions, has become more obvious to everyone, and college degrees in supply chain are increasing, many manufacturers still see it as a renamed purchasing department.
Effective procurement is an important profession, but it does not define nor integrate inventory strategies into the company mission, core values, and strategy. If anywhere at all, that is likely the responsibility of planning or scheduling, or supply chain.
But do any of them really do that for your business?
Setting up parameters in your ERP system is not strategic inventory management. Nor is negotiating for volume discounts with suppliers. Both of those may be worth doing, but neither adds value in a vacuum.
Well, you’ve certainly had a chance to see just how strong your supply chain is, as well as how well your organization can plan and execute shifts in volume and mix. More importantly, you have likely seen weaknesses in the multi-level understanding of the supply chain, including towards the customer.As
Since IBM’s Watson, many have hoped that Artificial Intelligence, or AI, would be able to rummage through a pile of data, pick out what is relevant, and create some new learning that matters. That hope has been proven futile, at least with our current thinking and capabilities.That doesn’t mean AI