Baan/LN Tip of the Week: Top 10 Survival Tips For Manufacturers

by Guy Morgan / IndustryWeek

Under intense cost pressures, quality is at risk at many manufacturers. These 10 tips can help you survive the competitive challenges ahead.

1. Maintain your focus. Make a decision about the kind of company you are and stick with it. 
2. Reinvent your products regularly. Suppliers who sharply differentiate their products fare the best. 
3. Maximize your productivity and increase your speed through enhanced product and process design. Lean manufacturing focuses on production and its associated costs from a component's conception.
4. Pay attention to your supply chain. You must know about any risks, financial or otherwise, that threaten your suppliers. 
5. Offshoring vs Onshoring. You must know the total cost of products. 
6. Improve quality. There are still too many manufacturers delivering components with high defect rates. 
7. Diversify your customer base. This may involve segmenting your industry or going outside it.
8. Embrace globalization. Acquisitions, consolidations and diversification can help suppliers achieve economies of scale. 
9. Invest in your employees. Suppliers who paid higher wages and made bigger investments in training and equipment came through the downturn better than those who didn't.
10. Facilitate total productive maintenance. While this concept has been around for decades, some manufacturers are still not training machine operators to perform many of the day-to-day tasks of simple maintenance and fault-finding.

Optimize Your Manufacturing Today!

Kathy BartheltKathy Barthelt

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