Business Management - Productivity/Process Improvement

As a 32-year-old planning on living and working for some time, I’ve naturally developed a healthy fear of being replaced by a robot. There must be some technical term for this, but I have not found it. I’d much rather make use of the robots, than be replaced by one.

Seiko Epson has invested approximately 16 billion yen in two new production lines in Japan. The lines have been constructed to manufacture next-generation print heads—the core component in inkjet printers—for use in business and industrial printing systems to come to market in the latter part of the 2013 fiscal year.

Epson believes that the enhanced precision and density of the new print head will act as a platform for significantly improving the fundamental performance of Epson inkjet printers, and for making further improvements going forward.

There needs to be standardized processes for every area of your operation, not just vague assignments that leave a new employee to figure out some kind of procedure that may or may not fit with your organization. Give your new employee an established procedure for performing important tasks in your operation, and the new hire will be empowered to hit the ground running.

Surveying helps preserve your brand on social media review sites. Surveying is a customer early warning system. If you are getting timely feedback, you are able to react before customers leave negative comments on social media sites. Customers now have the upper hand.

We can’t change basic personalities, but we can alter behavior if we are proactive in dealing with both negative and positive instances. We have the right and the responsibility to form our companies with the values and a culture to which we subscribe. Why let our company drift toward values that we do not believe in? One minute coaching can be a valuable tool if we learn to practice it regularly.

If you have not used the Printing Impressions job posting site on PIworld.com, I recommend you give it a try. I recently assisted one of our franchise members with recruiting a production manager, and we used the site. Within two weeks of posting the job, we received more than 40 resumes.

At the University of Chicago Booth School of Business’ Management Conference last week, I had the pleasure of attending one more lecture by James Schrager, clinical professor of entrepreneurship and strategic management. In his lecture, Schrager presented a very simple tool to analyze our business success.

Isn't growth good in a business? Doesn't growth give you extra resources to hire more employees to take on some of the workload? My answer is YES and NO.

Huge customers are great when you have them, but what happens if and when you lose them? It can be a disaster, and even put your firm at risk. We see this more and more in today’s market. The most successful and growing firms often have one or more very large customers that grow to dominate their sales and influence how they do business.

It's not easy to humble yourself and admit to other business owners that you need help. I know about that! We ALL need help and direction at some point.