Job Shop Insights

By Mark Stevens

Here’s a look at what job shops and contract manufacturers deal with every day, and some simple tools to help resolve issues. 

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By Mark Stevens

See how data can be integrated and made visible from various job shop departments to reveal major opportunities for improved productivity.

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By Mark Stevens

Use these 5 practical and time-saving steps to identify and improve inefficiencies in your job shop.

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By Mark Stevens

Get the most out of your ERP system with these 4 steps and reap the results of improved efficiencies, workflows, production, and employee satisfaction. 

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By Mark Stevens

Large manufacturers use ERP best practices, but small job shops aren’t sure if those processes will help them. Ask these questions to find out.  

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By Mark Stevens

Smaller job shops believe ERP systems are for larger operations, or that they’re too expensive. It’s time to debunk those and other ERP myths! 

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By Mark Stevens

When a job shop can confidently answer these 5 questions, they’ll be able to choose the right ERP system to manage operations, inventory, sales and more. 

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By Mark Stevens

An ERP system not only improves internal processes for job shops and manufacturers, it improves customer satisfaction and sales. 

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By Mark Stevens

Here are a few common missteps in job shops and suggestions on how to resolve them. 

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By Mark Stevens

Overhead expenses can eat up most of a job shop’s income—especially if overhead isn’t actively monitored and appropriately reduced. 

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By Mark Stevens

Changes from customers are inevitable. Instead of getting frustrated, focus your energy on understanding why changes happen and how you can positively adapt to it.

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By Mark Stevens

Psychology has proven that humans, by nature, need to feel supported, successful, and satisfied to work at peak productivity. 

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By Mark Stevens

Pursuing efficiency for efficiency’s sake and ignoring the effectiveness of the process behind it can be misleading. This is especially true in job shops where processes—not necessarily efficiencies—drive productivity and, ultimately, profitability.

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By Mark Stevens

Understanding the advantages of using an ERP system will help your Job Shop gauge its actual value for your business operation.

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By Mark Stevens

Scheduling is pivotal in ensuring all other facets of the job shop run smoothly. Revamping your system can’t—and won’t—happen overnight, but you can implement four best practices to improve the process incrementally.

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By Mark Stevens

Finding those small, often hidden, time thieves that increase lead times means taking a long, hard look at your overall manufacturing process from quote through payment. Understanding the entirety of your job flow will reveal opportunities for making relevant improvements. 

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By Mark Stevens

While many are, there are several perceived downsides to NetSuite, the fit, functionality and value of this ERP system must be evaluated by job shops on an individual basis.

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By Mark Stevens

Creating processes that produce better results, establishing expectations around adhering to those processes and measuring and reporting on behaviors that support them can elevate performance in any field. It’s only natural that you should apply this same discipline to sales management.

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By Mark Stevens

Just like most successful athletes, successful sales pros understand that following a disciplined approach to sales planning and execution will lead to consistently better results. Most importantly, they recognize that truly great sales teams work together to build the processes that lead to sustainable success.

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By Mark Stevens

Marketing is something job shop owners and contract manufacturers know they have to do, but it often gets put on the back burner while more urgent matters take priority. Learn what you need to do and think about to market to the right prospect, with the right message in the right format.

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By Jeffrey H. Wulf

An ERP system makes it possible for job shops to have an accurate, up-to-date, 360-degree view of the state of your company. Without it, companies find the process of gathering and making sense of all their information too burdensome and revert to gut-reaction decision-making and disjointed spreadsheets.

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By Mark Stevens

You need to answer these questions about your value proposition, your ideal customer profile, the type of relationship the customer wants/needs, and the appropriate sales channels to put together a strategy that will deliver a pipeline stocked with quality leads.

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By Mark Stevens

If you’re like many job shops and contract manufacturers, you’re working hard to sell a wider range of products and/or services to a broader customer base. To do that, though, you need a healthy pipeline of work. But how do you develop and sustain it?

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By Mark Stevens

It’s no secret that finding qualified employees is a challenge, but it is possible to manage through a lack of new workers if you provide the ones you have with the skills, technology and opportunities to help them “do more with less.”

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By Brett Polglaze

To ease disruption and ensure high productivity levels during an ERP implementation, you need to help your employees understand and manage through the change. You also need to work with a provider with significant implementation experience and proven methods for saving time and reducing stress.

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By Jeffrey H. Wulf

If communicating with people and groups within your organization has no real structure around it, you can bet there are opportunities to improve, including when it comes to profitability.

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By Mark Stevens

An ERP system functions best when digital natives work alongside those with wisdom and a deep history with your business processes.

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By Mark Stevens

Not every ERP implementation is identical, but each one comes with a common set of tasks and decisions that need to be implemented to ensure success.

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By Mark Stevens

ERP systems not only integrate and optimize processes, they make it possible for job shops to take advantage of new product and market opportunities.

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By Mark Stevens

Knowing what you can expect before you implement an ERP system will help ensure that you get the greatest value from it.

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By Mark Stevens

Learn the signs that a cloud-based ERP system will help your job shop be more efficient and facilitate its growth.

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By Mark Stevens

Reducing the time spent quoting/estimating requires a complete, accurate view of all project costs for your job shop—something an ERP system offers.

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By Mark Stevens

When it comes to job shop growth and investment in an ERP, there’s a distinct difference between strategic- and operational-minded business owners.

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By Mark Stevens

To stay competitive job shops must take every opportunity to better understand their operation and eliminate inefficiencies and unnecessary costs.

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By Mark Stevens

An ERP system monitors and interprets vast amounts of data about your operation and turns it into actionable intelligence that helps you make informed decisions and pursue new markets.

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By Mark Stevens

One key decision related to an ERP is whether it’ll be on premise or in the cloud. There are several infrastructure and pricing factors that make cloud-based ERP a better choice for job shops.

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By Mark Stevens

Many job shops today use a mix of tools to manage their businesses, but newer software solutions integrate processes and provide insights that improve decision-making and company growth.

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By Mark Stevens

While the software cost can be determined easily, it’s the “other things” that go into an ERP investment that will determine your ultimate cost. Here are five you need to account for.

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