Any talk of manufacturing operations is moot when there is no material on hand to work with. Given that the very nature of the industry is to take raw materials and refine it into something usable this would seem self evident, right? So then why do manufacturers constantly assert that one of their key challenges is the shortage of material? It would make…

In operations, as in business broadly, we are constantly fighting to keep revenue generating activities going in order to fulfill the demands of the business. There's always a production target, a quota, a sales order to fill, and falling behind means working that much harder to catch up next month.

Whenever I think about the questions I'm asked to answer in operations - how long will something take, when can we ship this product, why are we spending more on labor this month - I'm always grateful when I have some record of the team's activity handy.

It's pretty unreasonable to suggest that no company that has built an ERP for a specific niche (think electronics assembly, chemical manufacturing, food processing, etc…) is wanting to actually be in that space, but let me make a case for why this might be so.

I’d like to start off my inaugural post by sharing a quick story of a man I know. We have an employee at my company, let’s call him Dave, that helps with the general custodial upkeep of the production floor. On a typical day, you can see him sweeping the floors with a worn out broom and dustpan, doing his best to keep up with the waste that a 100k+ sqft…