The first formal program with the title “Engineering Management” originated at the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri S&T) sometime in the 1960s.  The University of Missouri describes Engineering Management as the art and science of planning, organizing, allocating resources, and directing and controlling engineering activities.  Many other colleges have been focused on the same foundational concepts of Engineering Management for a long time.  The principles have been practiced in manufacturing and even military operations for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.    

Making sure your team has enough hands on deck can present challenges of all kinds. Namely, the expense involved with traditional ways of hiring. Traditionally, a recruiter could spend a couple of weeks hiring for just one position. All things considered (things being salary, onboarding costs, and the plan ahead), hiring often comes with a hefty fee attached.

You’ll sometimes hear inventory referred to as “crystallized capacity,” the idea being that when you have limited capacity, building inventory is a solution that helps you meet customer demand. The typical example is a seasonal business, like a manufacturer of skiing equipment. 

Flexibility and agility are two words that are often used interchangeably, but there are important distinctions between them. Knowing the difference can guide how and when you focus your time and energy to strengthen your business.

Stacking inventory as a buffer is a common practice, but it often goes too far. In the worst cases, businesses produce everything ahead of time and then hope to sell it all, only to find that engineering made an urgent modification to the product or that the forecasts were way off.

Automation, whether robots or co-bots, are drawing a lot of attention these days with the 43.7% growth of e-commerce and the increasing fulfillment needs across a number of industries and consumer categories.  We’ve all heard the familiar refrain that automation is taking over in manufacturing and logistics, but that has not been the case due to offshoring versus automation.  

You need to meet customer demands, but you also have to plan your production properly to make sure you’re working profitably. This is a tall task, and luckily, people in your shoes have already tried many approaches to solving this problem.

Manufacturing has long had the concept of a “digital twin” of physical facilities and their machines. The consumer-oriented version of this concept has been branded the “metaverse” and is catching on among Silicon Valley figureheads and social media companies.

Ideally, your production process would achieve single piece flow and there would be no need for managing the process with a system for tracking what is where, and how much is needed. But because we don’t live in a perfect world, you will have to choose a system for managing your production process.

You’ve probably seen Craigslist show up in search results for … well, anything you could want to buy. The Craigslist website was one of the early power players on the Internet, and still has staying power today. So does that mean the Gigs section of Craigslist is the right way for you to find work?

Staff augmentation is a broad category, but does it include Veryable?

When you need workers, you don’t want to spend so long finding them that it slows your business down. At the same time, you want to take time to vet candidates so that you get good workers instead of bad apples. So how do you balance these two priorities?

You’ve heard of Veryable and you’ve heard of on-demand staffing solutions. What you might not have known is that the two are different in a few key ways.

You’ve probably wondered before what the best way is to attract workers to your business with on-demand labor. It’s not always easy to tell, especially if you’re used to scheduling workers by the week like most companies are. However, on-demand labor gives you the option to post daily work opportunities, so how are you supposed to know when to use this option?

If you’ve looked for labor on a short-term basis before, you’ve probably used temp staffing. So when you heard of Veryable, we’re guessing your first thought might have been something like, “How is this different from temp staffing?”

So you’ve logged into Veryable, seen bids on your Op, and you’re wondering if you should pick the “Ready to Work” Operators without any ratings yet. Maybe you asked yourself, “Are they a risky pick? How often do new workers turn out to be reliable?”

When thinking through your operation and how to best organize it to complete the work, you’ve most likely weighed prioritizing labor productivity rates versus prioritizing labor availability. This is actually a critical question, and one with implications on customer service that are not fully appreciated across an operation. 

If you’ve ever managed an operation in manufacturing or logistics, you’ve noticed that some workers get more done than others. You’ve likely heard jokes justifying a slow pace of work by saying “I’m paid by the hour.” People say there is always a bit of truth in a joke, so what’s the truth in the difference between being paid by the hour and being paid based on what’s actually accomplished?

The idea of automation in manufacturing has caused many people to sound the alarm about potential job elimination, and for others it sounds like a necessary step toward more efficient production and less labor-intensive processes. There are strong opinions about automation that differ depending on who you ask. But one thing is clear: automation is already picking up speed.

It is difficult to understand how much money different forms of hiring will truly cost your company. What most people really want to know is whether you should handle it all yourself, or pay someone to manage some or all of your hiring. Many even wonder if they should choose another option entirely, like staffing agencies or on-demand labor.

You’ve just gotten a 10% increase in orders, 1 employee is out on a scheduled vacation, and another two have called off for the day. Now you find your operations team is short and you’re scrambling to make sure you can fulfill orders. What are your options?

Many people today tout Lean Six Sigma as a common tool to drive process improvement across industries and functions.  You may think that the two are one in the same, but Lean methodology and Six Sigma are two distinct tools to achieve performance improvement smashed together under one banner: LSS.

Forecasts, by definition, will always be wrong. The degree to which they are wrong varies widely – the magnitude of the gap is often a factor of demand planning techniques and tools, market factors, changing customer preferences, and operational strategy. In terms of strategy, many businesses seek to find the "sweet spot" between forecasting and operational flexibility; they ebb and flow across the forecasting-flexibility spectrum with changes in leadership preferences, business models, and enabling technology.