When understanding the general public sentiment related to your company, almost nothing compares to your average customer’s experience from discovery to purchase to support. There will be specific factors that may lead to churn, such as a negative experience when calling customer support or receiving a product that just doesn’t meet expectations. 

This just in: your order volume is increasing. What was once a small business you fully owned and operated alone is now a full-blown e-commerce store, and you’ve got a whole team to manage. Sound familiar? Would you like it to? You’re in the right place.

In an earlier blog post, we said that defect prevention depended on understanding the root cause(s). Because this is such an important part of the problem-solving process, let’s explore it further.

Having on-demand labor at your fingertips is a great competitive advantage, but many businesses have questions about how bringing in new operators might affect quality. 

Have you ever wondered where all the overhead in your business is coming from? Transaction costs might be to blame, but luckily there are things you can do to minimize these. Lean methodology holds the keys to reducing the most readily addressable issues affecting transaction costs in your business.

The skilled labor shortage has been a persistent problem in manufacturing for some time now. What’s causing this, and how do we fix it?

There are many reasons you might be lacking labor capacity to meet the day’s demand. Workforce burnout, sick employees, religious accommodations, PTO, and a tight labor market are all common causes of labor capacity fluctuations.

Local workforces are a microcosm of the overall state of the labor market. In a tight labor market, the local workforces often feel it most strongly. When a large employer moves into town, this often causes a shift in the workforce that can be quite disruptive. A concept known as the Dutch Disease can reveal some insights into how to deal with this issue.

Everyone faces turnover at some point. Knowing your turnover rate enables you to properly manage your labor capacity by taking action to address your labor needs.

As a company decision-maker, you know that continuous improvement is critical to competing, and digitization is all but required to win in today’s market. However, stakeholders don’t always agree on the best way forward. Often the introduction of any new technology to your long-standing operations is a battle, and buy-in at all levels is necessary to maximize value creation.

You’ve been here before: operations seem to be doing just fine, until you check the numbers and see that output is not keeping pace. You should be taking on more orders, but you’re having trouble keeping up with the ones you have. So what do you do?

You’ve been there before: volume has suddenly dropped off a cliff, after months of hiring staff to meet a big surge. You’re left with more employees than you have the work for, and it’s eating a hole in your margins. The situation might be bad enough that you have to let people go.

Imagine this: you drive in to work expecting everyone to show up for their shift and planning how you’re going to finally get ahead for a day and start tackling your backlog. Then when you get to the morning huddle, two of your 20 employees aren’t there. This ruins the productive day you had envisioned.

We’ve talked to hundreds of operations leaders, so we know you probably think that on-demand labor will take a long time to set up and test. If you’ve worked with traditional staffing agencies, you’ve probably spent hours just getting started. And that time doesn’t even reflect the whole process happening behind the scenes that you didn’t have control over.

Sometimes businesses aren’t seeing the results they wanted from on-demand labor. While some things are certainly out of your control, we know that there are best practices that you can follow to be sure you’re doing everything to get the performance you want.

Uncertainty is plaguing everyone’s world view now with how the past year has unfolded and how that will project forward into the future. One thing is for certain, top operations leaders share similar concerns as they evaluate their business driving into 2021. In this recent Supply Chain Dive opinion poll, executive leaders voted on their top concerns:  

So you’re new to on-demand labor, and you end up hitting a roadblock that you weren’t expecting. You’re excited about the potential of Veryable for your business, but aren’t so sure any more. What now?

You’ve probably reached what you thought was the limit of how far your cycle times could be reduced. And when that happens, you start to wonder if there’s something else to be done so that you can deliver to the customer faster and quit feeling like you’re treading water just to stay afloat. 

Imagine you are starting your morning on a Tuesday. You’ve got a cup of coffee and everyone is rolling up to work so you can push out a big order by the end of the week. Just as you’re leaving your office, you hear the phone ring. The call is for a big order that’s way above what you forecast for the week. 

There are three words that scare operations managers everywhere: free two-day delivery. This phrase wraps up the Amazon effect and slaps a bow on it. Customers are starting to expect reliable on-time delivery of whatever goods they want with little extra cost, and they’re expecting it to happen faster than ever before.

It’s something manufacturing leaders dream about: one day, a huge order comes in for your products, and you’ll be sitting on a gold mine once you ship everything out to your happy customers. Depending on how prepared your company is to handle the spike in demand, this could sound like a good dream or a nightmare.

No matter how hard you try, it seems like the busy season throws more at your business than you’re prepared to handle. Every year, it’s a scramble to grab the extra cash that’s being thrown your way if you can meet your customers’ seemingly insatiable, seasonal demand for that precious period of time.

If you’ve used on-demand labor for a while, you’ve probably heard the concept of a labor pool mentioned at least once. And maybe you’ve decided you want to implement this model at your business, but you’re thinking it can’t just be as simple as “build a labor pool.” What does that even mean?

When you’re first looking into on-demand labor, it’s a bit intimidating to consider all the ways this new model might or might not work for your business. You probably want to know what might go wrong. Even if you’re not thinking about it now, we know it’s important for you to be aware of the problems that could exist with a solution like ours. 

You’ve heard of on-demand labor, and maybe you’ve been looking for a solution to add flexibility to your operations. But it isn’t always easy to take those first few steps. So, what’s the right way to start using on-demand labor?

Scaling your manufacturing business is hard work. You know that you will have to spend money to achieve this goal, but maybe you aren’t sure where your money would produce the greatest return on investment. Perhaps you’re even wondering if there are ways to scale without spending.

Last week, we published a blog called Manufacturing Companies, Keep the Faith and Soldier On, which was a call to action for US producers and distributors to prepare to play offense in this time of crisis. Because although it is clear that the near-term will be uncertain in terms of restrictions, delays in materials, and workforce challenges... that should not prevent you from preparing to take on pent-up demand that is just around the corner.