jimcolt
Gold Member
The keys to being able to build excellent product really has nothing to do with where a product is built.....or even the pay scale of the workers that are building the product (and $92 an hour is not that absurd....as it probably includes overhead benefits, retirement, etc.), rather....building a good competitive product is the result of excellent product design as well as an a good company infrastructure.
Good product design makes the product easy and quick to build without sacrificing product performance or reliability. A good company infrastructure ensures that the workers have a clean, comfortable, safe, friendly place to work....with adquate compensation and benefits to support the lifestyle in the region of the world that they reside. This formula, properly executed allows for excellent productivity, which is perhaps the most important word in producing competitive products anywhere in the world.
You don't get good productivity by cracking the whip.....you get it by treating production workers as an equal part of the company team.
There are many companies in the U.S. that follow the above principals....you will find that these companies are the ones that continue to excell and grow in the markets that they are in.....even with worldwide sales. The companies that do not subscribe to these principals often suffer in economic downturns and tend to farm much of their production to different parts of the world in an effort to cut costs.....which only tends to lower morale and productivity for their domestic workers.
I speak from my experiences with Hypertherm....a company that is employee owned (each employee has stock ownership as part of the benefits package...the stock grows when the company improves sales and performance in any way. The employees also share in annual profits through a profit sharing program). During the recent downturn....business levels dropped dramatically...yet not a single employee was laid off (there has never been a layoff in Hypertherm's history), rather....employees in jobs that were slow such as most production jobs..were transferred into other positions. As an example, Hypertherm management decided to increase spending on research and development during the slow period....a gamble during hard times to say the least. Production workers took on jobs monitoring around the clock engineering tests, as well as working as technicians which increased engineering productivity. The result...4 new products were introduced as the economy started to turn around. Our competitors in the industry....that had laid off as much as 10 percent of their workforces.....some of them farming out work to other areas of the world....had nothing new to offer.
The economic downturn, while certainly not something we would like to repeat...actually increased the level of satisfaction among Hypertherm employees...knowing that the company cared about the workers positions as much as the management positions actually created a boosting effect to that productivity word.
There really is no reason why U.S. companies cannot produce products as cost effectively and with quality that ranks among the best in the world. There is a rapidly growing trend for companies to be more progressive and be able to maintain productivity levels....as well as the domestic jobs that are vital to our local economies.
My two cents!
Jim Colt
Good product design makes the product easy and quick to build without sacrificing product performance or reliability. A good company infrastructure ensures that the workers have a clean, comfortable, safe, friendly place to work....with adquate compensation and benefits to support the lifestyle in the region of the world that they reside. This formula, properly executed allows for excellent productivity, which is perhaps the most important word in producing competitive products anywhere in the world.
You don't get good productivity by cracking the whip.....you get it by treating production workers as an equal part of the company team.
There are many companies in the U.S. that follow the above principals....you will find that these companies are the ones that continue to excell and grow in the markets that they are in.....even with worldwide sales. The companies that do not subscribe to these principals often suffer in economic downturns and tend to farm much of their production to different parts of the world in an effort to cut costs.....which only tends to lower morale and productivity for their domestic workers.
I speak from my experiences with Hypertherm....a company that is employee owned (each employee has stock ownership as part of the benefits package...the stock grows when the company improves sales and performance in any way. The employees also share in annual profits through a profit sharing program). During the recent downturn....business levels dropped dramatically...yet not a single employee was laid off (there has never been a layoff in Hypertherm's history), rather....employees in jobs that were slow such as most production jobs..were transferred into other positions. As an example, Hypertherm management decided to increase spending on research and development during the slow period....a gamble during hard times to say the least. Production workers took on jobs monitoring around the clock engineering tests, as well as working as technicians which increased engineering productivity. The result...4 new products were introduced as the economy started to turn around. Our competitors in the industry....that had laid off as much as 10 percent of their workforces.....some of them farming out work to other areas of the world....had nothing new to offer.
The economic downturn, while certainly not something we would like to repeat...actually increased the level of satisfaction among Hypertherm employees...knowing that the company cared about the workers positions as much as the management positions actually created a boosting effect to that productivity word.
There really is no reason why U.S. companies cannot produce products as cost effectively and with quality that ranks among the best in the world. There is a rapidly growing trend for companies to be more progressive and be able to maintain productivity levels....as well as the domestic jobs that are vital to our local economies.
My two cents!
Jim Colt
