Taken from my companies website. Our core principle for serving customers and a source of pride. -- "We consider ourselves an extension of your companies design, engineering, and production. We make a commitment to your successful development and manufacturing of products. It makes no difference if we are making OEM parts or are assisting an OEM manufacturer our commitment is to your success."

Leave the ego at the door. There is no room for growth as a manager if a person cannot learn from the people around them. If, as a manager, you only "hang out" with management, you have no idea what is going on in your company or department. "You cannot manage by sitting in an office. To be in tune with the daily workings of the company, you manage by walking around. "Now, this one is courtesy of the author Tom Peters." His book "In Search of Excellence" is as pertinent today

Leave the ego at the door. There is no room for growth as a manager if a person cannot learn from the people around them. If, as a manager, you only "hang out" with management, you have no idea what is going on in your company or department. If you think about it most if not all companies are working hard to meet sometimes unreasonable customer demands, the very same companies turn around and make unreasonable demands on their suppliers. Many, many problems in the supply chai

If you work for a company that uses the catchphrase "Best Practices" keep in mind, there is no such thing as a "Best Practice" only Better Practices. Using Best Practices leads to complacency, implementing Better Practices leads to improvement. If you believe in continuous improvement, Better Practices are rungs on a never-ending quality improvement ladder. Better Practices need a test period to determine their success. Better Practices are continually evaluated to determine

As a company are you protecting your supply chain, or are you constantly at odds with your suppliers beating them up on schedule and price. If you are not treating your suppliers as valuable resources, you are taking a short-sighted view of business and helping to create your breakdowns in the supply chain. The American auto industry drove some very large suppliers out of business by continually beating their suppliers up on price, and when an economic downturn hit, the suppl

The business world is changing, and many small manufacturing and service companies are finding it hard to grow and even maintain. The demands of larger businesses on them as a supplier is increasing at the same time the larger companies are pushing costs down and demanding price decreases. In the over thirty years of its existence, DMI remade itself several times, leading to the diversity of its skill set. For many years DMI's diverse skill set was a considerable strength i

A small business environment gives an owner the benefit of having to look at projects on a department by department basis. Each step in the manufacturing process is looked at with the eye of how it affects subsequent steps. An example is an extra minute of time in one department can save ten minutes in the next. An example of this is wooden boxes manufactured by DMI for a customer. On the first run of boxes, the concentration was on the speed of cnc machining. The resulting

Most managers would be stunned to find out it is the average employee working around problems created by their latest and greatest directive that keep companies moving forward. A result of managers sitting in their office and not getting out to learn from their people. A case in point is to watch the television show "Undercover Boss". In many cases the boss knows little about the operations and people of the company he or she is tasked with leading into the future.

I would say my number one asset is developing the ability to listen to people, not at people. By listening to people and asking the most basic questions, you can quickly ascertain what challenges are being presented and how to guide the person or persons to find their own solution. This is of significant importance in meetings between different departments within an organization. The inability of departments to work together usually stems from listening at but not to each oth