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Magazine Column
Shop Operations
Lemonade out of lemons
Manager's Desk column covers the ups and downs experienced in the shop this year lead to hard decisions, including staff reductions.
Shop’s buried treasures
After visiting a few fellow shop owners, Manager's Desk Columnist Keith Jennings found that generating extra cash was a frequent topic of interest -- particularly with the fickle state of the market and governments being desperate to extract additional revenue through taxes and fees.
The global machine shop
Have you noticed job candidates and the people you're dealing with across the business world are increasingly from other countries?
Symposium promotes growth
While writing his Manager's Desk column for the May 2015 issue of Cutting Tool Engineering magazine, Keith Jennings attended a 3-day symposium hosted by a key customer -- a large, growing energy company.
Keeping your distance
Keeping employees' personal matters separate from professional ones.
Protecting digital assets
Machine shops need lots of tangible assets to make parts: machine tools, cutting tools and real estate, among other items.
Discounts and increases
I strive to start each year on a positive note, but 2015 sure hasn't taken long to throw us our first challenging management scenario. It requires immediate oversight of rapidly changing economic conditions.
Adapting to today’s customer
Welcome to the start of another year, where machine shops will be pushed to adhere to even stricter standards as customers deal with consolidation, relocation, certification, lean-system implementation and other versions of doing more with less.
Cultivating the future of machining
Manager's Desk Columnist Keith Jennings suggests that employees who demonstrate their lives aren't ruled by social media have an advantage.
IMTS was a worthy experience
IMTS is a spectacle full of machining and related technologies that will excite anyone in this business, observes Manager's Desk Columnist Keith Jennings in the October 2014 issue of Cutting Tool Engineering.
When a loss isn’t such a loss
Manager's Desk Columnist Keith Jennings reminds all owners and managers that while losing key members of the staff may seem stressful, a silver lining exists when a they leave because such an event can be a blessing in disguise.