Month: November 2022
Released November 2, 2022
Published November 1, 2022
Access to All PMPA Podcasts
Access to PMPA Knowledge Centers
Published November 1, 2022
From 2016 to 2021, the global market for heavy-duty truck manufacturing products has shown a slow but steady decline on an average of 3% per year.
Top 5 Companies
Published November 1, 2022
So many emails and so little time. At PMPA, email is our primary form of communication and I’m sure that is true for many companies. You can get a message to one or 100 people and they can read it on their time. But are they reading it?
Readable Emails
My mother used to say, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.” Sounds wrong, but it’s not. Writing is part of my job. This article was a lot longer than the one you are reading now. I wrote it, then went back and took out the unnecessary words/thoughts. Email messaging needs the same treatment. An email relays information and the message should be clear and concise.
For example, instead of saying, “I was sitting at my desk thinking that you and I need to talk about such and such. If we don’t talk about it soon, it may be too late to do anything about it,” you can say “Such and such is time – sensitive. Can you meet today at p.m .? ” You have included the necessary information and a call-to-action to get things moving.
We live in a bite-size world. Our news is in clips, our online entertainment lasts as long as a TikTok video and we get notifications about everything.
And we are notified on everything — our desktop, laptop, smartphones and smart watches. There is a lot of information heading everyone’s way everyday, so you need to make sure your message is bite-size, informative and includes a call-to-action, if necessary, to ensure it gets the attention it deserves.
Take the Time to Write a Shorter Letter
If you send me a long email, I’m not going to read it. It’s nothing personal, but my brain sees all those paragraphs and I skim it for the gist. Want to send an easily consumable email? Here are a few tips:
Let’s not forget pleasantries. They are important and should be included. But keep it concise. Instead of “Last time we spoke, you were going on vacation to Maui and bringing the whole family. Did you have fun?” you can say “Did you and the family have fun in Maui?” Want it shorter? “How was Maui?” You can almost make it a game — how short can I get it?
You need to communicate and are taking the time to do it. Help the reader by making it easier to receive the message.
Carli Kistler-Miller, MBA has over 25 years of experience with
communications, event/meeting planning, marketing, writing and
operations. Email: gro.apmp@rellimc — Website: pmpa.org.
Published November 1, 2022
I attended IMTS 2022 in Chicago, IL, and one of the most vivid sights for me was an entire hall filled with hundreds of vendors supplying various Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) software, dashboards and machine monitoring/reporting technologies. An entire hall! OEE shows you the performance of your operations, compared to their available potential — but nothing about your position and performance relative to the market, and your competitors.
Where can you go to get credible and authoritative information to use to evaluate your organization’s performance in the market, your industry and the broad economy? Today’s world is characterized by Volatility (e.g., the price of energy), Uncertainty (e.g., the availability of critical raw materials), Complexity (e.g., the latest revisions on tax and depreciation rules) and Ambiguity (e.g., is it still a pandemic? Endemic? Is it over?). In such a VUCA world, you need a trustworthy resource that gives you a credible means to know where you stand in regard to the broad issues in which you operate. You need information that is curated to be appropriate to your niche, which provides actionable understanding of performance relative to your peers. Where do you go to get trusted data to benchmark your organization’s performance?
PMPA is a 501(c)6 trade association, referred to as a “business league” under the IRS code. “A business league’s activities must be devoted to improving business conditions of one or more lines of business…they direct their efforts at promoting the common economic interests of all commercial enterprises in a trade or community.” bit.ly/PMPA-PM1122
At PMPA, our mission statement challenges us to progressively lead members to sustainable success with reliable and relevant information, resources, advocacy and networking opportunities. Among our many informational deliverables — which include economic updates, annual wage surveys and reports — is our Monthly Business Trends Report. Our Business Trends Report consolidates the (confidentially submitted) sales and hours of first shift scheduled data from about 35% of our manufacturing membership. In addition, we track four sentiment indicators for the next three-months for outlook for sales, lead times, employment and profitability. Because our reporting shops are all precision turned products shops, NAICS 332721, the inferences that our reporting gives us is focused and accurate — and a suitable standard for benchmarking your shop’s experience.
Our shops performance in the short term does not correlate well with broader indicators like Industrial Production, Manufacturing Output, Durable Goods, or GDP. In fact, over the past year, our shops have often outperformed most of these indicators. However, because of the shared processes, customers, markets, suppliers, scale, scope and capabilities common to all of our precision machining shops, the aggregation and sharing of our collective data leads us to discover “the wisdom of the crowd.” Our monthly cadence helps you to compare your shop’s sales and scheduled overtime performance to that of your “comparable peers.” Similarly, you can compare the outlook that you have for the next three months with that of your peers/competitors. What are you missing? What are they seeing? Is there a gap?
Here are three potential situations in any given month for your shop’s sales performance:
This past year, as of August, all eight month’s Business Trends sales came in at higher levels than the 2021 calendar year average. Despite two major declines March at 181 to April at 156 (a 13.8% drop) June at 175 to July to 154 (a 12% drop), our shops had confidence that they were outperforming. Our sentiment indicators showed that outlooks for lead times were holding steady, and we could all compare outlook for profitability and employment prospects going forward. Our discussion in each monthly report showed how our shops compared to the Federal Reserve’s Industrial Production and Manufacturing Output Indicators.
Here is what we said in August: “According to the Federal Reserve, Industrial Production decreased 0.2% in August. Manufacturing output edged up 0.1% after increasing 0.6% in July.” Here is how the PMPA participating shops performed for that same period: “The PMPA Business Trends Sales Index increased from 154 in July to 173 in August, a gain of nineteen points (12.3%). This is our index’s third highest value ever…PMPA’s Business Trends August Sales increase substantially outperformed the sales of the broader industrial production sector’s performance.”
How do PMPA shops know if their organizational performance compares to that of their peers, their industry or sector? By effective associating. By sharing, in complete confidentiality, a few items of relevant data and sentiment. By aggregating data from trusted and known peers, PMPA is able to provide inferences that “promote the common economic interests of all commercial enterprises in a trade.” Where do you go to get trusted information? We invite you to join PMPA and become part of a trusted community of peers and get your own company’s personalized Business Trends snapshot reported to you monthly. Know where you stand compared to the broad economy, the industrial and manufacturing sector; and your peers. Get a forecast of sentiment looking ahead three months. And when you join, we will share with you how our early in the year data reliably forecasts the end of the year sales average. How much more comfortable would your decision-making be based on trusted data?
Miles Free III is the PMPA Director of Industry Affairs with over 50 years of experience in the areas of manufacturing, quality and steelmaking. Miles’ podcast is at pmpa.org/podcast. Email Miles