by tradesmeninsights | Dec 12, 2019 | Industry Articles, Manufacturing
Today we have a guest post from MAGNET (The Manufacturing and Growth Advocacy Network) organization that has a mission for helping manufacturers grow and compete in Northeast Ohio, especially the 98% of startup to medium-sized manufacturers that drive our economy. MAGNET rolls up its sleeves to provide hands-on support ranging from new product design to operations and brings education and business together to create tomorrow’s manufacturers.
MAGNET needs your help. By taking 20 minutes to complete its survey before the end of the year, you can help impact future legislative decisions, offerings and services, as well as use the survey results to help your own organization.
At MAGNET, we’re inspired to drive regional impact by supporting small- to medium-sized manufacturing companies in areas of product design and development, process innovation and automation, operational excellence and engagement, and more.
But for us to supply you with the right services at MAGNET, it’s imperative that we gain insight into the current Northeast Ohio manufacturing landscape. That’s where the survey comes in.
About the Ohio Manufacturing Survey
This year’s survey is your opportunity to impact how key stakeholders across manufacturing make decisions for our industry’s future. By giving us 20 minutes of your time, you can:
- Impact how legislators and key stakeholders make future decisions
- Shape the offerings and services of manufacturing support organizations
- Use the results to benchmark how you compare to other Ohio manufacturers
And as a thank you for your time and responses, you’ll get the following upon submission:
- Your choice of any one of 12 different business books
- FREE admission to one of our report rollout events—Cleveland, Akron, or Canton in February 2020
- $5 to Harvest for Hunger donation made by our sponsors for every response
The survey deadline is December 31, 2019. This survey is limited to businesses that produce physical goods, with production locations in Ohio.
Make Your Manufacturing Voice Heard
Every response creates a more powerful view of the state of manufacturing in Ohio. Submit your responses to the 2020 Ohio Manufacturing Survey.
Want to read another guest post from MAGNET?
Manufacturers: Avoid These Three Frequent Failures of a Product Launch
by tradesmeninsights | Oct 18, 2019 | Industry Articles, Manufacturing, Marketing Trends
By Matt Sonnhalter, Vision Architect, Sonnhalter
Being able to accurately show how well your efforts impacted a company’s bottom line is one of the biggest challenges marketing teams face every year. For years, the easiest indicator of a marketing team’s success was measured mostly in sales and lead generation. But with the rise of content marketing, influencer relations and social media in marketing plans, it’s sometimes difficult to accurately quantify exactly how all these tactics improve ROI. Regardless of where you stand on the value of these tactics, even the most stubborn skeptics will need to face the reality that content marketing, social media and other tactics for the digital age are here to stay. Unfortunately, most marketing budgets have yet to catch up with the financial and personnel resources necessary to successfully utilize these tactics.
Many of these challenges and concerns were addressed in IEEE GlobalSpec’s “Trends in Industrial Marketing Survey,” which surveyed 326 marketing and sales professionals in the industrial sector on marketing trends within the engineering, technical, manufacturing and industrial communities. Here are some of the most interesting tidbits from the survey:
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Breakthroughs in marketing analytics have made it easier to calculate the ROI of a company’s marketing efforts.
“Marketers are under steady pressure to demonstrate ROI for their marketing programs. The need to improve ROI is one of the top challenges industrial marketers face. To meet this challenge, marketers use leads as their number one measure of success. But generating high-quality leads for sales is also one of the top marketing challenges. This may sound like a vicious cycle, and some marketers would agree, but the point is that measurement matters. Other measures of success include customer acquisition and sales attributed to marketing campaigns. Marketing automation software, which can improve tracking and measurement capabilities, is used by only 37 percent of industrial marketers.” (more…)
by tradesmeninsights | Sep 6, 2019 | Manufacturing, Tradesmen Insights
Today we have a guest post from MAGNET (The Manufacturing and Growth Advocacy Network) organization that has a mission for helping manufacturers grow and compete in Northeast Ohio, especially the 98% of startup to medium-sized manufacturers that drive our economy. MAGNET rolls up its sleeves to provide hands-on support ranging from new product design to operations and brings education and business together to create tomorrow’s manufacturers. 
Did you know 70% of all new product launches fail?
While manufacturers may feel a sense of urgency to introduce a new product or service to market, testing thoroughly before launch can mean the difference between success and failure. After all, simply launching a new product will not guarantee its success.
So whether you’re in the ideation phase of a new innovation, or zeroing in on your promotion plan, you’ll want to take into consideration these frequent failures of a product launch.
Lack of Market Understanding
Why do so many products fail? The answer is simple: failure to understand the market. Misunderstanding the market is equal to destroying a product before launching it.
We’ve all heard the old adage “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, why do it at all?” Instead of rushing to get several products to market with incomplete research, sales support, or inventory, manufacturers should consider planning for a few, well-thought out products in a given time period for higher profit margins and faster growth.
Read more.
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 19, 2019 | Industry Articles, Manufacturing, Tradesmen Insights
This post originally appeared on INSIGHT2PROFIT.com.
Welcome back to INSIGHT2PROFIT’s 2019 Pricing Challenge! Each article covers a common pricing challenge faced by businesses and provide some tips to help improve your profitability.
Now that we’re about halfway through 2019, let’s talk about the plan you set for the year. How have you performed thus far relative to your plan?
If your performance hasn’t matched your financial projections for this first part of the year, what happened? Maybe you’ve looked at your financial reports, and you see that your customer or product mix isn’t what you were expecting, or that you have been impacted by tariffs, and your profitability has suffered because of it.
That’s a start – having a rough idea of the shortfall – but you need to get to the root causes. Has a shift in your mix driven down margin rates? Are you falling short of plan due to a volume slowdown, or are pricing shortfalls eroding your revenue growth? How does that vary by market segment or by salesperson?
Analyzing the gap down to the customer-SKU level can yield clear, actionable intelligence about your problem. Well-run businesses have a strategy, and the budget is the road map to execute it. Planning at the same level of granularity as your sales allows for a healthier understanding of what’s happening within your business, why, and how to act. By having a detailed budget, you are creating a source of accountability for your team and a path for success for your business.
Accurate revenue planning and measurement is tough to do, but it’s one of our specialties. Every engagement includes strategy, a client-specific model, a detailed plan and road map to execute it, and measurement to achieve the set goals. All while leveraging our DRIVE technology platform.
To learn more about how your company can improve results for the remainder of 2019, schedule a time to talk to one of our profit experts today.
What’s your pricing challenge? Talking about pricing challenge, with tariffs ever present in the news, you may want to download our 3 Steps to Navigating Tariffs Guide.
by tradesmeninsights | Jun 5, 2019 | Manufacturing, Tradesmen Insights
Today we have a guest post from MAGNET (The Manufacturing and Growth Advocacy Network) organization that has a mission for helping manufacturers grow and compete in Northeast Ohio, especially the 98% of startup to medium-sized manufacturers that drive our economy. MAGNET rolls up its sleeves to provide hands-on support ranging from new product design to operations and brings education and business together to create tomorrow’s manufacturers.
The widespread adoption of technology is indisputably transforming manufacturing operations. But before manufacturers jump right in and fight for technology implementation and adoption, it’s important to understand how certain techs can work, how they’re used, and what benefits they may reap.
MAGNET details three common technology trends that are impacting manufacturing processes:
1. Expansion of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
2. More Emphasis on Cybersecurity
3. Continued Push for 3-D Printing
To read the entire post and download MAGNET’s 2019 State of Northeast Ohio Manufacturing Report, click here.
by tradesmeninsights | Nov 27, 2018 | Manufacturing, Tradesmen Insights
by Chris Ilcin, Account Superintendent
As members of the manufacturing community, we all have abundant anecdotal evidence of the Skills Gap. But as people involved in precision and “measure twice, cut once” careers, we also understand that when you measure something, you can work on it.
That’s why this new study from Deloitte is so welcome. They have taken a good, long, hard look at the industry in general, and applied solid numbers and reasoning to the looming crisis. Additionally, they have partnered with The Manufacturing Institute to work on filling the gap.
For the Executive Summary and links to the complete study, click here.
