[RKDinOKC]

Don't know how much longer the company I work for is going to be in business.

We make oilfield pumps and valves. They are cast iron, ductile iron, steel, and stainless steel for applications depending on the chemical/pressure/temperature environment.

The highest selling product is a cast iron back pressure regulator. The company started with it in 1948 and has consistently been the highest seller. It has been decided to discontinue cast iron valve in favor of the ductile iron version to reduce the product line. Was told the profits on the cast iron is only 25% and is 48% on the ductile.

WTF!

If ductile was a viable replacement for cast iron it seems like the company would have discontinued the cast iron at some point in the 69 years it as been in business!

Also 4 years ago we had 800 employees and our sales were almost twice what they are today. Of our 50 top sellers, 95% of sales they were able to ship product the same day it was ordered. Today we have 650 employees with only a little over half the sales and are backordered 3 months!

Production is working 4 days a week with 2 - 10 hour shifts. It was 5 days a week with 3 - 8 hour shifts. That is 80 hrs a week of production versus 120 hours! While to the employee it is still 40 hours a week, production scheduling to meet demand you are losing 40 hours a week that could be used to meet demands scheduling wise. That is significant.

I took industrial engineering and one of the things found is if workers work more than 8 hrs a day for any length of time they actually become less productive. Even if they work the same total hours per week. When I was in charge of the drafting department my staff did not believe this. They wanted to work 4 - 10 hour days and get an extra day off.

So we did some tests adjusting schedules to work more or less hours per day. We arranged it to keep the department covered and the guys thought is was fun to take part and really wanted to prove me wrong so they could work 4-10hr days. We found at under 8 hours per day their productivity was the same, but they didn't like working Saturdays to meet 40 hours. Any thing over 8 hours per day, they seemed as productive, BUT. They started making more mistakes. The mistakes cost time to fix and loss of productivity in other areas. Both quality and productivity suffered. After that they didn't want to even work overtime unless it was to come in on a Saturday because they did not like having to redo work and seeing the problems it caused for other areas of the company.

Production has been working 4-10hr days long enough that despite quality control having doubled it's staff products are being shipped that have to be recalled due to manufacturing or assembly errors. This almost never happened in the past.

Man, they really need to promote me to VP of Technology and let me fix this stuff before they go out of business. Bet if they just changed back to 5 day work weeks production and quality would improve enough that I would look like a God. Eeh, what do I know.

Still, discontinuing your highest selling product because you can't meet past production goals? That is CRAZY!!