18 Business View - January 2015
By Tony Moore
NOTE: This is an excerpt from Tony Moore’s book,
“One of a Kind – Making It Happen,” which is avail-
With so many U.S. companies fac-
ing competition from overseas;
what does it take to produce ex-
cellent U.S. made products com-
petitively priced to compete. I
was General Manager of a U.S.
glove company when a new glove
came into the market from Paki-
stan. Within a short time it had
taken 20% of our sales, and with
such tight margins, it wasn’t long
before we were facing losses that
would shut the company down un-
less we did something fast. I had
some seventy staff that would be
left jobless as a result so urgent
decisions had to be made. I could
either go offshore (they lose their
jobs anyway) or I could try to make a better product
here in the USA. Going offshore has very high set up
and initial delivery costs plus the transfer of informa-
tion leading to a completed and acceptable ready to
sell product.
We were in the certified firefighting glove market re-
quiring that all of our products had to be tested and
certified annually. I called a meeting with all my fac-
tory staff and laid out not only our firefighting gloves
but those of our competitors. In most cases factory or
production staff seldom, if ever,
actually see competitors’ products
to compare them to what they are
making. I laid out both our prod-
ucts and our U.S. competitor’s
products alongside. I invited my
staff to see for themselves the
differences and to show them the
comparison of our products with
these less expensive and very
comparable products.
I had already taken this U.S. manu-
facturing company from Batch into
continuous LEAN manufacturing,
that had reduced our production
costs by 33% with a streamlined
operation, but we were still more
costly than these imports.
I shared my vision of what it would take to produce
a superior and more competitive product that would
enable our customers to choose a U.S. made product,
reasonably priced and one that could be chosen in
What Does It Take?
BOOK EXCERPT
Managing new product development
amidst tough competition
