The short answer is yes!
The long answer is below...
We believe that a high tide raises all ships. If you succeed, we succeed. The same goes for out employees.
Here is how are business model and profit margins to support this structure.Wages for a Triple Bottom Line Company
When NMU was started we wanted it to put people first. We use the “piecework model”.
How to determine their wage?The first step is to develop a LEAN manufacturing product. This means getting our hands dirty. Michael Klepacz develops each manufacturing step. He determine where the bottlenecks are and what improvements to make. Then he performs the tasks at a moderate pace and determine how many units I can produce in a 7 hour period. Then we adjust that for 8 hours, 8 hours because of break times and to reduce the pace over the work day.
Let’s say I am able to create 300 items in 7 hours. I want a "moderate pace" with time for breaks and lunch - I bump that to 8 hours from 7. In manufacturing, cycle times are an important KPI to track.300/8 = 37.5 units per hour. A
cycle time of 1.6 minutes per unit.If I want my employee to earn $15 per hour that means they will get paid $0.40 per unit.In 8 hours a person should be able to make at least 300 units per day at 40 cents per unit. This comes out to $120 per day working at a moderate pace.
Training at NMU is based on an hourly wage. We want employees to learn how to make a product properly, not how to make a product “fast”. We remind them that speed comes with efficiency and muscle memory. When we are training people they are made aware of the median cycle time for the product.
This model works well in the flexible manufacturing model that we created. In fact, because of how flexible we are COVID did not make any impact on our output. NMU is a "Decentralized Factory". We encourage the top quality performers to work from home and we construct machines for them. Our employees are happy. Life is good.