All Features
Ryan E. Day
As manufacturing finds its way through the 21st century, there’s a groundswell change emerging. Organizations are jockeying for competitive position as they endeavor to describe this phenomenon. Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution, and the industrial internet of things (IIoT) are a few…
Morgan Ryan Frank, Iyad Rahwan
How do workers move up the corporate ladder, and how can they maximize their career mobility? Increased wealth disparity, increased job polarization, and decreases in absolute income mobility (i.e., the fraction of children who earn more than their parents) all suggest that upward mobility is…
Ken Albala
Trade wars have an interesting way of revealing cultural stereotypes.
Countries often propose tariffs not on the most valuable items in their trading relationships—since that would be painful to them as well—but rather on products iconic of national character. A good example of this came in the…
Chad Kymal
There is a proliferation of management system standards and requirements globally. These management system standards are either customer or industry mandated. Many standards are becoming a requirement for doing business.
For example, ISO 9001 is a quality management system (QMS) standard with…
Patrick Mork
Whether you work for a startup or a large company, there have never been so many metrics to help you understand how your business is doing. But I would argue that one metric rules them all: the net promoter score (NPS).
NPS represents the willingness of consumers to recommend your product to…
Ryan E. Day
‘In God we trust; all others bring data.” “Follow the data.” “Let the data talk.” Nice clichés, but there’s one problem... data can’t talk. In fact, data don’t say a darn thing. Data are bits of raw information. If you want to reduce product variation, improve your manufacturing processes, and…
Scott Gottlieb
There’s new technology that can improve drug quality, address shortages of medicines, lower drug costs, and bring pharmaceutical manufacturing back to the United States. At the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), we’re focused on propelling these innovations, collectively referred to as…
Kanoe Namahoe
‘Effective communication is more a journey than a destination,” says Gary Mills, co-founder and chief operations officer at Pinnacle Performance, a communications-skills training company in Chicago.
“Great speakers are made, not born,” said Mills during a fast-moving, 75-minute session during the…
Kaya Wiles
Your everyday permanent markers, glue sticks, and packing tape may offer a surprisingly low-tech solution to a long-standing nuisance in the manufacturing industry: Making soft and ductile, or so-called “gummy” metals easier to cut.
What makes inks and adhesives effective isn’t their chemical…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In our Aug. 3, 2018, episode of QDL, we FDA's "Case for Quality" program, technology in supply chain management and, talk to the incoming and outgoing chairs of the CMSC.
“Trends in Global Supply Chain Management”
A number of promising technologies on the horizon will help us all keep pace with…
Donald J. Wheeler
Data mining is the foundation for the current fad of “big data.” Today’s software makes it possible to look for all kinds of relationships among the variables contained in a database. But owning a pick and shovel will not do you much good if you do not know the difference between gold and iron…
Mike Figliuolo
Legislative and regulatory changes can cause massive upheaval for your strategic plan. Elections happen all the time. New rules and regulations are proposed, implemented, or repealed on a daily basis. Court cases can change an entire industry landscape.
To stay on top of all these changes and to…
Ryan E. Day
Factory and industrial inspections are the backbones of robust quality assurance programs. Inspection is also an integral part of machine system installation and maintenance, as well as in-situ repairs and retrofits. This is why highly competent individuals who understand the metrology methods of…
jeffdewar
‘There’s nothing we can do about it.”
In a customer service situation, those words are equivalent to “buzz off” (or worse).
Here’s what customer service managers, from healthcare to telecommunications, from utilities to gyms, should have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids: Because employees…
Mark Miller, Lucas Conley
Recently, General Electric—the last remaining member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s original 1896 index—was removed from the world’s most prestigious equity benchmark. News of the venerable brand’s dismissal from the Dow, the index of 30 large, publicly traded U.S. brands reflecting the…
Quy Huy
Innovation is the No. 1 priority of today’s CEOs. They correctly perceive that the fast-turning treadmill of disruption topples organizations that stand still. The only sure-fire way to stay on top is to consistently introduce products and services that provide unique, superior value and defy…
Glenn S. Wolfgang
Flow quality management (Flow QM) is a logistical alternative to handling product in lots for the purpose of assessing and mitigating defects. It features a streamlined, automated acceptance sampling methodology, is built on empirical metrics, and facilitates timely, meaningful performance…
Thomas Andresen Gosselin
Whoever coined the phrase “it’s a small world” clearly doesn’t work in supply chain management. The earth maintains a relatively constant size of roughly 196,900,000 square miles of surface area, but in the last decade or so, the scope and complexity of global supply chains have expanded…
Leonard L. Berry, D. Kirk Hamilton
We spend much of our time in buildings, and they can have a profound effect on our well-being, for better or for worse. As long ago as 1943, Winston Churchill told Britain’s House of Commons that “we shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”
Research is showing that effective…
Steven Brand
While manufacturers have traditionally been hesitant to invest in their operations due to cost, a recent National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) survey of more than 500 manufacturers reveals that 65 percent plan to increase capital spending during the coming years. Where is the money going to…
Harry Hertz
I recently read a blog post by Mary Jo Asmus titled “Eight Unexpected Ways to Continue to Develop Yourself As a Leader.“ Some ways were more obvious (to me) than others, and I will quickly summarize all of them below. However, my main takeaway was to reflect on how I continue to learn. And I would…
AssurX
Proposed in 2012 and now in effect, the general data protection regulation (GDPR) is the newest landmark of data protection legislation. GDPR compliance legislation is designed to better protect personal data of individuals in the European Union (EU) by making companies more accountable for how…
William A. Levinson
Quality and manufacturing practitioners are most familiar with the effect of variation on product quality, and this is still the focus of the quality management and Six Sigma bodies of knowledge. Other forms of variation are, however, equally important—in terms of their ability to cause what…
John R. Stoker
I have had the opportunity to coach a number of different leaders. Sometimes I’m asked to observe how a leader interacts with team members and then provide him with feedback about the effect of his behavior on the team. When I observe a lack of engagement during a leader’s meeting, I interview team…
Pamela Waterman
Anyone involved in 3D printing/additive manufacturing (AM) knows about STL file formats. Problem is—and no offense meant—STL is dumb. It’s just a large text file, generally written in ASCII programming language, defining the surface of a closed solid using a zillion triangles. For every tiny…
