All Features
Ayush Soni
Audits and inspections are critical components of industrial safety management. These processes help organizations ensure compliance with legal requirements, identify risks, and improve workplace safety and operational efficiencies. Conducting regular audits and inspections is not just a regulatory…
Angie Basiouny
Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli is routinely asked to predict the future of work. His expert answer is always the same: “The future looks like the past.”
He’s not trying to be cryptic. It’s just that the big changes ushered in by the pandemic five years ago are still unfolding—remote…
Akhilesh Gulati
Paul was sitting in his office staring at production numbers from the past quarter. Despite having a great team, strong customer demand, and state-of-the-art equipment, the factory’s performance wasn’t meeting expectations. There was a bottleneck in the assembly line—a critical chokepoint that was…
Jones Loflin
I enjoy painting, and I’ll admit that I’m not the neatest painter out there—I get a lot on me. And I’m not the fastest painter either, but I feel like I do a pretty good job. One of the tools that helps me improve my painting skills is painter’s tape (the blue stuff is my favorite). It enables me…
Brian Hughes
We live in a world where problems aren’t just growing—they’re evolving into ever-more complex challenges. During the 20th century, we pushed the boundaries of innovation, creating complicated systems that demanded structured problem-solving approaches. Techniques like 5 Whys and the Ishikawa…
Akhilesh Gulati
In the world of operations and quality management, the pressure to act quickly can feel overwhelming. Senior executives are constantly racing against time to meet customer demands, solve problems, and keep shareholders satisfied. In the rush to address immediate challenges, “Ready, aim, fire!” gets…
Harish Jose
In this article, I’m exploring complexity through the lens of George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form (Cognizer Co., 1994). This philosophical and mathematical treatise explores the foundations of logic and mathematics via a unique symbolic system. Spencer-Brown introduces a primary algebra based on a…
Laurie Locascio
So much has changed since I walked onto the Gaithersburg, Maryland, campus of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) almost three years ago to begin my term as its director and U.S. Commerce Undersecretary for Standards and Technology.
We were all still feeling the impacts of…
William A. Levinson
Recent labor relations controversies and ongoing arguments about the minimum wage have raised questions as to how a supply chain should share the utility it produces.
If we ask the wrong question, however, we’ll get the wrong answer. “What is a fair share?” asks how a supply chain should divide a…
Harry Hertz
A recent Inc.com blog post by Jessica Stillman discusses Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Co., 2024). The theme in both works is that you can’t create a high-performing team simply by bringing together individual high performers. They need to gel as a…
Peter Zemsky, Ricky Wong
Gemini, O1, Grok, Claude, Llama, Yi, and Mistral: The number of large language models (LLMs) seems to have grown exponentially since OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst into the public consciousness in late 2022. It’s estimated that $154 billion was spent on AI by businesses in 2023, while the most recent …
Prashant Kondle
Unplanned equipment downtime costs manufacturers an estimated $50 billion annually, according to a study by Deloitte. It is estimated that unplanned downtime costs more than $100,000 per hour. Traditional maintenance approaches—whether reactive or scheduled—are not sufficient to address these…
Herman Tang
In manufacturing, especially in assembly systems, every operation plays a role in shaping the quality of the final product. The influence of these operations can carry through each stage, ultimately affecting the quality of the finished products delivered to customers. Understanding how these…
Silas Fulsom
In today’s highly competitive global markets, lean manufacturing is no longer something that’s nice to have—it’s a way of life. You can either reduce costs, simplify operations, and improve productivity on a continual basis—or you can lose business to competitors that do.
Lean manufacturing starts…
Gleb Tsipursky
Generative AI is revolutionizing industries, from drafting legal contracts to crafting personalized marketing campaigns with unmatched speed and precision. Yet this transformative power comes with challenges: fears of job loss, concerns about algorithmic bias, and the phenomenon of “hallucinations…
Megan Wallin-Kerth
It’s 2024, and the age of automation has largely taken over our phones, computers, and businesses. This isn’t entirely a bad thing, you understand. It gives us the ability to spend time and money elsewhere—from investing in staff to spending more time on innovating technology rather than whittling…
William A. Levinson
The ongoing relevance of the quality profession requires evolution and adaptation to meet the needs of the 21st century. Remember, the quality profession originated with the need for inspection to prevent poor quality from reaching customers; this was before it evolved to include metrology,…
Quality Digest, Ryan Pembroke
Hexagon is frequently at the fore of innovation. Like many in its industry, part of the company’s initiative to succeed is rooted in the constant push to automate tedious processes that take up valuable time, eat up resources and personnel, and delay production and delivery of products. Tools like…
Akhilesh Gulati
It was another busy morning at the monthly operations meeting. Lindsay, the operations manager at TechElectronics, a growing manufacturer of consumer electronics, called the meeting to order. As usual, they started with the routine updates—inventory levels, production schedules, and customer…
Mike Figliuolo
Everyone has goals these days. The one that causes more disconnects than any other is a sales goal. It’s a number to hit (either units or dollars or both—the better ones are actually measured in profit dollars rather than revenue dollars). They’re problematic because by their very nature they get a…
Jennifer King
A study by Upwork has revealed that about 22% of the American workforce will be working from home by 2025. Remote work is here to stay, bringing many benefits along with it—including significant cost savings for businesses and the promise of a better work-life balance for employees. However, the…
Etienne Nichols
A quality management system (QMS) is at the heart of every successful medtech company. A QMS comprises all the policies, processes, and procedures that ensure the production of safe and effective medical devices—which means that problems with your QMS can quickly become problems with your products…
Yushiro Kato, Quality Digest
The state of American manufacturing is in dire need of improvement. For decades, the U.S. economy has been transforming into a service-based model while the manufacturing power we associate with the American postwar capacity of the 1950s and ’60s has dispersed offshore.
This slow degradation of U.…
Michael Sharp
Welcome knowledge seeker! Do you feel dazzled and awed by the great potential of artificial intelligence (AI)? Perhaps hesitant or lost when terms like convolution, deep learning, or autoencoder are thrown around? Well, fear not, for you’ve come to just the right place. You don’t need to be a…
Cal Newport
The goal: Using proven strategies, cut the clutter to focus on core priorities.
Nano Tools for Leaders—a collaboration between Wharton Executive Education and Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management—are fast, effective tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes…
