All Features
Jones Loflin
I had just finished a keynote presentation and was at the book table set up by the client. Participants were invited to pick up one or more of my books, and the company would pay for them.
One excited audience member quickly made their way to the table and was perusing their possible choices. They…
Eric Linxwiler
Quality management has evolved far beyond traditional checklists and periodic inspections. For complex supply chains, quality is no longer a static endpoint. It’s a dynamic real-time process deeply interwoven with collaboration, transparency, and data-driven decision-making. As supply chains grow…
Donald J. Wheeler
In last month’s article, “ANOVA and the Process Behavior Chart,” we saw how both techniques use the same basic comparison to answer completely different questions. Here, we’ll look at a case history where both techniques were used.
A physical property of a mass-produced item was important to its…
Michael Sharp
Understanding the inner workings of your industrial artificial intelligence (IAI) system is crucial if you want it to add measurable value to your manufacturing operations. Here, we’ll dig into one important aspect of every AI: the inputs, aka your data. Including the right type and the right…
Matt Tweedy
In global manufacturing, two key goals—intertwined yet distinct—heavily dominate the industry’s agenda: addressing the growing demand for environmentally sustainable practices, and optimizing operational efficiency. With these priorities in mind, companies are seeking multifaceted solutions that…
Harish Jose
Today I’m looking at the free energy principle (FEP) by the British neuroscientist Karl Friston. The FEP basically states that to resist the natural tendency to disorder, adaptive agents must minimize surprise. This has implications for the gemba, as you’ll see.
A good example to explain this is…
Steven Garner
In the ever-changing landscape of business management, the concept of quality has undergone significant transformations. What began as a focus on maintaining standards such as ISO 9001 and AS9100 is evolving into a more holistic approach encompassing organizational excellence. Tom Taormina’s book…
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…
