All Features
Willie L. Carter
Becoming a process-focused organization requires a sustained effort, and for most industrial and service organizations that is a difficult task. Failure to improve the performance of your processes leads to a failure to improve the organization and results in improperly managing the business.
All…
Kevin Meyer
One of my great pleasures is going for a walk on the six-mile-long and generally empty beach a couple blocks from my house. There’s the remnant of a long-dormant (hopefully!) volcano at one end that is strangely humbling. A long walk in such a beautiful spot creates a connection between nature, my…
Mark Rosenthal
Imagine a factory with a large monument machine. It takes several days to set up. When it does run, it runs very fast, much faster than you can actually use its output. Therefore, you take the excess output and store it to use later. Actually, you don’t know how many items you need to make, so you…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
The six core questions you see below are a window to help us understand why we struggle at work. Why? Because the answers to them are missing! The remedy is to first notice that—to notice the motion caused by those deficits. Then remove the motion by implementing visual answers. Imbed the answers…
Bonnie Stone
Dramatic cost savings. Lead time and inventory reductions. Improved transactional processes. Although lean has its roots in manufacturing, nearly every industry and type of organization around the world can benefit from it. A little while back, we reviewed the “Five Critical Lean Tools” that are a…
Benjamin Kessler
The rise of the independent worker is arguably the biggest change to hit the global labor market in decades. Well more than 30 percent of the United States workforce reportedly lack “real jobs” working full-time for a conventional company, and that figure, some say, may top 40 percent by 2020. If…
Debashis Sarkar
The cheating at Kobe Steel shook not just Japan but the entire manufacturing world. As Kobe Steel CEO Hiroya Kawasaki revealed, about 500 companies had received its falsely certified products, which affected not only those companies but also its entire supply chain. However, the issue at Kobe was…
Manfred Kets de Vries
According to the most recent report of the Economic Policy Institute, the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio in the United States has gone down from 286 to 1 (in 2015) to 271 to 1 (in 2016). This number may disappoint many top executives who were hoping to see it return to its peak of 383 to 1,…
Ryan E. Day
In part one of this article, we explored how Woodland Trade Co. (WTC) leveraged high-accuracy portable CMMs to help land tight-tolerance aerospace contracts, and even earn Boeing’s Supplier of the Year award. Here in part two, WTC’s QA manager William Shanks reveals the advanced technology that…
Jason Furness
In a previous article I wrote about the reasons why so many lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and other improvement programs fail. In this article I’m going to expand on reason No. 1: the Academy Award Syndrome.
Academy Award Syndrome
The Academy Award Syndrome is where a program or project is…
Ryan E. Day
Manufacturing activities have strong ties to economic prosperity. Deloitte’s 2016 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index states, “Nations and companies are striving to advance to the next technology frontier and raise their economic well-being.” It’s no surprise that the manufacturing sector is…
Willie L. Carter
What differentiates a lean-thinking organization from a traditional one? Basically, the lean-thinking organization is grounded in the answers to two simple questions: “What do my customers value?” And, “What organization and work processes inside my company will most directly deliver that value?”…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
What must it be like to be Elon Musk? Here’s a guy who can successfully launch the world’s most powerful rocket into space, a feat hitherto reserved for nations with decent budgets. Since 2010 his commercial company, SpaceX, has been ferrying satellites to their permanent homes, and delivering…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
It’s easy enough to make a visual device—or borrow an idea for one from something you saw in a book or at another workplace. Reproducing other people’s ideas (as long as you say thank you) is a positive, and it can keep you going for a while. But not for very long.
Unless you are a natural-born…
Michael Armstrong, Kenneth Klassen
Patients often wait weeks or months for medical appointments. Canada’s Fraser Institute recently reported that Canadians typically wait 10 weeks to see specialists. Long wait times are one reason Canada ranks behind other developed countries in healthcare quality.
In the United States, waits are…
Jun Nakamuro
The sad truth is that the word “engagement” is not very engaging. It’s one of those fluffy, ambiguous terms that have become all too familiar around the business world, like “empowerment” and “respect.” What does engagement really mean, and how do you, as a leader, engage your workforce? The…
Harish Jose
It’s not easy to find topics to write about, and even if I find good topics, it has to pass my threshold level. As I was meditating on this, I started to think about procrastination and ambiguity. So my column today is about the importance of “fuzzy concepts.” I am using the term in a loose sense…
Kevin Meyer
Ever since I visited Italy more than a decade ago my inner geek has had a fascination with traffic engineering. If you’ve visited Italy, or many similar places, you probably know why. Traffic appears chaotic, thanks in part to what appears at first glance to be a lack of signals and other controls…
Steven Brand
The global aerospace and defense (A&D) industry grew by 2.4 percent and generated about $674 billion in 2016, according to a Deloitte 2017 study. California alone was responsible for generating $62 billion a year in revenue in 2014, according to a 2014 California Aerospace Industry Economic…
Markus Grau
Industry 4.0, cyber-physical systems, or the internet of things (IoT): the paradigm shift in the production economy is cheerfully progressing under various names. What they all refer to is the digitalization and networking of production processes and environments. The idea is by no means new. The…
Bruce Hamilton
Speaking at the 2003 Shingo Conference, Guy Briggs, general manager of North American operations for General Motors lamented, “We spent the 1980s ‘counting robots’ before we realized that it’s people that make the difference in our business.”
He was alluding to the thirty-five billion (yes,…
Jim Benson
People are always asking us for help with ways to prioritize. Almost everyone believes prioritization to be an action in and of itself. They ask, “What mechanisms do you use to prioritize?” However, we find most often that prioritization issues, like trust issues, are a symptom of deeper problems…
Harish Jose
I recently read Jordan Ellenberg’s wonderful book, How Not To Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (Penguin Books, 2014). I found the book to be enlightening and a great read. Ellenberg has the rare combination of being knowledgeable and capable of teaching in a humorous and engaging way.…
Trevor Blumenau
How does one define quality in the context of a warehouse? The perfect warehouse is clean, has everything in its place, and is easy to access. Your warehouse looks like the one below, right?
You have a perfectly accurate database table that tells you exactly where everything is, correct? And…
Bonnie Stone
Lean, also known as “lean manufacturing” or “lean production,” focuses on maximizing customer value by removing waste and eliminating defects. Lean tools are about understanding the process, looking for waste, preventing mistakes, and documenting what you did.
Let’s look at five lean tools used…
