All Features
Evan Miller
Sponsored Content
The Mueller Co. was ready for a change. The multiplant manufacturer of water distribution products had an excellent reputation in the marketplace, but that good reputation came at a price. Internal scrap and rework metrics told the story. High costs reduced the bottom line and…
Jeffrey Phillips
Ihave been thinking a lot about the challenges that midsized and larger companies face when trying to do more innovation. It’s not a secret that they need to do more innovation; everyone knows this. It’s not really a secret what innovation is, or what the potential benefits might look like. We’ve…
Jonathan O’Hare
Closed-loop manufacturing and the digital thread are new buzzwords being thrown around a lot these days, but do we understand their significance? In all manufacturing processes, there are three key elements consisting of “sensing, thinking, and acting” that drive your manufacturing productivity.…
Nikolaus Correll
America’s manufacturing heyday is gone, and so are millions of jobs, lost to modernization. Despite what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin might think, the National Bureau of Economic Research and Silicon Valley executives, among others, know this is true. A new report from PwC estimates that 38…
Volodymyr Bilotkach
On April 9, 2017, a passenger was forcibly removed from a United Airlines flight from Chicago O’Hare to Louisville after the carrier was unable to find volunteers to accommodate four of its employees on standby. Many articles have reported that airlines routinely overbook their flights, and…
Morten Bennedsen
Employee absenteeism is a problem for companies everywhere. When employees are away from the office, for good reasons or not, the cost has been measured at somewhere around 4 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. Absences lead to delayed work, colleagues take on more, and projects are…
Knowledge at Wharton
The mismanagement of bet-the-company business crises has become pandemic. Consider just the most recent examples.
In December 2016, Yahoo disclosed that three years earlier hackers had stolen confidential information from more than 1 billion accounts, including users’ names, birthdates, phone…
Laurie Locascio
Like a lot of scientists, I am very goal-oriented, so after I got my Ph.D. in toxicology, I set out to become a leader in my field by the time I was 40. To get there, I knew I had to be acknowledged by the top researchers in my field, get invited to speak at important conferences, organize…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
The year: 1989. Florida Power & Light had just won the Deming Prize, Japan’s national quality award, and became the first overseas company to do so. There were a lot of high-flown speeches in the aftermath and deservingly so. But for me, what stuck were the words of CEO Charles Turner.
“The…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
For manufacturers, big parts pose big challenges. How does one measure parts that are in excess of 15 ft and also have complex geometry? Design and inspection are part and parcel of all manufacturing operations, but as product size increases, and part geometry grows more complex…
Mike Richman
On our most recent episode of QDL from this past Fri., April 14, 2017, we took a close look at innovation and engineering. Here’s a quick recap:
“SAE Institute Creates Webisodes to Benefit STEM Education” This piece demonstrates the good work that the San Jose, California, campus of the SAE…
Gleb Tsipursky
Let’s say you’re interviewing a new applicant for a job, and you feel something is off. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you’re a bit uncomfortable with this person. She says all the right things, her resume is great, she’d be a perfect hire for this job—except your gut tells you…
Greg Cresswell
Occasionally, my colleagues and I will take a step back from the day-to-day and have a more philosophical discussion about the field of ergonomics. Recently, the question was raised, “In the plan-do-check-act continuous improvement cycle, which step is the most important?” This sparked some…
Jason Furness
In a previous column based on our recent book, Manufacturing Money (Amazon Digital, 2015), we explained how to maximize ROI. Here we describe some changes that business owners and managers can make on their way toward becoming a Black Belt in a manufacturing and distribution business.
Before any…
Mark Whitworth
Supplier quality assurance (SQA) is the process that ensures a supplier reliably provides goods or services that satisfy the customer’s needs. This process is collaborative to make certain the supplier’s offerings meet the agreed-upon requirements with minimum inspection or modification.…
LaRae Quy
To survive growing up on a remote cattle ranch in the middle of Wyoming, I needed to be scrappy, gritty, and tenacious. If I wasn’t keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes, I was avoiding horned bulls charging my horse as I tried to cut them from a herd of cows.
I learned many important life lessons…
Dawn Bailey
The message for audience members who attended the 29th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference held last week was, “Prepare for an inspiring journey.” This was the advice of keynote presenter Polly LaBarre, co-founder and director of Management Lab (MLab) and co-founder of Management Innovation…
Lois Kelly
It’s discouraging and frustrating to work tirelessly on solving what you think is an important issue and nothing happens. Despite brilliant thinking, smart teammates, and innovative solutions, the organization never fully embraces the new approach.
There are a lot of reasons why good ideas never…
Bruce Hamilton
I grew up in a small manufacturing company where nine different languages were spoken. English was the language of managers, office workers, and some of our production employees. Additionally, these languages were spoken in our factory: Armenian, Laotian, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Italian, Creole,…
Harish Jose
In this article, I will be looking at entropy in the manufacturing world. Entropy is generally defined as a measure of disorder. This general definition can sometimes be inadequate.
Let’s look at the example of a desk in an office. One could say that if the desk appears to be in order (i.e., neat…
Chad Kymal
What is enterprise quality? Simply put, it is a system where there is one quality manual, and a core of common processes, work instructions, and forms and checklists for a multisite environment. Why is this a good idea? Because it saves money.
Figure 1 illustrates how enterprise quality takes…
Michael Jovanis
Sponsored Content
Particles of metal in children’s medicine. Adulterated baby formula. Spontaneously combusting smartphones. When scandal is only a tweet away, companies can’t hide from quality failures.
High-profile quality problems like these can not only harm consumers, but also lead to huge…
Steven Sweldens
The tide of popular opinion seems to have turned against multitasking. Recent articles scoff at the notion that people could satisfactorily complete more than one activity at a time, labeling it a myth and a fallacy. This purist pushback in the press mirrors common resentment among professionals…
Julie Winkle Giulioni
The complexity, connectivity, and pace of business today demand that employees and leaders understand their work like never before.
This goes beyond “corporate speak’ and buzzword vocabulary; everyone in today’s organizations must have a working knowledge of the strategy and how that translates…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
My wife and I purchased a new car this year. The employee handling the closing paperwork gave a compelling presentation concerning the extended warranty, which we also purchased. His presentation included a litany of high-tech components and even higher-tech systems that could…
