All Features
Steve Garbrecht
Here’s a stat that might surprise you—according to LNS Research, 50 percent of manufacturers have implemented or will be implementing cross-functional groups to support their operational excellence journeys within a year. At the same time, only 18 percent have software or processes in place to…
Annette Franz
I was honored recently to be a guest on Innochat, a weekly Twitter chat that takes place every Thursday at noon Eastern time. The show is about innovation and covers a wide range of topics and angles. If you love talking innovation, make time for this chat every Thursday.
The topic on July 21 was…
Andrew Maynard
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Motors, recently revealed the second part of his master plan for the company, and it’s a doozy. Not content with producing sleek electric cars (which to be fair, were only a stepping stone to greater things), Musk wants to fundamentally change how we live our lives. But the…
MIT News
Ever waited way too long at your doctor’s office for an appointment to start? Those long waits may soon be over. A schedule-optimizing software developed by MIT spinout Arsenal Health gets more patients seen more quickly and could soon be used by thousands of healthcare providers across the…
Harish Jose
Today I’d like to take a look at a lesson from Taiichi Ohno regarding the pursuit of quality. His comment, “The pursuit of quantity cultivates waste, while the pursuit of quality yields value,” struck a chord with me. Among other things, he's referring to the importance of resisting mass-…
Knowledge at Wharton
Have you seen the recent commercial where a young son tells his parents that he’s going to work for GE—as a software developer? Their response was one of bewilderment. In their minds, GE is a manufacturer. The commercial exemplifies the idea that the mental models of leaders—their attitudes,…
Jesseca Lyons
This may be stating the obvious, but engineers are generally very analytical. One of the areas where this trait comes to the fore is in evaluating all the ways things can go wrong. This includes exposure and using tools like failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA).
As an engineer, there’s a good…
Mike Figliuolo
Sponsored Content
M
ost of us are good leaders. Most of us aspire to be great leaders. Few are. What does it take to transcend “good” and become “great?” What’s the secret?
There isn’t one.
The differences between a good leader and a great one boil down to a handful of traits that inspire people…
Denise Robitaille
The great physicist Richard Feynman is best known—at least among laypeople—as the person who solved the mystery of the Challenger space shuttle explosion more than two decades ago.
Many of us remember the image of an O-ring suspended in a glass of ice water sitting on a conference table…
Henrich Greve
Creators beat managers at predicting an innovation’s success—unless they’re predicting the success of their own work.
You probably know someone who owns an Apple Watch, or maybe you own one yourself. Is it a creative product? Well, the multifunction watch was creative the first time it appeared…
John Elliott
In 1978, REO Speedwagon released the single “Roll with the Changes,” a song that never fails to give me an adrenaline rush, especially as I run or bike. I think it’s pertinent to what healthcare professionals are experiencing since health reform became law in 2010 and the Centers for Medicare…
Heinz Schandl
The world is using its natural resources at an ever-increasing rate. Worldwide, annual extraction of primary materials—biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores, and minerals—tripled between 1970 and 2010. People in the richest countries now consume up to 10 times more resources than those in the poorest…
Bruce Hamilton
Early along, as a student of the Toyota Production System (TPS), now referred to as lean, I struggled with some of the concepts and systems. For example, Shigeo Shingo’s claim that a four-hour machine setup could be reduced to less than 10 minutes made me a skeptic.
“Perhaps, when Mr. Shingo…
Micki Vandeloo
It’s so important for manufacturers to find and cultivate valuable partnerships. They can help manufacturers expand their service or product offerings, make their processes more efficient, and help specify and procure just the right equipment.
When manufacturers launch a new product or are making…
Annette Franz
I recently came across the Japanese terms genchi genbutsu and gemba; they’re both key principles of the Toyota Production System, which comprises Toyota’s management philosophy and best practices. Although they’re (lean) management principles and concepts, they apply not only to the employee…
Manfred Kets de Vries
Thrill-seeking employees’ addiction to risk can create havoc in the workplace. Managed correctly, however, their fearlessness can be a great advantage to any organization.
People who knew Lawrence Devon, a VP of sales in a large retail group, viewed him as the quintessential sensation seeker—a…
Jason Furness
For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re aware of an issue that’s holding your enterprise performance back, and you know what to do about it. At that point, there are seven key actions you can take to rapidly implement change, which in turn will allow you to respond to market changes with short…
Kevin Meyer
Few people realize how employee policy manuals, usually given to you on your first day and then mostly forgotten, shape an organization’s culture and thereby its fundamental performance.
To give you a reference point, one company I worked for had an employee manual of 40+ pages. Every section…
Society of Manufacturing Engineers
SME’s July issue of Manufacturing Engineering magazine has published its fourth annual “30 Under 30” issue, celebrating young men and women who have demonstrated leadership, excellence, and hard work in manufacturing. Among the standouts:
Fabian Bartos, 16, of Franklin Park, Illinois, is the…
Robert Fangmeyer
In August 1987, Congress created the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, a public-private partnership that spawned a global movement. This small program was given a great big purpose: to improve the quality and performance of U.S. businesses so as to improve our national competitiveness. As a…
Chad Kymal
In 2014, the International Automotive Task Force (IATF) reported that the automotive industry wouldn’t upgrade the ISO/TS 16949 standard to ISO 9001:2015, much to the dismay of Tier One suppliers. In a survey that same year, Tier One suppliers related their desire to update their management…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Does lean have a clearly delineated limit? When a company starts out on that path, should it expect an endpoint, a completion, an arrival? Is it a forever commitment, or is it a bounded outcome that companies can achieve and then move on? In short, is lean a destination or a process?
These aren't…
Mark Whitworth
Quality is, for every organization and across all industries, a key competitive differentiator. This is especially true in the highly competitive automotive industry, where cost pressures have pushed automakers and their suppliers toward global sourcing and distributed supply-chain operations.…
Evan Miller
Sponsored Content
The CIO for a multiplant packaging company was in an uncomfortable spot. Bringing six newly acquired plants under the corporate umbrella was going smoothly, but he saw that at least in quality systems, there would have to be an unpopular change. The plants were using two…
Ruth P. Stevens
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s the document and imaging industry evolves, imaging workflows become more sophisticated, and products increase in complexity. But with innovation, the industry has faced a new problem: customer confusion. Workflow management now involves both traditional end users in the office as well as IT…
