All Features
Jason Chester
Manufacturers have seen the need to digitize operations for quite some time, but the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the issue to center stage. They’ve had to adapt to sudden, dramatic changes like more remote workers and social distancing across production lines. It didn’t take long to realize the…
Bruce Hamilton
PDCA—plan, do, check, act (or adjust)—is one of those acronymic concepts that regularly finds its way into lean discussions. Descended from Francis Bacon’s scientific method (hypothesis, experiment, confirmation), PDCA has become a ubiquitous catchword for business process improvement. From…
Matt Fieldman
This article is the fourth in a monthly series brought to you by the America Works initiative. As a part of the MEP National Network’s goal of supporting the growth of small and medium-sized manufacturing companies, this series focuses on innovative approaches and uncovering the latest trends in…
Harish Jose
Recently, I came across an interesting insight at Toyota’s website. I was taken aback by the first sentence of this paragraph: “Eventually, the value added by the line’s human operators disappears.”
The complete paragraph is shown below: “Eventually, the value added by the line’s human operators…
Bryan Christiansen
Adherence to lean principles is considered a precondition for success in modern manufacturing. In a resource-intensive environment, anything that improves efficiency and productivity is a godsend. Lean maintenance has become more prominent as manufacturers grapple with sustainability challenges,…
Katherine H. Freeman, Raymond Jeanloz, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
In 2020, the annual committee meeting of the journal we edit was a bit of a mess. It took place in March, just days before the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, so some attendees canceled their travel even as others…
Glenn Daehn
Failure of a machine in a factory can shut it down. Lost production can cost millions of dollars per day. Component failures can devastate factories, power plants, and battlefield equipment.
To return to operation, skilled technicians use all the tools in their kit—machining, bending, welding, and…
Doug Devereaux
The premise for the NIST MEP Digital Supply-Chain Network project is familiar to MEP centers—many small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) are often not ready for Industry 4.0 and don’t know how to implement it. Manufacturers with fewer than 50 employees often lag in digital supply-chain areas…
Chuck Olinger
Most manufacturers want a quality management system (QMS) to meet strict quality values. They need one to expressly meet the needs of their specific organization yet be within the parameters of federal, state, and industry prerequisites.
For example, food, drug, and medical device companies all…
Nicola Jones, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
I am sitting in a darkened room, listening to upbeat music of the type often used at tech conferences to make attendees feel they are part of something big, waiting in eager anticipation for a keynote speaker to appear.
Bang on time,…
Knowledge at Wharton
Wharton professor G. Richard Shell’s graduate course on business responsibility is peppered with students he calls “ethics refugees.” They are young people who earned their bachelor’s degrees and landed a great job only to fall into an ethical or moral trap set by a boss, a co-worker, or the…
Paul Laughlin
Do you see the limitations and over-hyped expectations of today’s approach to artificial intelligence (AI)? Does it need a reboot, a redirection, to finally achieve its potential, one that truly understands us and we can trust?
That is the premise of a great book on the subject, Rebooting AI:…
Isaac Maw
Whether you deal with hydraulic or pneumatic seals such as wiper seals, or other types of seals and O-rings on gearboxes and other mechanical equipment, seals must be able to withstand a range of environments and duties, including extreme temperatures, high pressures, chemicals, and contamination…
Chip Bell
When you played cowboys and Indians as a kid, did you want to be the cowboy or the Indian? I wanted to be the Indian. All the ones I saw in comic books had super-cool moccasins and could move around with their bow and arrows without making a sound. And there were plenty of famous Native Americans…
Iffet Turken
We need instant adaptability to the new skill sets in the unknown future of work. The Covid-19 pandemic is a prime example of how change is accelerating and requiring us to adapt quickly. We often hear about the skill sets we will need but not enough about how executives will adapt to them. A “…
Peter Dizikes
When bringing technologies into the workplace, it pays to be realistic. Often, for instance, bringing new digital technology into an organization does not radically improve a firm’s operations. Despite high-level planning, a more frequent result is the messy process of frontline employees figuring…
Duke University
Price discounts and other promotions on consumer goods can boost a product’s sales in the short term, but that same strategy may destroy a brand’s equity, according to research from Carl Mela, a marketing professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Brands often focus on the short-term…
Jim Hardeman
Customer complaints about service or food safety, and general quality incidents for delivered products, are bound to happen. It’s how brands use these incidents to further enhance product quality and the customer experience that matters.
Restaurant and grocery customers will—and should—report…
Eliot Dratch
Owning and operating a top-quality manufacturing business comes with a multitude of challenges. To help outline points of improvement and give your business a road map to success, California Manufacturing Technology Consulting (CMTC) offers these quality strategies to help you achieve premium…
Dawn Bailey
In 2020, MESA, a small business in Oklahoma, became to date the first and only three-time Baldrige Award recipient.
From a one-person consulting firm founded in 1979, MESA has grown to support a workforce of more than 250 people. The largest privately owned company in its market, it is a…
MIT News
First published June 7, 2021, on MIT News.
It’s no secret that a manufacturer’s ability to maintain and, ideally, increase production capability is the basis for long-run competitive success. But discovering a way to significantly increase production without buying a single piece of new equipment—…
Kimberly Merriman, David Greenway, Tamara Montag-Smit
As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers about remote work.
A good example of this is a recent op-ed written by the CEO of a Washington, D.C., magazine that suggested…
Michael Lee Stallard
Astronaut crews living and working in space experience as a matter of course what many of us experienced unexpectedly during the coronavirus pandemic. Consider these similarities.
Astronauts are physically isolated for a long period of time from family, friends, and the majority of their work…
Carlos Valdes-Dapena
In my work in collaboration and team effectiveness, I am sometimes approached about helping with a “dysfunctional team.” People use the word “dysfunction” liberally and can mean various things by it. I’ve learned some lessons about team dysfunction, and the most important one is that it isn’t what…
Del Williams
To enable raw water for use as cooling water, industrial facilities such as power, processing, and manufacturing plants prefilter raw water from rivers, lakes, gulfs, and coastlines to remove organic, aquatic, and other solids. It’s not as simple as it sounds.
The cooling water is typically used…
