All Features
Christine Alemany
No matter how siloed roles or departments are, no one works in a bubble. What happens in marketing affects finance. And finance’s forecasts have ramifications for customer service. In such an interdependent world, managers must learn to open up with all stakeholders or risk losing others’ faith—and…
Mike Figliuolo
Creating a business plan is the most fundamental step in building a business, and the importance of it cannot be underscored enough. You may ask, “Why do I need a business plan? Why can’t I just launch my business and get to market?”
First, you must define your business and how you’re going to…
Harish Jose
I must confess up front that the title of this column is misleading. Similar to the Spoon Boy in the movie, The Matrix, I will say, “There is no lean problem or a Six Sigma problem. All these problems are our mental constructs of a perceived phenomenon.”
A problem statement is a model of the…
Davis Balestracci
Recently, I’ve had a sad, increasing sense of déjà vu. Twitter has become even more vacuous, and LinkedIn has quickly devolved into a business version of Facebook. Literally right after I finished this draft, I read a newspaper headline: “Twitter Use Eroding Intelligence. Now there’s data to prove…
Boris Liedtke
‘Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants,” said Henry Ford in 1909, “so long as it’s black.” Ford’s strategy of standardization and efficiency made a runaway success of the Model T car and built Ford Motor Co. into one of the world’s biggest automakers. But 110 years on,…
Jason Furness
One of my hobbies is building and flying radio-controlled model aircraft. Not the small foam ones from Kmart but larger 2-m wingspan craft. It is a lot of fun and usually very relaxing.
My birthday was a few months ago, and for the first time I was given a plane. Somehow my family read my mind,…
Annet Aris
Even tedious jobs like cleaning out archives can sometimes lead to great insights. Sifting through my old files recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find a treasure trove of old memories and forgotten facts. Among these papers were notebooks from my engineering studies; I realized that I no…
James daSilva
When you think about Domino’s, you think about getting pizza quickly—30 minutes or less. Domino’s has also become known for technology, including flashy and fun concepts such as the Associated Talent Development (ATD) conference in Washington, D.C. There, attendees heard from Domino’s training and…
Jody Muelaner
Whether we like it or not, manufacturing is becoming digitized and connected. Industry increasingly connects production machinery with internet of things (IoT) devices, gathers multiple real-time sensor information into large datasets, and harnesses machine learning to make data-driven decisions.…
Chip Bell
Many years ago, I worked for the president of a bank famous for aggressive bank acquisitions and rapid growth in the financial services space. The bank ultimately became the Bank of America, and the president became its CEO. Hugh McColl was famous for his swashbuckling leadership style, his…
Matthew M. Lowe
While most business sectors have welcomed the efficiencies and benefits that cloud technologies and software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings bring, the life sciences industry has been slow to embrace external cloud networks. Merely a decade ago, in fact, an International Data Corp. survey showed that…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
As some of you already know, I was in Ford Motor Co.’s corporate quality office during the early 1980s when, just after “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We” aired on NBC, we pleaded with W. Edwards Deming to help us out of a very bad place. One of the things I most remember about those times was that he…
David Dubois
Faced with a growing range of tech solutions in marketing, from AI to big data to blockchain, business-to-business (B2B) companies too often choose the status quo. Recent evidence suggests the divide between success and failure is not about how much companies spend, but how well they integrate…
Kevin Meyer
My favorite part of a recent podcast with James Clear, author of Atomic Habits (Avery, 2018), was the last five minutes, when he talked about a potential downside of good habits. When we decide to improve and create a new practice with the right cues and rewards, we form a new habit. But habits can…
Nicole Radziwill
As early as 2015, McKinsey’s “Digital America” report projected that adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing alone was expected to increase domestic GDP by more than $2 trillion by 2025. This estimate, developed from expectations surrounding productivity enhancements, waste reduction…
Isaac Maw
In manufacturing today, data analysis tools can give management the information it needs to make better decisions in areas such as maintenance and labor. Unfortunately, however, many data analytics systems require large sets of historical data to generate accurate and useful results.
According to…
Vip Vyas, Diego Nannicini
Is your enterprise dominated by passive thinking and prescribed routines? Or is it one that generates fresh thinking and unlocks insights into the future?
The viral popularity of TED Talks—with more than a billion views to date—highlights the innate hunger we have for discovering breakthrough…
Alex Bekker
Do you know what a retailer and a tightrope walker have in common? They both have to balance. For the tightrope walker, the logic is clear. But what’s the balance that a retailer is looking for?
A typical dilemma of shortages vs. storage costs
Although the dilemma of shortages vs. storage costs is…
Mike Micklewright
Industry 4.0 is the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. Also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it follows behind the previous three revolutions of: 1) mechanization, water, and steam power; 2) mass production, assembly lines, and electricity; and 3…
Ryan E. Day
Current business conversation often focuses on data and big data. Data are the raw information from which statistics are created and provide an interpretation and summary of data. Statistics make it possible to analyze real-world business problems and measure key performance indicators that enable…
Nicola Olivetti
According to a report by PwC, industrial sectors worldwide plan to invest $900 billion in Industry 4.0 each year. Despite these growing technology investments, only a few technologies are significantly mature to drive measurable quality impacts. Digital visual management (DVM) is one of them, being…
Jesse Allred
Lean manufacturing is a philosophy focused on maximizing productivity and eliminating waste while creating a quality product. One of the most powerful strategies in the lean toolbox is total productive maintenance (TPM), a system targeting continuous improvement through a holistic approach to…
Ryan E. Day
In the article, “ANSI’s Role in the Wide World of Standards,” (Quality Digest, March 12, 2019), we looked at where standards originate and how companies are involved in developing them. In this article, we’ll outline four points that can help your organization integrate standards into your…
Amadou Diallo
At James Lick High School the slate-gray Chromebooks are ubiquitous. Rolling cabinets stocked with dozens of the laptops sit in classrooms where teachers assign them to students for everything from researching hereditary DNA to writing essays. In this majority-Latino school of 1,100 students, 84…
Shobhendu Prabhakar
Someone recently asked me why quality failures and safety incidents continue to occur despite organizations communicating their quality and safety visions to the workforce, developing and implementing quality and safety management systems, and campaigning day in and day out about quality and safety…
