All Features
Quality Digest
Sponsored Content
‘My small business has landed a few very lucrative contracts and we’re growing. Honestly, we’re now struggling with quality control. We have management systems in place, and that’s helping, but we’re still having issues. I don’t know where to begin to get a handle on this.” —…
Jeffrey Phillips
I recently had the opportunity to speak to a leadership team that is considering building an innovation capability in their business. I was asked a question I get infrequently, but one I always enjoy answering. The question is this: “What keeps businesses from innovating effectively?”
The answer…
Jess Scheer
T
he world’s worst-kept business secret is that most acquisitions fail. Depending on what metric you use to evaluate success, mergers miss their intended goals by as much as 85 percent of the time. With a failure rate that high, there’s no single cause, and there’s no silver bullet that will…
Michelle LaBrosse
When project managers establish effective routines for their daily work as well as for managing their teams, they develop healthy project management (PM) “hygiene.” This metaphor relates to having consistent processes in place, and it’s what project management is all about. Consistent routines…
Kevin Meyer
Awhile ago I discussed the value created by writing by hand. By writing on whiteboards or scribbling in a notebook, ownership, learning, and understanding is created. Similarly, truly understanding numbers creates ownership, learning, and understanding—thereby creating the potential for action.
I’…
Bob Emiliani
There are many ways to improve your thinking skills. One way is by practicing critical thinking. Teachers require their students, from elementary school on through college and graduate school, to do research to gather information, analyze the validity of data, determine the strengths and…
Bruce Hamilton
A favorite Twilight Zone episode that played during Labor Day weekend put me in mind of the stressful “push production” environment that many organizations still endure today.
In a technical sense, push production refers to launching orders into production before customer requirements are known…
Andrew Hughes
So much has been written about the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) that separating the wheat from the chaff is becoming an ever more gargantuan task. The problem is complicated by the fact that the IoT in consumer markets is hyped beyond comprehension. Although the potential benefits are real…
Tim Healey
Visual management is increasingly common in offices implementing lean. Yet even though signs, large LCD displays, whiteboards, and charts dominate the wall space, these tools often become part of the wallpaper. After just a few months, many offices revert back to meetings and management to provide…
Kelly Graves
Three months ago I sat in a meeting with seven talented executives whom I’ve worked with on and off for five years. For the past two, there have been major undercurrents of friction between them during executive meetings. After attending a few of these, I noticed people were on their best “fake…
Thomas R. Cutler
Established in 1982, the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) is a nonprofit association with a diverse group of stakeholders—including retailers, suppliers of all sizes, automakers, manufacturers, service providers, academia, and the government—working collaboratively to streamline industry…
Nero Haralalka
Double-digit productivity improvements resulting from workflow redesigns and new-capital equipment investments always get a lot of attention. But over time the returns from many smaller, more methodical changes and investments can rival more highly visible projects. Total productivity maintenance…
Barbara A. Cleary
Last year’s Gallup poll of worker satisfaction revealed that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from the work at their jobs—a shocking revelation that has apparently been repeated in many polls.
Barry Schwarz, a professor of psychology at…
Will Huggett
My client, a leader in innovative rail-friction management, was recently preparing for an integrated ISO 14001/OHSAS 18001 audit, and I was asked to provide on-site training to help prepare their employees. The company and its staff are well-versed in audits, having been registered under ISO 9001…
Darin Marcuz, Laron Colbert
This article describes a novel approach to calculating the financial aspect of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), with the result referred to as $EE (as in monetary units). By using $EE, a management team readily can “SEE” their operation in financial terms. Employees are then better able to…
Alan Nicol
A good friend and mentor of mine said, “We should eat the bread that we make.” He is James Wardlaw, now of Summit Engineering Solutions, and he reminded me of this piece of wisdom during a recent conversation.
It means that we should live with the consequences of our own work. We should deal with…
NIST
In today’s increasingly complex manufacturing operations, Murphy’s Law is only an unexpected hiccup away—anything from a data error to an errant vibration to a dulled cutting tool can undermine production. In a future with fully effective sensing and information technologies that anticipate and…
Mike Richman
Of all the tools in the lean toolkit, 5S is the one that has proven to be the most effective—and also the most elusive. It’s effective because the actions needed to sort, set in order, shine, standardize, and sustain mirror the deeper, critically important philosophy of thinking about value, waste…
Matt Kelland
In part one of this article, we looked at ways automation can increase quality and output while saving manufacturers money. Part two considers the ways engineers are developing production systems to take advantage of automation, which requires a different mindset than traditional mechanical…
Matt Kelland
In the world’s largest ketchup processing plant, a robot fires a continuous stream of freshly picked tomatoes across the factory floor using compressed air. A plethora of cameras make minute observations of every tomato as it flies by, checking for ripeness and damage. As soon as a defective…
Chip Johns
Reducing waste, implementing efficiency-promoting practices, and continuously improving operations are the main goals of lean manufacturing ideology. These tasks may seem daunting for a manufacturer at the start of an improvement program, but there are many concrete steps that can be taken to…
Jon Speer
When people talk about U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) design controls, they often place a lot of emphasis on inputs and outputs, verification, transfer, and the design history file. All good things, of course; without them, you won’t meet FDA requirements for your design controls. The…
Ken Koenemann
As a business leader, you spend a lot of your time figuring out how to win. With good reason: The most crucial job of every executive is to align efforts at every level of the organization to deliver wins for the week, for the quarter, and for the year.
The people at the front end of the business—…
Ken Koenemann
In my first article on relevant metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), I explained why limiting management’s strategic planning to high-level goal setting is doomed to failure. For strategic goals to be realized, they have to be translated into daily KPIs that are meaningful to everyone in…
Ken Koenemann
During annual strategic planning meetings, the temptation is always to spend most of the time working on the business, discussing the big-picture strategic plans and breakthrough developments that are critical to the future of the company. But just looking at long-term plans ignores a critical…
