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Knowledge at Wharton
While sales of products like toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and even home appliances have skyrocketed during the coronavirus pandemic, auto sales have experienced the opposite. Through March, April, and May 2020, total vehicle sales in the United States fell to levels not seen since the Great…
Gleb Tsipursky
As a vast number of companies rush to reopen, they’re falling into the trap of “getting back to normal.” They don’t realize that we’re heading into a period of waves of restrictions, due to many states reopening too soon. Indeed, some of the states that opened early have already reimposed some…
Jeffrey Phillips
Throughout human history we’ve constantly sought out tools and capital to make us more productive. From the formation of basic tools to assist in farming to real cultivation and shaping of the land for greater yields, humankind learned to grow food. Further research into genetics, fertilizers, and…
Adam Bahret
‘What’s the MTBF of a human?” A bit of a strange question I ask in my Reliability 101 course. Why ask such a weird question? I’ll tell you why. Because MTBF is the worst, most confusing, crappy metric used in the reliability discipline.
OK, maybe that statement is a smidge harsh, but it does have…
Donald J. Wheeler
In May 2019, James Beagle and I published an article that contained tables for the analysis of mean moving ranges or ANOMmR (pronounced a-nom-m-r). By request of those using this technique, I have expanded these tables. This article contains these expanded tables and repeats the illustrative…
Martin J. Smith
Robert Siegel has peered into the post-Covid-19 future and concluded that anyone hoping for a quick recovery is likely to be disappointed. Which means a great many businesses will fail.
“We can say that with 1,000-percent certainty, and there are many reasons why,” says Siegel, a lecturer in…
Harish Jose
Shigeo Shingo is one of my heroes in industrial engineering. He had a great mind that thrived on curiosity. Today I am looking at Shingo’s Whys. This is in contrast to Taiichi Ohno’s 5 Whys method.
Ohno’s 5 Whys method is one of the tools in Toyota Production System to get to the root cause of an…
Wendy Stanley
Today’s manufacturers have plenty of software solution options that are meant to enhance their productivity. You may be familiar with each of these software packages. However, if you are not, it is important to understand what each of these software packages are designed to deliver.
Enterprise…
Eric Buatois
As the coronavirus wreaks economic turmoil around the world, our modern supply chains are facing unprecedented stress. For months prior to the Covid-19 crisis, trade tensions had been mounting due to the escalating tariff war between Washington and Beijing. A rise in protectionism, coupled with…
William A. Levinson
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the HEROES Act (Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act)1 which will, if approved by the Senate and president, require OSHA to develop a standard for workplace protection against Covid-19.
Under section 120302 the legislation says…
Chip Bell
One of my favorite movies is Stripes. Starring Saturday Night Live comedians Bill Murray and John Candy, the 1981 hit movie features a scene in which new Army recruits (including Murray and Candy) are in a “get-acquainted” circle with their basic training platoon sergeant. Each recruit tells the…
Leigh Turner
Given the death, suffering, social disruption and economic devastation caused by Covid-19, there is an urgent need to quickly develop therapies to treat this disease and prevent the spread of the virus.
But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), charged with the task of evaluating and…
Tom Taormina
Each article in this series presents new tools for increasing return on investment (ROI), enhancing customer satisfaction, creating process excellence, and driving risk from an ISO 9001:2015-based quality management system (QMS). They will help implementers evolve quality management to overall…
Vanessa Bates Ramirez
Long before coronavirus appeared and shattered our preexisting “normal,” the future of work was a widely discussed and debated topic. We’ve watched automation slowly but surely expand its capabilities and take over more jobs, and we’ve wondered what artificial intelligence will eventually be…
Jason Chester
For many manufacturing quality professionals, the thought of updating their statistical process control (SPC) solution is like getting an extra birthday. Many quality experts know that modernizing the way they collect, analyze, and use data is a critical need for their organizations, now more than…
Ryan E. Day
An organization can achieve great results when everyone is working together, looking at the same information generated from the same data, and using the same rules. Changes can be made that affect a company’s bottom line through operational improvements, product quality, and process optimization.…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Blame it on Moore’s law. We live in a digital Pangaea, a world of borderless data driven by technology, and the speed and density with which data can be transmitted and handled. It’s a world in which data-driven decisions cause daily fluctuations in markets and supply chains. Data come at us so…
Ryan E. Day
It’s no secret that manufacturing companies operate in an inherently unstable environment. Every operational weakness poses a risk to efficiency, quality, and ultimately, to profitability. All too often, it takes a crisis—like Covid-19 shutdowns—to reveal operational weaknesses that have been…
Eric Weisbrod
For nearly a century, statistical process control (SPC) has been the cornerstone of quality management and process control. But traditional SPC can’t keep up as the pace of manufacturing accelerates. Twenty-first century manufacturing lines produce multiple products and create thousands of data…
Steve Wise
Quality data are the heart and soul of statistical process control (SPC), the industry standard methodology for measuring and controlling quality in manufacturing processes. Asking manufacturers to give up data is like asking them to give up water. It’s just something that is necessary for their…
Mary Rowzee
During the first six months after the publication of its first edition in June 2019, the AIAG & VDA FMEA Handbook gained popularity in the global automotive industry. Both U.S. and European OEMs have started to require the AIAG VDA approach to failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) in their…
M. Tina Dacin, Laura Rees
A small business has been given the green light to reopen amid the Covid-19 pandemic. What does it need to consider for employees and customers?
Small-business owners are reorganizing physical space to account for continued distancing requirements, and rethinking supply chains to deliver products…
Mariah Hauck
The latest Thomas Industrial Survey revealed the ongoing impacts of Covid-19 on North American manufacturing. Unsurprisingly, 89 percent of the 1,000+ North American manufacturers surveyed reported being affected by Covid-19. Business impacts include decreased demand, staffing issues, and…
Jim Benson
Stop asking, “Which tool should I use?” and start asking, “How can I work smarter?”
When I was a young coder, I asked my mother, “What will I be?” Will I be Jira, Will I be Asana? Here’s what she said to me....“Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. Your app is not a ticket to be free. Que…
Jessica Reiner
For more than 20 years, a class of man-made, potentially cancer-causing chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has commonly been found in humans and the environment. These chemicals are used in a variety of industries and can be found in many consumer products, such as food…
