All Features
Anne Trafton
When MIT announced in March 2020 that most research labs on campus would need to ramp down to help prevent the spread of Covid-19, Canan Dagdeviren’s lab was ready.
For the past two years, Dagdeviren and her lab manager, David Sadat, have run the Conformable Decoders Group using “lean lab”…
Ryan E. Day
The Covid-19 pandemic is disrupting business across the globe, and supply chains are being stressed to their limits by sudden and drastic increases in online commerce. As organizations strive to continue delivering physical product, the industrial internet of things (IIoT) is being considered as a…
Jim Benson
I hear this lament from new practitioners to seasoned veterans: Why isn’t our (insert school of workflow management here) transformation working?
Time and again I see coaches focus on the “deficiencies” of their clients or their companies. If only they would just focus! They don’t do what they say…
Hari Abburi
If there’s one thing the global business community is learning from the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s the outright imperative for companies to be agile “from top to bottom.” This lesson continues to ebb, flow, and unfold daily, wreaking having on bottom lines in every corner of the world.
In fact,…
Brian Lagas
When most people think of lean processes, they believe the goal is to optimize things in a step-by-step approach. The result that companies using lean methods can look forward to is incremental improvements brought about by the elimination of waste.
Individuals who stick with this definition often…
NIST
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a novel, accurate, easy-to-operate, time- and labor-saving way to provide calibrated scale-bar standards for testing the performance of terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) systems.
TLS technology is widely employed to…
Carrie Van Daele
Crossing the street or stepping backward when you encounter another person has already become a habit, as has a routine elbow bump, instead of a handshake.
And that is definitely what is needed during a health crisis. But when the time is right, as a society we must bounce back to social…
Corey Brown
Many industrial businesses have heard of the dangers of relying on tribal knowledge. But what exactly does tribal knowledge mean? How does tribal knowledge impact an organization? How do you capture tribal knowledge?
Organizations spend substantial time and resources developing the knowledge and…
Gleb Tsipursky
So many companies are shifting their employees to working from home to address the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Yet they’re not considering the potential quality disasters that can occur as a result of this transition.
An example of this is what one of my coaching clients experienced more than a…
Sangeet Paul Choudary
The digitization of patient data and the adoption of cloud-based healthcare management systems have created efficiencies and new business models across the value chain. Advancements in AI provide superior decision support systems to doctors, while connected devices enable the remote delivery of…
Jason Chester
During the last several decades, many forward-thinking manufacturers have adopted factory automation for all that it promises—greater efficiency, consistency, productivity, and cost savings. In fact, if you walk through most modern manufacturing plants, you’ll see lines of machines performing a…
Charles Tarrio, Thomas Lucatorto
In 2019, after decades of effort, manufacturers used a new technology to create smartphones with individual circuit features as small as 7 nanometers (nm), or billionths of a meter, enabling them to cram 8.5 billion electronic devices, known as transistors, on a single small chip. Fitting more…
Annette Franz
There’s a little bit of irony in the title of this article. Why do we have to make sure the customer—and employee—experience is crisis-ready? Well, as John Kennedy said, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”
Back in November 2012, I wrote an article titled, “Are You Ready for…
Greg Hoeting
Nuclear power has long been a clean, dependable source of energy throughout the world. However, as power plants age, concerns grow about their continued reliability. Many components make up the infrastructure of a nuclear power plant with the design intent to reduce radiation and contamination…
Ryan E. Day
As shelter-in-place orders make work-from-home (WFH) the new normal, some organizations are struggling with the transition to working as a remote team. But there are companies that have been doing so for quite some time, and we can benefit from their experience.
Covid-19 is forcing thousands of…
Knowledge at Wharton
Long stretches of empty supermarket shelves and shortages of essential supplies are only the visible impacts to consumers of the global supply-chain disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Unseen are the production stoppages in locations across China and other countries and the shortages of raw…
Evident Scientific
F unction often relates to form, and this is particularly true within the world of manufacturing. Rigorous quality assessment procedures ensure that components are manufactured according to their precise specifications before being assembled into the fully functioning whole. These assessments might…
Mark Rosenthal
Training Within Industry (TWI) job instruction is built around a four-step process titled “How to Instruct.”
Steps two and three are the core of the process: • Present the operation • Try out performance
I want to discuss step three: Try out performance
Teaching back as learning
All too often I…
Jason Chester
Even in the midst of the pandemic, product safety and quality remain critical. For many manufacturers, complex quality management systems and procedures stand in the way of agile responses and effective operational optimization. Cloud technology provides the means to dramatically simplify quality…
Cheryl Carleton
The labor market is changing rapidly with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Many organizations are laying off almost all of their workers, while others are considering which workers to lay off, which to furlough, and which to keep. Alternatively, some are expanding their labor forces.
When…
Julius DeSilva
ISO 9001 certifications have seen a decline during the past two years, per data from ISO. Some say the standard has gotten too complicated with the introduction of organizational context, risk-based thinking, and the removal of mandatory documented procedures. Even a few of QMII’s clients have…
Bruce Hamilton
Most lean folks use 5 Whys daily to problem solve, but relatively few are familiar with a clever problem-solving device developed 30 years ago by Deming Prize winner Ryuji Fukuda, called the why-not diagram.
Because objection is a natural human response to new ideas, Fukuda created the why-not…
Kathleen Wybourn
Business continuity is a relatively simple idea. Plan ahead so you can keep your business successful during times of difficulty. Key management transitions, loss of a major customer, the impact of a lawsuit, perhaps a fire or an earthquake. But what if that “difficulty” is a global public health…
Donald J. Wheeler, Al Pfadt
Each day we receive data that seek to quantify the Covid-19 pandemic. These daily values tell us how things have changed from yesterday, and give us the current totals, but they are difficult to understand simply because they are only a small piece of the puzzle. And like pieces of a puzzle, data…
Stanislav Shekshnia
Corporate boards across Europe are reacting to the coronavirus pandemic in three ways. For some, it’s business as usual. “Crisis is the business of the CEO; the board does not need to adjust its workings,” the chair of one such board told me. Other boards are going in the opposite direction,…
