All Features
Ryan E. Day
With more than 300 employees headquartered in a modern 150,000+ sq ft facility, Plasser American Corp. (PAC) manufactures top-quality, heavy railway construction and maintenance equipment for customers in North America. To stay competitive with international competition, PAC continually looks for…
Nadia Naffi, Ann-Louise Davidson, Houda Jawhar
Today, the survival of many organizations depends on their plans to leverage cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to transform their workplaces into augmented environments.
A recent IBM study found that, as a result of AI and intelligent automation, 120 million workers will need…
Davis Balestracci
Editor’s note: The following browsable offering from Davis Balestracci represents a good chunk of his knowledge base. If you’re looking for improvement ideas, motivation, or a swift kick in the pants for yourself or your team, you’ll find them in this collection of his most popular columns.
In the…
William A. Levinson
The Automotive Industry Action Group’s (AIAG’s) and German Association of the Automotive Industry’s (VDA’s) new Failure Mode and Effects Analysis Handbook (AIAG, 2019) offers significant advances over FMEA as practiced 15 or 20 years ago.1 The publication is definitely worth buying because the new…
Bruce Hamilton
This year marks the 35th anniversary of a remarkable and unfortunately also singular event in my career: In 1985, my employer, United Electric Controls (UE), elected to remove time clocks from the factory.
At the time of this unusual decision, I had already been employed at UE for 14 years in a…
Anton Ovchinnikov
Left to their own devices, humans tend to fall prey to biases that make them poor decision makers. For instance, among other foibles, most purchasing managers routinely under-order. In fact, past research has shown that managers are typically 10 to 20 percent off the mark when it comes to ordering…
Harry Hertz
‘I have been offered a significant increase in salary by another employer and am giving my two-week notice.”
My guess is that this is the most common reason given when employees quit their current job. But is salary the real reason most employees quit? I have always suspected and believed that,…
Aaron Fox
If industrial manufacturing had a buzzword of the decade, it might be “Industry 4.0.” The concept is inescapable, yet it can be hard to define, especially for small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs). After all, SMMs’ capabilities, needs, and budgets look very different from the large companies…
Penelope B. Prime
The United States and China have reportedly reached a so-called phase one deal in their ongoing trade war.
While few details have been disclosed, the agreement principally seems to involve the United States calling off a new round of tariffs that were slated to take effect on Dec. 15, 2019, and…
Nathan Furr
Few companies and CEOs have attracted as much praise, derision, skepticism, and enthusiasm as Telsa Motors and its founder Elon Musk. Having interviewed Musk and the Tesla leadership as part of my research, one of the questions I’m asked most frequently is: How can you make sense of Tesla’s wild…
Corey Brown
Many manufacturers see reducing changeover time as a golden opportunity to improve operational efficiency and reduce waste. For good reason, a simple reduction in changeover time can increase output, reduce inventory, reduce work in progress, and improve responsiveness to customer demand.
Yet, the…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
What a year.
No matter your job, your industry, or your political beliefs, this year has been a heck of a ride. The (still ongoing) trade war with China, manufacturing gains (and losses), the 737 MAX, Hong Kong riots, North Korea, Brexit, impeachment. What a mixed bag of ups and downs that has…
As usual with Quality Digest’s diverse audience, this year’s top stories covered a wide range of topics applicable to quality professionals. From hardware to software, from standards to risk management, from China trade to FDA regulations. It’s always fun to see what readers gravitate to, and this…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Values are beliefs about what is fundamentally important. They affect your decision making and your behaviors, whether you are conscious of them or not. Your real values are reflected by your behavior, and if your espoused values are not consistent with your behavior, you will lose credibility and…
Christy Lotz
After being an ergonomist for almost 15 years, I can honestly say I have never been more excited about the future of this field. When I first began working at Humantech and would do wall-to-wall assessments every week, I didn’t think I would last.
The pen and paper-based methods we used were often…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Some mistakes managers make at the start of a visual conversion are serious and hard to repair. For example, when managers decide to commandeer the task of implementing the visual where—or simply order it into existence. Either way, this is the damaging loss of an opportunity of inestimable value…
Andrea Canidio
The culture of overwork—with the expectation of incredibly long hours and interrupted vacations—is often criticized for its negative impact on workers and organizations. Workers suffer from burnout, are not as productive as they think they are, and make mistakes, as research has made overwhelmingly…
Corey Brown
While on-the-job training is practical for certain applications, manufacturers rely on it too heavily as a method for onboarding and training employees.
Companies looking to train a new workforce should be aware that on-the-job training can: • Hurt productivity • Increase safety risks • Impact…
Nico Thomas
Earlier this year, the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, celebrated its 50th anniversary. The recognition is much deserved for an agency that has worked hard to strengthen minority-owned businesses. Through a network of centers and partners not…
Davis Balestracci
During the late 1970s, quality began to evolve from its historically Neanderthal, passive inspection approach to its current Cro-Magnon state, where its more proactive, project-based approach is bolted on to the operational status quo. Joseph Juran was a pioneer in such efforts. Various subsequent…
Clifton B. Parker
An underlying theme emerged from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence’s fall conference: Artificial intelligence (AI) must be truly beneficial for humanity and not undermine people in a cold calculus of efficiency.
Titled “AI Ethics, Policy, and Governance,” the event…
Ryan E. Day
Headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Plasan North America (PNA) manufactures metal, composite, and ceramic-composite components for defense and commercial applications. PNA brings decades of process experience to bear in creating the world’s most advanced armor, metal components, and…
Thomas R. Cutler
Quality control and inventory control are equally important to the ongoing success of all manufacturing businesses. Both form the basis of an efficient organization that operates at high productivity levels, minimizes waste, and delivers quality products to meet or exceed consumers’ expectations.…
Pawel Korzynski
Dell is doing it. MasterCard, too. Even universities, not exactly bastions of social media influence, are embracing it. Employee advocacy in social media is gaining currency as an effective way to promote an organization by the very people who work in it. Rather than creating ads or hiring social…
The QA Pharm
Weekly CGMP Quiz 1: Part 210 & 211 Subpart A General Provisions. Use with your team for training credit!
This is the first of eleven quizzes on CGMPs that will appear weekly on QA Pharm. Try it yourself, and use it as a discussion tool for your staff groups. Also, each quiz will have one…
