All Features
Ian Woodward
High altitudes hold a special place in the history of human achievement. We remember Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepalese sherpa Tenzing Norgay as the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Other altitude pioneers include Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to fly in outer…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
We are fast approaching the time when companies realize and are ready to accept the astonishing power of empowering people, and the remarkable changes that can result. Yes, people as a resource for ideas is at the core of a transformed work culture and incalculable financial benefits—as long as…
James Rawstron
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Wichita, Kansas, is known as the “Air Capital of the World.” This is due in part to the National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) at Wichita State University, an advanced aircraft manufacturing laboratory. The area is home to notable aerospace and defense OEMs, including…
Bonnie Stone
Lean, also known as “lean manufacturing” or “lean production,” focuses on maximizing customer value by removing waste and eliminating defects. Lean tools are about understanding the process, looking for waste, preventing mistakes, and documenting what you did.
Let’s look at five lean tools used…
Knowledge at Wharton
The mere mention of keeping up with overflowing email, constant meetings, and time-sucking conference calls makes many of us groan and roll our eyes. How did we all get so busy? A major culprit is the sharp rise in cross-functional collaboration over the past several years.
Today, it’s often not…
Tonianne DeMaria
Lean says: Manage flow. Your brain says: My work isn’t linear. My day is filled with interruptions, and so I don’t have the “luxury” of flow. What’s at play here: functional fixedness.
If there is one area where there’s not an obvious transfer of lean principles from manufacturing to knowledge…
Jon Speer
What exactly is a risk-based quality management system (QMS)? This is a timely topic to get into. In 2016, ISO 13485—“Medical devices”—“Quality management systems” was updated, and one of the key concepts presented is the idea of a risk-based QMS.
Historically, regulations have almost exclusively…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
It’s quite frustrating to be not heard when you speak up, and unfortunately, it’s more common than you might think.
Speaking up in a group setting is one of the biggest challenges many people face. You have some valuable information and opinions to share, but no one listens to you. It can be hard…
Ryan E. Day
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Headquartered in Algona, Washington, Dynacraft is a diversified global manufacturer of PACCAR medium and heavy-duty truck parts sold under the Kenworth, Peterbilt, and DAF nameplates. For more than 40 years, Dynacraft has provided the company’s truck manufacturing divisions and…
Jason Furness
You have defined what you want as an outcome of the change program; you have looked at how to understand your financial statements and how to use them to assess options. You have looked at the obstacles that lay in your path. Now we are going to start to look at your business, specifically.
Why…
Fred Schenkelberg
The term “Weibull” in some ways has become a synonym for reliability. Weibull analysis = life data (or reliability) analysis. The Weibull distribution has the capability to describe a changing failure rate, which is lacking when using just mean time between failures (MTBF). Yet, is it suitable to…
Kevin McCardle, Ilia Tsetlin, Robert Winkler
Academics and corporate innovators both spend their workdays pursuing breakthroughs that may never materialize. Venturing into unknown territory carries fairly high potential rewards, but also a fairly high risk of failure.
When working on a research project, it can be difficult to decide when to…
Kevin Meyer
Changing an organization’s structure seems to be the common knee-jerk response to internal issues. My prior company embarked on a reorganization to eliminate arbitrary site- and function-based structures so that we could align around corporatewide value creation processes.
During the…
The QA Pharm
If I could summarize in one page the most important lessons I have learned in pharmaceutical quality assurance over the last 40 years, this is it.
When it comes to putting a procedure into written words, it doesn’t mean the words will be effective in getting people to follow the procedure.
The…
Jeffrey Phillips
I
was thinking over the weekend that for years we've positioned innovation incorrectly. Too often we position innovation as creating a new and valuable offering or solution, ready when customers demand new products and services. In other words, we've positioned innovation as something to do to…
Steven Brand
Manufacturing’s role is changing and evolving in ways that make the traditional methods of creating products and services outdated. As manufacturing enters a dynamic era, policymakers need new approaches and improved capabilities to save on costs while fulfilling the changing needs of consumers.…
Olympus
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High-volume manufacturers need fast, nondestructive testing methods to help avoid material mix-ups and to meet customer quality requirements. Quality assurance (QA) inspectors are responsible for evaluating incoming raw materials by determining their elemental makeup and…
Jennifer V. Miller
According to a Deloitte Consulting study, 88 percent of executives state that to build an “organization of the future,” they must transform their business practices. Transformation requires extensive change, which is difficult. Or is it?
In the Harvard Business Review article, “Stop Using the…
Tonianne DeMaria
Lean says: Map the value stream. Your brain says: I’ve been doing this so long, it’s become second nature to me. The steps are right here—in my head.
What’s at play here: • Illusion of transparency • Curse of knowledge/information imbalance • Status quo thinking • Groupthink/false consensus…
Timothy Lozier
Document control is probably one of the most sought-after applications within the quality management system (QMS). It allows an organization to manage the creation, approval, distribution, and archiving of all controlled documents and processes. It is an integral part of quality, environmental…
Kemper Lewis
President Trump has long talked about reinvigorating U.S. manufacturing, which has suffered heavy job losses as a result of automation, trade deals, and other factors. In July, the Trump administration even celebrated “made in America” week by showcasing things built in the United States and…
Eric Stoop
General Motors (GM) recently published updated customer-specific requirements for IATF 16949 compliance. The new requirements take effect Nov. 1, 2017, and cover layered process audit (LPA) requirements in greater depth than previous versions.
LPAs use a series of frequent audits to check high-…
Harish Jose
Today I will look at epistemology at the gemba. Epistemology is the part of philosophy that deals with the theory of knowledge. It tries to answer the questions, “How do we know things, and what are the limits of our knowledge?” I have been learning about epistemology for a while now, and I find…
Scott Berkun
While researching my new book, The Dance of the Possible (Berkun Media, 2017), I studied the history of some of the most misleading ideas that have been popularized about creative thinking. Like the myth of epiphany and the other creative myths of innovation, these sayings are misleading despite…
Bruce Hamilton
The first two books I ever read about lean were Zero Inventories (McGraw-Hill, 1983) by Robert Hall, and Japanese Manufacturing Techniques (Free Press, 1982) by Richard Schonberger. In 1985, these definitive academic works were among just a few sources of information about what was then referred…
