All Features
Taran March @ Quality Digest
One thing you can say about that critical commodity called steel: It gets around. Ancient ironware excavated in what is now Turkey has been dated to 1800 B.C. Some 1,200 years later, blacksmiths in Sri Lanka employed furnaces driven by monsoon winds to produce a high-carbon steel. The Tamils of…
Beth Colbert
When we think of champions of manufacturing today, we tend to think of some of the big companies such as Boeing, Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. But companies don’t form themselves, and patents don’t automatically mean innovation—people do.
Not all companies have inventors. However, all…
GBMP
American Rheinmetall Systems (ARS) LLC, formerly Vingtech, is located in Biddeford, Maine. Established in January 2007, as part of a Norwegian company that had received a supplier contract for the U.S. Army’s CROWS remote weapon station program, the company was acquired by the Rheinmetall Group in…
William Hang, Zihua Liu, Kevin Yang
It seems to happen to every company, big or small, newcomer or seasoned expert. You ship a product design off to a manufacturer, and something goes wrong on the manufacturer’s side. The problem crops up in the design, production, or packaging, and leads to a bad apple in a batch of otherwise great…
Arun Hariharan
In the last week of August 2017, two extreme weather events occurred on opposite sides of the world. Hurricane Harvey brought record-breaking rain and catastrophic flooding to Houston, Texas, causing loss of life, mass evacuation of people, and damage estimated to be in billions of dollars. Around…
Mike Richman
Last week, my friend and colleague, QD editor in chief Dirk Dusharme, wrote an uplifting and important column in this space. Titled “The Day We All Looked for the Same Thing,” Dirk’s article used last week’s solar eclipse, seen in its totality in so many places around the United States, as a motif…
Thomas R. Cutler
Flawless order fulfillment from a distribution center or warehouse to the customer’s door is the neglected leg of the supply chain. Ironically, without careful attention to the last mile, e-commerce customers are disappointed with the quality, accuracy, and condition of the products being…
MIT News
The first of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) half online, half in-person supply chain management master’s degree programs is making a profit and bringing dozens of new degree-seeking students to campus.
The results from the blended program in supply chain management are…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Our August 11, 2017, episode of QDL looked at the role of technology in after-market service, stairs that help you up, Fidget Cubes, and more.
“Climbing Stairs Just Got Easier With Energy-Recycling Steps”
These stairs actually help you go up.
“The Curious Case of the Fidget Cube”
How a product…
Ryan E. Day
Innovation within industry is a must to improve processes, products, and customer experience. Although some innovations, like Amazon’s floating distribution center, seem implausible, other sci-fi technology is already revolutionizing and redefining the way employees accomplish tasks.
Tales of…
Loic Sadoulet, Giovanni Tassini
Making the most of its position as an important seaport, Venice’s remarkable economic development during the Middle Ages relied on network effects, contractual innovation, and coordination among the players involved in long-distance trade. Companies today still exploit these mechanisms to succeed…
Intertek
Sponsored Content
As widely useful and broadly applicable as it may be, the ISO 9001 standard covering general requirements for quality management systems (QMS) cannot address all stakeholder needs in every sector. Component functions and operations of discrete industries often require additional…
Ryan E. Day
During the 1950s, W. Edwards Deming championed quality management philosophies that helped Japan develop into a world-class industrial center. In 1954, Joseph M. Juran was invited to lecture by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers. His visit marked a turning point in Japan’s quality…
Anna Nagurney
The American economy is underpinned by networks. Road networks carry traffic and freight; the internet and telecommunications networks carry our voices and digital information; the electricity grid is a network carrying energy; financial networks transfer money from bank accounts to merchants.…
Mark Whitworth
Supplier quality assurance (SQA) is the process that ensures a supplier reliably provides goods or services that satisfy the customer’s needs. This process is collaborative to make certain the supplier’s offerings meet the agreed-upon requirements with minimum inspection or modification.…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
As manufacturing becomes increasingly oblivious of where one country stops and another begins, the responsibilities of quality managers have extended beyond the safely measurable and into the loosely regulated wilds of global competition. Quality control now requires a sense of how different…
Michael Jovanis
Sponsored Content
Particles of metal in children’s medicine. Adulterated baby formula. Spontaneously combusting smartphones. When scandal is only a tweet away, companies can’t hide from quality failures.
High-profile quality problems like these can not only harm consumers, but also lead to huge…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
‘Made in the U.S.A.” Do people really care about those words on the label, and more important, how motivated are they to buy American-made products? The answer is yes... and sort of. Yes, consumers in the United States say they want to “buy American” and are willing to pay up for it. According to…
Bruce Hamilton
Most often when we think of a wheel, it’s in the context of transportation, one of the more obvious and ever-present of the 7 wastes in lean. In fact, the first likely use of a wheel and axle was not for transport but for processing—actual work.
According to the Smithsonian, the potter’s wheel…
Adams Nager
Depending on whom you ask, it’s either the best of times or the worst of times for global trade. Protectionists villainize trade as damaging to U.S. workers, while on the other side of the coin, pure laissez faire free traders consider trade as a pure positive for the United States.
Mexico and…
Roger Jensen
For several decades, manufacturers have been pursuing lean on their shop floors to reduce costs and improve lead times through waste elimination and process improvement. They have been less successful, however, in reaping lean’s potential benefits in their purchasing, planning, and supply chain…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Do we have another automotive cheating scandal? Could helping our economy be as easy as just paying our vendors faster? Last week’s Quality Digest Live contained answers to those questions and a discussion between myself and my co-host, Quality Digest publisher Mike Richman. During the show, we…
Jean-Noel Barrot
Operating a small business, the backbone of the U.S. economy, has always been tough. But small businesses have been disproportionately hurt by the Great Recession, losing 40 percent more jobs than the rest of the private sector combined. Interestingly, as my research with Harvard’s Ramana Nanda…
Stefan Geib
While the fallout of the United Kingdom’s decision to exit the European Union has sent shockwaves throughout the political and economic world, Brexit is merely a footnote in the global supply chain risk story. According to the latest risk index from the Chartered Institute of Procurement &…
Daniel Blake, Caterina Moschieri
Pulling out of a country is an expensive proposition for a multinational firm, but it is sometimes required for the corporate bottom line. If the host country changes laws or even expropriates a subsidiary, it is often time to leave or divest.
Divestiture—pulling out assets or closing down part…
