All Features
Lisa Anderson
Global supply-chain disruptions are rampant. Manufacturers and business owners now routinely deal with triple and quadruple lead times, widespread shortages, escalating prices, and transportation delays. Every link in the supply chain is out of alignment. Think of the imbalance as a sixth-grader on…
William A. Levinson
The U.S. Military Academy’s Honor Code says that “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the USMA’s superintendent, elaborated, “The tenets of honorable living remain immutable, and the outcomes of our leader development system remain the same,…
Sarah Schiffling, Nikolaos Valantasis Kanellos
Everything was about shortages last year. COVID-19 vaccine shortages at the start of the year were replaced by fears that we would struggle to buy turkeys, toys, or electronic gizmos to put under the Christmas tree. For most of the year, supermarket shelves, car showrooms, and even petrol stations…
Jason Tham
It’s common to hear about how the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted supply chain operations. Supply chain leaders are navigating one of the most difficult periods in recent history, and it’s impossible to foretell an end to global disruptions. What many don’t realize, however, is that the pandemic…
Sabine Terrasi
In intralogistics, there has been a real hype about robotics for some years now, whether in trade journals or at fairs. Most of them are classic six-axis articulated robots that are looking for their way out of a production environment and into logistics. The goal: fully automated small-parts…
Prashant Yadav, Antoine Désir
The pandemic has seen an unprecedented global effort to accelerate the development of safe and effective vaccines as well as a rapid expansion of vaccine manufacturing capacity. However, challenges in further scaling up vaccine manufacturing capacity to meet higher-than-expected demand, and the…
Andrea Luangrath
Consumers who see a product on sale being virtually touched are more engaged and willing to pay more than if the item is displayed on its own, according to a recent research paper I co-authored.
Behavioral economists have previously shown that people value objects more highly if they own them, a…
Adel Guitouni, Cynthia Waltho, Mohammadreza Nematollahi
In 2019, global supply chains moved more than $19 trillion in exported goods. The production and sale of many items we need and use—including toys, clothes, food, electronics, and home furniture—depend on global supply chains.
For most of us, supply chains are no longer an abstract concept. The…
Nicholas Dagalakis
The RoboCrane—now hard at work at the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear cleanup sites—is a good example of a successfully commercialized technology invented at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). I’ll try to tell that story here.
During the early 1980s, the manufacturing of…
Mark Greevan
China’s dominance in manufacturing has made it the factory for the world. The subsequent economic growth enriched an ever-expanding middle class, and the country’s retail industry has quickly adapted to supply a growing appetite for consumption.
Some of these developments in the way people spend…
William A. Levinson
Shigeo Shingo was able to summarize entire concepts in single phrases, such as “paint parts, not air.” This meant that paint which misses parts in a spray booth constitutes wasted material and also an environmental aspect. “Ship product, not air” defines similarly empty space in packaging as wasted…
Daniel de Wolff
For years, companies have managed their extended supply chains with intermittent audits and certifications while attempting to persuade their suppliers to adhere to certain standards and codes of conduct. But they’ve lacked the concrete data necessary to prove their supply chains were working as…
Mark Schissel
Increasingly, consumers, investors, and other stakeholders are looking to companies big and small to do what’s right for people and our planet. To meet the demands of these stakeholders, transparency is key. In fact, an Innova Consumer Survey in 2020 revealed that six in 10 global consumers are…
Julia Canale
Believe it or not, the technology that brought you Bitcoin is beginning to make waves in the food manufacturing industry. This technology, called blockchain, is a digital ledger maintained across several computers, then linked through a peer-to-peer network. The system's design makes it difficult…
Kate Zabriskie
From time to time we all have to send our suppliers or customers packing. Does the following client relationship sound familiar? About 100 of her clients use her services once a year. They expect champagne service on a beer budget, and they pull her attention away from the people she works with…
Zach Winn
More and more people are doing their shopping from home these days, and whether they’re ordering groceries, home office equipment, or Covid-19 tests, they increasingly expect their deliveries to be fast and on time.
Companies have struggled to keep up with the rise in orders and expectations. One…
Sachin Waiker
Know who invented the first digital camera? It was Kodak—or more accurately, an engineer at the historic camera company who conceived the technology and built a prototype in 1975. But corporate leadership had no interest in pursuing the idea, given the company’s dominant position in the market for…
Tom Stacey
Europeans and other Western nations have dominated automotive excellence for more than a century. Whether it is the satisfying thud of the door closing on a Volkswagen from Wolfsburg, or the beauty of a Ferrari from Modena, these brands are iconic—and very lucrative for their manufacturers. When we…
Knowledge at Wharton
After more than a year of being pummeled by pandemic-related supply chain shortages, computer maker HP had some good news to report during its third-quarter earnings call last month. Revenue is up 7 percent over the prior-year period, even though it fell short of projections.
The problem isn’t…
John Hayes
Read any article on automated warehouse vehicles, and it’s pretty easy to see there is a lot of hype. Although automation in automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs)—my specialty—have come a long way, they are not replacing all warehouse workers.
In an interview with…
Stavros Karamperidis
Ningbo-Zhousan may not exactly be a household name, but find something in your house made in China, and it’s quite likely it was delivered from there. Ningbo-Zhousan, which overlooks the East China Sea some 200 km south of Shanghai, is China’s second-busiest port, handling the equivalent of some 29…
Lauren Dunford
Manufacturing is stepping up investment as the U.S. economy recovers from the challenges of 2020. Nearly 40 percent of manufacturers have increased CapEx spending, with less than 7 percent planning to spend less, the National Association of Manufacturers reports.
With that investment, factories…
Matt Mong
During a recent interview with Dirk Dusharme, host of Quality Digest’s QDL, we discussed project-based manufacturing, the umbrella term that covers the types of manufacturing done on a project-driven schedule. Some refer to this as “engineer to order” (ETO), a niche in engineering-focused…
Ravi Anupindi
Inoculating the planet from Covid-19 presents an unprecedented logistical challenge like none we’ve seen before. Mobilizing for a world war may be the closest comparison, but in this case, the enemy is invisible and everywhere.
Some of the vaccines require super-cold storage at virtually all…
Rick Gould
Ever since people could tie logs together to form rafts and use them to transport goods by water, seaborne trade has flourished and grown. Historians believe that the first international trade routes were developed 5,000 years ago between the Arabian Peninsula and Pakistan, while by the 18th…
