All Features
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Manufacturers are constantly tweaking their processes to get rid of waste and improve productivity. As such, the software they use should be as nimble and responsive as the operations on their factory floors.
Instead, much of the software in today’s…
Aliyah Kovner
It’s 1 p.m. on a sunny afternoon in July—smack dab in the middle of summer break—and a perfect 75° outside, but Jonathan Park is laser-focused. Though he could be strolling down a beach, or at home browsing social media, this 16-year-old is bent over a lab bench, intently pipetting reagents to run…
Vibhas Rattanjee
Leadership development might be one of the most significant loss-making ventures in modern business. Companies spend big money on developing leaders—about $3.4 billion annually by some estimates—yet research shows that 50 to 60 percent of executives fail to achieve the strategy they were hired to…
Susan Whitehead
It’s a Catch-22 for a manufacturing supervisor: You need to train new hires properly to master the skills for the job, but your own daily job duties can’t wait. Putting time aside to train workers is especially challenging if you’re a small to medium-sized manufacturer (SMM) with tight, daily…
Julien Pollack, Petr Matous
Someone we know recently told us about a team-building event that proved anything but.
The chief executive who arranged it loved mountain biking. So he chose a venue to share his passion with his team. On the day, he shot around the track. Others with less experience took up to three hours longer…
Jack Dunigan
It happens easily enough and usually innocently enough. You start a business or organization then endure what is often a long and expensive learning curve. Along the way you learn. You learn a lot. You discover the competencies and incompetencies of those working with you. You learn how to manage…
Leading2Lean
It’s no news that U.S. manufacturing has a workforce problem. However, a new survey conducted by Leading2Lean (L2L) offers some unexpected hope. The survey reveals that a new generation of workers could spur industrywide innovation.
The 2019 L2L Manufacturing Index, an annual measurement of the…
Gabriel Hawawini
Given the recent, renewed intensification of the shareholder vs. stakeholder debate, the concept of value creation has become more ambiguous. On whose behalf should organizations generate value? For owners, employees, upstream and downstream partners, or local communities immediately affected by…
Zara Brunner
Recently, I got the chance to travel to Youngstown, Ohio. As I came into town, it struck me that Youngstown was like many other cities across America, including my hometown of Buffalo, New York. In its heyday, Youngstown was a center of manufacturing and steel production—industries that employed…
Matt Minner
There is a lot of buzz these days in the manufacturing sector about robots—and how they can help manufacturers address some of the challenges they face in today’s market, such as increased productivity and the scarcity of skilled workers.
But what exactly do analysts and automation experts mean…
Edward Herceg
Those of us old enough to remember the “good old days” recall that grade school focused on learning the three R’s: readin’, ’ritin’, and ’rithmetic. In the world of sensors, there are also three Rs: repeatability, resolution, and response. Despite how important these sensor parameters are, there is…
Sunni Massey
The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) Manufacturers’ Outlook Survey: First Quarter 2019, found that 71.3 percent of the U.S. manufacturers surveyed cited the inability to attract and retain skilled workers as their top concern for the sixth consecutive survey. Analysts have called it a “…
Knowledge at Wharton
A recent family biking vacation in the Dolomites region of Italy had my family and I all swept up in the charms of Northern Italy. Snow-capped peaks near the Austrian border, endless apple orchards, award-winning Chenin Blanc, and quaint Italian villages with healthy doses of affogato (strong…
Caroline Preston
There’s a lot of anxiety out there about robots gobbling up our jobs. One oft-cited Oxford University study predicts that up to 47 percent of U.S. jobs are vulnerable to automation. Other research suggests the share is much lower. But while the exact numbers may be debated, there’s little question…
Victor Prince
If you work long enough, you will have a micro-managing boss or two. These bosses think they know your job better than you do. Maybe they had your job before they got promoted to management. They focus on how you do your job instead of on the results you produce. They think that because you are…
Caroline Rook
Toby Gould was both excited and petrified on the morning of Dec. 12, 2018. He and the three other nonprofessional rowers in his team were due to set off from La Gomera in the Canary Islands in a rowing boat equipped with only as much kit and freeze-dried food as a 29 × 6 ft boat can carry. Ahead of…
Barrett Thompson
A hot topic of conversation for many B2B industrial companies is the talent and skills gap due to the generational shift in the workforce from baby boomers to millennials. According to Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, “Too many employers…
Jim Benson
If I have been on a decades-long drive to make work more flexible, Alton Brown has been on a similar one in the kitchen. There is no shortage of rants on his various shows about “unitaskers”... things in your kitchen that can only do one thing and therefore are only useful in a few, often unlikely…
Brian Lagas
‘Why are our changeovers taking so long?”
If you’ve asked this question on the shop floor, more than likely you were met with blank stares by your employees. Open-ended questions like this are overwhelming, so employees try to find quick answers that don’t really address the problem. They don’t…
James daSilva
When you think about Domino’s, you think about getting pizza quickly—30 minutes or less. Domino’s has also become known for technology, including flashy and fun concepts such as the Associated Talent Development (ATD) conference in Washington, D.C. There, attendees heard from Domino’s training and…
Vip Vyas, Diego Nannicini
Is your enterprise dominated by passive thinking and prescribed routines? Or is it one that generates fresh thinking and unlocks insights into the future?
The viral popularity of TED Talks—with more than a billion views to date—highlights the innate hunger we have for discovering breakthrough…
Mike Micklewright
Industry 4.0 is the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. Also known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it follows behind the previous three revolutions of: 1) mechanization, water, and steam power; 2) mass production, assembly lines, and electricity; and 3…
William A. Levinson
Anthony Chirico1 describes how narrow-limit gauging (NLG, aka compressed limit plans) can reduce enormously the required sample size, and therefore the inspection cost, of a traditional attribute sampling plan. The procedure consists of moving acceptance limits t standard deviations inside the…
Shobhendu Prabhakar
Someone recently asked me why quality failures and safety incidents continue to occur despite organizations communicating their quality and safety visions to the workforce, developing and implementing quality and safety management systems, and campaigning day in and day out about quality and safety…
Chris Woolston, Knowable Magazine
More than a decade has passed, but Mary Mawritz can still hear metal-tipped tassels flapping against leather loafers—the signature sound of her boss roaming the halls of his real estate company.
“Whenever I heard that jingling, I would get sick to my stomach because I knew he was approaching,” she…
