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Knowledge at Wharton
Have you seen the recent commercial where a young son tells his parents that he’s going to work for GE—as a software developer? Their response was one of bewilderment. In their minds, GE is a manufacturer. The commercial exemplifies the idea that the mental models of leaders—their attitudes,…
Jesseca Lyons
This may be stating the obvious, but engineers are generally very analytical. One of the areas where this trait comes to the fore is in evaluating all the ways things can go wrong. This includes exposure and using tools like failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA).
As an engineer, there’s a good…
Mike Figliuolo
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M
ost of us are good leaders. Most of us aspire to be great leaders. Few are. What does it take to transcend “good” and become “great?” What’s the secret?
There isn’t one.
The differences between a good leader and a great one boil down to a handful of traits that inspire people…
Patrick Nugent
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A simple fact in manufacturing is that everyone has to measure. However, when precision is the ultimate goal, measurement is not simply about inspection, it’s about process control. Manufacturers need the right tools to increase quality, maximize productivity, and, ultimately, to…
Denise Robitaille
The great physicist Richard Feynman is best known—at least among laypeople—as the person who solved the mystery of the Challenger space shuttle explosion more than two decades ago.
Many of us remember the image of an O-ring suspended in a glass of ice water sitting on a conference table…
Henrich Greve
Creators beat managers at predicting an innovation’s success—unless they’re predicting the success of their own work.
You probably know someone who owns an Apple Watch, or maybe you own one yourself. Is it a creative product? Well, the multifunction watch was creative the first time it appeared…
Dan Sawyer
Whether they’re made of leather or metal, tape measures have been used by people for a long time. The first spring-loaded metal tape measure was invented and patented in England in 1829. Alvin Fellows of New Haven, Connecticut, made improvements to that design, including the locking mechanism that…
John Elliott
In 1978, REO Speedwagon released the single “Roll with the Changes,” a song that never fails to give me an adrenaline rush, especially as I run or bike. I think it’s pertinent to what healthcare professionals are experiencing since health reform became law in 2010 and the Centers for Medicare…
Meredith Griffith
When I wrote about automation back in March, I made my husband out to be an automation guru. He certainly is, but what you don’t know about my husband is that, although he loves to automate everything in his life, sometimes he drops the ball. He’s human. On the other hand, instances of hypocrisy…
Heinz Schandl
The world is using its natural resources at an ever-increasing rate. Worldwide, annual extraction of primary materials—biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores, and minerals—tripled between 1970 and 2010. People in the richest countries now consume up to 10 times more resources than those in the poorest…
Bruce Hamilton
Early along, as a student of the Toyota Production System (TPS), now referred to as lean, I struggled with some of the concepts and systems. For example, Shigeo Shingo’s claim that a four-hour machine setup could be reduced to less than 10 minutes made me a skeptic.
“Perhaps, when Mr. Shingo…
Micki Vandeloo
It’s so important for manufacturers to find and cultivate valuable partnerships. They can help manufacturers expand their service or product offerings, make their processes more efficient, and help specify and procure just the right equipment.
When manufacturers launch a new product or are making…
Annette Franz
I recently came across the Japanese terms genchi genbutsu and gemba; they’re both key principles of the Toyota Production System, which comprises Toyota’s management philosophy and best practices. Although they’re (lean) management principles and concepts, they apply not only to the employee…
Manfred Kets de Vries
Thrill-seeking employees’ addiction to risk can create havoc in the workplace. Managed correctly, however, their fearlessness can be a great advantage to any organization.
People who knew Lawrence Devon, a VP of sales in a large retail group, viewed him as the quintessential sensation seeker—a…
Fred Schenkelberg
Spending too much on reliability and not getting the results you expect? Just getting started and not sure where to focus your reliability program? Or, just looking for ways to improve your program?
There’s not one way to build an effective reliability program. The variations in industries,…
Jason Furness
For the sake of argument, let’s say you’re aware of an issue that’s holding your enterprise performance back, and you know what to do about it. At that point, there are seven key actions you can take to rapidly implement change, which in turn will allow you to respond to market changes with short…
Donald J. Wheeler
Having described the report card chart and the process monitor chart in previous columns, we now turn to a third way that people use process behavior charts—the process trial chart. Here the emphasis shifts from the detection of unknown changes or upsets to the evaluation of deliberate changes…
Kevin Meyer
Few people realize how employee policy manuals, usually given to you on your first day and then mostly forgotten, shape an organization’s culture and thereby its fundamental performance.
To give you a reference point, one company I worked for had an employee manual of 40+ pages. Every section…
Society of Manufacturing Engineers
SME’s July issue of Manufacturing Engineering magazine has published its fourth annual “30 Under 30” issue, celebrating young men and women who have demonstrated leadership, excellence, and hard work in manufacturing. Among the standouts:
Fabian Bartos, 16, of Franklin Park, Illinois, is the…
Robert Fangmeyer
In August 1987, Congress created the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, a public-private partnership that spawned a global movement. This small program was given a great big purpose: to improve the quality and performance of U.S. businesses so as to improve our national competitiveness. As a…
Ryan E. Day
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In today's hyper-competitive, fast-paced manufacturing world, there is rarely anything like a "routine" day at the office—especially when you're a tier-one supplier for some of the largest aerospace companies in the world. To make the grade and satisfy this kind of demanding…
Michael Huda
Speaking the language of color isn’t like telling someone your name and expecting him to remember it. Our minds just don’t process color like that.
While vague color descriptions are sufficient for many people—“Turn left at the blue house” or “Choose the reddest strawberries”—if you work in an…
Chad Kymal
In 2014, the International Automotive Task Force (IATF) reported that the automotive industry wouldn’t upgrade the ISO/TS 16949 standard to ISO 9001:2015, much to the dismay of Tier One suppliers. In a survey that same year, Tier One suppliers related their desire to update their management…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Does lean have a clearly delineated limit? When a company starts out on that path, should it expect an endpoint, a completion, an arrival? Is it a forever commitment, or is it a bounded outcome that companies can achieve and then move on? In short, is lean a destination or a process?
These aren't…
Mark Whitworth
Quality is, for every organization and across all industries, a key competitive differentiator. This is especially true in the highly competitive automotive industry, where cost pressures have pushed automakers and their suppliers toward global sourcing and distributed supply-chain operations.…
