All Features
Jim Benson
When we work together, which we all do, everything involves relationships. People request work from other people... that is a relationship. People take jobs that involve bosses and structure... those are relationships. People form teams to get specific types of work done... again, relationships.…
Ayman Jawhar
Product management as we’ve known it up until now—as a limited function or role—is effectively dead. However, viewed as a culture, product management is thriving. I predict “product culture” will be central to the future of work in digital economies. Yet knowledge workers, executives, and business…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
When I was 13, I had dreams of being a rock and roll star. For my birthday, I asked my parents for a guitar, and lessons to play it. My parents hired a staid instructor, and I was uninspired by the folk tunes she was teaching me. She was clueless about Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Kiss... even Black…
Esteve Garriga
There are many important issues to be considered in the food industry, such as consumer tastes, environmental impact, and economic aspects, but the most important is food safety.
Although current food safety management system (FSMS) certification schemes around the world are highly effective, I…
Mark Schmit
During the Sept. 18, 2020, session of the “National Conversation with Manufacturers,” our three West Coast manufacturing leaders on the panel kept coming back to their critical need for skilled workers.
The conversation was one in a series of 11 virtual listening sessions hosted by the National…
Lucca Henrion, Duo Zhang, Victor Li, Volker Sick
One of the big contributors to climate change is right beneath your feet, and transforming it could be a powerful solution for keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
The production of cement, the binding element in concrete, accounted for 7 percent of total global carbon dioxide emissions…
Gregg Profozich
Welcome to the third installment of our series on lean and Six Sigma. As we saw in the first article, lean and Six Sigma are complementary continuous improvement methodologies that reduce the overall waste and variability, respectively, in production processes. The second article went into some…
Jason V. Barger
Too many teams and leaders operate in thermometer mode. Without clarity of the type of culture they are trying to create and leaders they need to be, the culture they end up experiencing is purely reactionary. The temperature just goes up and down, depending on who is in the room or what is…
James Wells
When is a product “good enough” to accept? This is the classic challenge of quality. High customer expectations demand that suspect products be thoroughly scrutinized and a high standard set for their release. Customers expect this, and quality staff strive to achieve it.
The other side of the tug…
Andrew Schutte
Industrial engineers design, develop, test, and evaluate integrated systems for managing industrial production processes. Functions include quality control, human work factors, inventory control, logistics and material flow, cost analysis, and production coordination. These and other facets are…
Jennifer V. Miller
As the parent of two teens, I’ve become quite accustomed to the Eye Roll. This ocular straining happens most often when I request that a previously agreed upon task be completed by said teen. Me: “Hey, it’s time to empty the trash. Trash pick up is tomorrow.” Teen: “Ugh,” with a healthy helping of…
Annette Franz
In 2019, I wrote about a marketing phenomenon that I kept hearing about, that customers are in control, that they have all the power. I never felt like that was right.
In that post, I wrote: “So, when you see those headlines about customer control and customer power, what are they really talking…
Yoav Kutner
Like business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce allows customers to purchase parts and supplies via an online portal. The difference is that in B2B e-commerce, both the customers and suppliers are businesses, and the customers may or may not be the end users of the…
Nicholas Wyman
It’s a new year, with a new president and new opportunities to boost modern apprenticeship programs in the United States that can help get people back to work and stimulate the economy.
Getting people into apprenticeships has never been more vital, as job losses caused by the pandemic continue to…
Bruce Hamilton
At the tender age of 21, living in a universe with far too many parallels to present day, I took a job—which turned out to be more than a job—to support myself in college by working as a caregiver, cook, driver, and constant companion to a man who as a young adult had been infected by the awful…
Gleb Tsipursky
Stakeholder engagement is one of the more critical aspects of leadership, whether you’re a team leader or a member of a cross-functional team trying to lead team members to focus on quality. Stakeholders can be anyone from your colleagues to suppliers to business partners, and your relationship…
Tamela Serensits
Quality managers have a problem. The success of their quality program hinges on one thing. It’s not KPIs, and it’s not methodology. It isn’t even employee engagement or customer satisfaction. The one thing a quality manager needs most is leadership buy-in.
Quality programs fail because they do…
Fred Schenkelberg
There is a type of error that occurs when conducting statistical testing: to work very hard to correctly answer the wrong question. This error occurs during the formation of the experiment.
Despite creating a perfect null and alternative hypothesis, sometimes we are simply investigating the wrong…
Jose Luis Alvarez
Alexander Hamilton, one of the United States’ founding fathers, famously called energy the most important characteristic of the executive branch of government. “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” he said in the Federalist Papers. “A feeble execution is but another…
Gleb Tsipursky
Negotiators, even professional ones, make surprisingly many wrong decisions that doom negotiations that should have succeeded. Many of these mistakes relate to overestimating how well they can read the feelings and thoughts of other parties in the negotiation, as well as the extent to which the…
Andrew Peterson
Manufacturing robotics is to some extent following a similar path of advances to those in machining and fixed automation systems. Though the ROI is most easily measured in efficiency and cost savings, manufacturers are looking for robotic technology to help them resolve a pain point in their…
Aarti Gumaledar, Sameer Hasija, V. Paddy Padmanabhan
Globalization of trade and decades-long innovation in supply chain networks have resulted in significant benefits for all stakeholders—greater efficiencies, lower costs, and greater access to markets, to name just a few. Yet Covid-19 has exposed vulnerabilities in global supply chains. Dispersed…
Taylor Brown
It’s easy to think of quality as a niche responsibility, requiring only the involvement of those working in quality-based roles. But involving your entire medical device organization—and even suppliers and manufacturers—in the quality process can lead to better products, greater efficiency, and…
Anne Trafton
This story was originally published by MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).
In some ways, learning to program a computer is similar to learning a new language. It requires learning new symbols and terms, which must be organized correctly to instruct the computer what to…
Ryan E. Day
‘For sale: 3 bd, 2 ba, 1,407 sq ft home in Riverhead, NY,” the groundbreaking listing on Zillow reads. “Own a piece of history! This is the world’s first 3D-printed home for sale [on the open market]. The future begins with this historic property!” Perhaps the exclamation marks are warranted.…
