All Features
Harish Jose
As readers of my columns know, I am an ardent student of the Toyota Production System (TPS). One of the core philosophies of TPS is kaizen, often translated from Japanese as “continuous improvement.” It is the idea that one should continuously find ways to eliminate nonvalue-adding activities, and…
Ken Voytek
I find that every so often it is good to step back and think about the current state of manufacturing in the broadest sense. We all see bits and pieces as part of our daily work with manufacturers across the country and from reading the news, but sometimes it can be difficult to fit those puzzle…
Randall Goodden
The manufacturing industry, stock market, and new product development have really taken off in the past four years, and there’s a lot of focus now on moving offshore manufacturing back into the United States. With all of this growth, it is also apparent that many manufacturing corporations are…
Lolly Daskal
When I first started out as an executive leadership coach, not many CEOs saw the importance of leadership coaching or development. During the past few years attitudes have changed, and recent research finds that 90 percent of CEOs are planning to increase their investment in leadership development…
Jennifer Chu
A modern airplane’s fuselage is made from multiple sheets of different composite materials, like so many layers in a phyllo-dough pastry. Once these layers are stacked and molded into the shape of a fuselage, the structures are wheeled into warehouse-sized ovens and autoclaves, where the layers…
NIST
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to grow the economy and improve our lives, but along with these benefits, it also brings new risks that society is grappling with. How can we be sure this new technology is not just innovative and helpful, but also trustworthy, unbiased, and resilient in the…
Ian Golding
During the last five years, a small number of organizations have been featured multiple times in my writing. In the vast majority of cases, I have used these businesses as a way of bringing to life global best practices in the field of customer experience management.
It is inspiring to be able to…
Peter Dizikes
Given the complexities of healthcare, do basic statistics used to rank hospitals really work well? A study co-authored by MIT economists indicates that some fundamental metrics do, in fact, provide real insight about hospital quality.
“The results suggest a substantial improvement in health if you…
Naphtali Hoff
Workplace productivity is a huge challenge for nearly every company, business, and organization. Leaders struggle to get their own work done (and do the right work,) while also guiding, empowering, and motivating their people to achieve maximal productivity. Although the projections vary, estimates…
Paavo Käkelä
After two decades of offshore productions in low-cost countries, manufacturers are now struggling with the rapidly growing salaries and countereffects of cheap production. The question that industries are asking today is: Do we continue offshoring, or should we consider reshoring?
The right answer…
Jon Speer
Believe it or not, paper is very expensive. Although the going rate for a ream of standard copy paper is only about 10 bucks, the expense of relying on paper for your medical device quality management system is downright outrageous.
Some medical device manufacturers have recognized how expensive…
Anne Trafton
After a patient has a heart attack or stroke, doctors often use risk models to help guide their treatment. These models can calculate a patient’s risk of dying based on factors such as the patient’s age, symptoms, and other characteristics.
While these models are useful in most cases, they do not…
Anthony Veal
When Microsoft gave its 2,300 employees in Japan five Fridays off in a row, it found productivity jumped 40 percent.
When financial services company Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand trialed eight Fridays off in a row, its 240 staff reported feeling more committed, stimulated, and empowered.…
Tom Taormina
In part one of this series, I said that I want to help my colleagues use their ISO 9001 implementation as a profit center and to turn risk-based thinking into risk avoidance. To do this I will share a set of tools that help evolve quality management into business management.
These tools include…
Phanish Puranam
Machine learning, the latest incarnation of artificial intelligence (AI), works by detecting complex patterns in past data and using them to predict future data. Since almost all business decisions ultimately rely on predictions (about profits, employee performance, costs, regulation, etc.), it…
Jennifer Lauren Lee
3D printing of metal objects is a booming industry, with the market for products and services worth more than an estimated $2.3 billion in 2015, a nearly fivefold growth since 2010, according to Wohlers Report 2016. For this type of manufacturing, a metal part is built up successively, layer by…
Kelvin Lee
Biopharmaceutical manufacturing uses living cells to produce therapies that treat diseases like cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune disorders. Manufacturing medicine using biology presents different challenges from the traditional chemical manufacturing processes that stamp out identical pressed pills…
Christine Schaefer
Robert Rouzer is retired, but he may be busier than ever as a Baldrige volunteer. In recent years, Rouzer has served not only as a Baldrige examiner for the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, but also as a state-level examiner for two Baldrige-based award programs that are part of the…
Jim Benson
‘It’s the shoes!” Spike Lee yelled into the camera on the Air Jordan ads.
But it was never the shoes. Michael, Magic, and LeBron would have outplayed their leagues in golf cleats.
It was never the shoes.
But it was us, the salespeople. In our case, the intelligencia that “trains” people to be…
Annalise Suzuki
The argument for moving toward enterprisewide model-based definition is simple: The way we describe products is increasingly digital, not paper-based. The way we optimize and validate products seems almost entirely digital, except for a few remaining destructive tests. The way our production…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Two of my articles (the first regarding standards, standardization, and standard work; and the second on visual standards) drew a lot of response. Readers were kind enough to share their thoughts and definitions. Some offered new terms to include in the mix: standardized work and visual standard…
Michael Baxter
You would expect a building where vinegar is made to have a sour smell, highly pungent, perhaps with a whiff of apple. World Technology Ingredients (WTI) smells nothing like this. Their manufacturing facility, off a county two-lane in Jefferson, Georgia, has a vaguely mineral aroma. More dry than…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Government bureaucracies are inefficient. They waste taxpayer dollars, and they have no incentive to improve. We’ve all heard and probably repeated these axioms about wasteful government spending.
And it’s often true; you don’t have to look far to find examples of government overpaying for products…
Ryan E. Day
Lean: an employee-championed method of waste reduction. Six Sigma: a robust method of defect reduction. Embracing both methods provides organizations with multiple tools for continuous improvement. Developed for manufacturing, lean Six Sigma has now been recognized by government agencies as a…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
At the University of California at San Diego, lean concepts have taken hold. Along with its process improvement curriculum, the university applies what it teaches through initiatives around campus. Projects both complex and simple tackle the snags, waste, and bottlenecks of academic life. Students…
