Gleb Tsipursky
How should organizations—including their quality departments—reshape office space to maximize productivity in the future of work? What will the new workspace—from the office to homes—look like in the...
William A. Levinson
This article contends that we should replace “quality” with “value” to address an enormous array of previously unaddressed risks and opportunities. Poor quality is only one of the Toyota Production...
Jim Benson
Stress is a natural physical and mental reaction to life experiences. In fact, for short periods of time, it is actually valuable to us. The hormones our brains release during stressful moments were...
Bruce Hamilton
Just a little over a year ago we lost Hajime Oba, one of the great pioneers of Toyota Production System (TPS) learning in the United States. In 1992, he was the founding manager of the Toyota...
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...
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...
Saligrama Agnihothri
Health-tracking devices and apps are becoming part of everyday life. More than 300,000 mobile phone applications claim to help with managing diverse personal health issues, from monitoring blood...
Dawn Bailey
The spirit of service—for a small clinic started in 1913 to provide free care to Los Angeles (LA)—lives today in the servant-leader aspirations of 2019 Baldrige Award recipient Adventist Health White...
John Preston
‘This government is obsessed with skilling up our population,” said Boris Johnson in his recent speech on “leveling up.” There’s still a fair amount of uncertainty about exactly what the United...
Jim Benson
Value stream mapping is a team exercise, it’s collaborative, enlightening, and the foundation for professionalism.
I’m pretty well-known for saying that teams are unique and that there is no one...
Silke von Gemmingen
Due to digitalization in Industry 4.0, internal logistics is subject to constant change. Internal traceability—i.e., tracking goods in the warehouse or production facility—increasingly plays a key...
David Cahn
Lean Six Sigma has improved manufacturing operations and processes for years now. Now the effect of the methodology is extending to supply chain and operations to help eliminate waste and reduce...
Emily Newton
Effective equipment testing is essential for manufacturers of industrial equipment and end-users. Without testing, defects and damage can shorten the life span of equipment, cause unplanned downtime...
Bruce Hamilton
PDCA—plan, do, check, act (or adjust)—is one of those acronymic concepts that regularly finds its way into lean discussions. Descended from Francis Bacon’s scientific method (hypothesis, experiment,...
Glenn Daehn
Failure of a machine in a factory can shut it down. Lost production can cost millions of dollars per day. Component failures can devastate factories, power plants, and battlefield equipment.
To...
Doug Devereaux
The premise for the NIST MEP Digital Supply-Chain Network project is familiar to MEP centers—many small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) are often not ready for Industry 4.0 and don’t know how...
Jim Benson
No matter who you are or what you do, you create systems and live in the systems of others every day. But for some reason, we’re never actually taught lean systems thinking. We think it is natural,...
Benjamin Kessler
Suddenly, supply chains are in the spotlight. The practical details of how products arrive on supermarket shelves, for example, gained unwelcome relevance amid last year’s wave of panic buying caused...
James Wells
I was talking recently with a friend who runs an academic program at a major U.S. university. She was telling me about solving a problem in her department and how the solution was obvious so she just...
Bruce Hamilton
This time of year the abundant ads for junk removal and cheap storage units remind us that it’s time for spring cleaning, an annual pastime that has perhaps been bolstered by the need to unlock extra...
