All Features
Christine Schaefer
‘Every organization has countless opportunities for improvement, but only a few points—what we call constraints or bottlenecks—govern the pace and performance of the entire system,” says Rami Goldratt, who gave the closing keynote presentation at the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program’s 36th…
Silke von Gemmingen
In areas such as high-precision metalworking, accuracy is nonnegotiable. This includes the automotive industry and its suppliers, which are in crisis in Germany for several reasons. The industry is under enormous pressure to deliver products of impeccable quality while reducing operating costs (for…
Creaform
Hawthorne High School of Manufacturing & Engineering in Los Angeles is not your typical high school program. Led by program coordinator Lucas Pacheco, it’s a hub where young minds are immersed in advanced manufacturing and engineering design courses. With a hands-on curriculum covering multi-…
Elisa Duquet
The semiconductor industry is one of the most complex, dynamic, and technologically advanced sectors in the world. It plays an essential role in shaping modern life, serving as the foundation for everything from smartphones and MRI machines to kitchen appliances and space shuttles. In today’s…
Gleb Tsipursky
Generative AI (gen AI) is fundamentally transforming industries, reshaping the way professionals innovate, create, and solve problems. These systems, capable of generating text, images, music, and complex solutions, aren’t just tools—they’re catalysts for a paradigm shift in the professional and…
John O'Kelly
Warehouses are the backbone of supply chains, ensuring that goods move efficiently from suppliers to consumers. However, the physical demands of warehouse work—heavy lifting, repetitive motions, and prolonged standing—can take a toll on employees, leading to fatigue, injuries, and long-term strain…
Mike Figliuolo
Email is the bane of our existence. Sure, it’s awesome for funny cat videos, chain letters, and getting awesome blogs like this one (see what I did there?), but it can also cause massive amounts of stress and waste tremendous amounts of time.
One of the first things I do when I take on a new…
Jones Loflin
I took a deep breath as we left the “car park,” as it’s called in Ireland. The only comforting thought I had was, “I’m glad I paid for the upgrade to an automatic.” Changing gears with my left hand while navigating roundabouts and narrow, rock wall-lined roads was an added stress I didn’t need when…
Bryan Christiansen
Failure analysis helps uncover the root cause of equipment issues so you can fix problems and prevent them from happening again. This guide outlines a clear, six-step process to conduct effective failure analysis and write a report that adds long-term value.
Failure analysis techniques vary widely…
Quality Digest, Donald J. Wheeler
Dr. Donald J. Wheeler has been one of Quality Digest’s most highly read authors for decades. His teaching on the use of control charts in industrial settings has long been considered the gold standard. He has conducted more than 1,100 seminars in 17 countries on six continents, and his books have…
Akhilesh Gulati
As director of quality at a manufacturing plant, James faced the reality of shift every day. As the plant embraced new technologies and adapted to changing global dynamics, he knew that quality management could no longer be reactive. The question was whether he could turn these shifts into…
Gleb Tsipursky
Once hailed as both an ethical mandate and a strategic necessity after the upheaval of 2020, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives now face intense scrutiny and pushback. Major corporations—ranging from Walmart to Google—are quietly retreating from these programs amid escalating…
Stephanie Ojeda
The pharmaceutical industry and the medical device industry have unique ways of defining terms like deviation and nonconformance. Often, this leads to confusion about how events should be classified and managed.
This article explains the difference between a deviation and a nonconformance, and why…
Quality Digest
If you’re a corporate employer, you must know the importance of training and its effects on your firm’s growth. Teaching employees with the help of corporate training is an essential step that every firm should follow to reach its goals. Additionally, incorporating OSHA training ensures workplace…
Seb Murray
What happens when workers get a say in evaluating their managers? At one Chinese carmaker, the results speak for themselves: happier teams, better leadership, and a noticeable boost in productivity—without a single downside. Those are key findings of a recent study by Wharton associate professor of…
Akli Adjaoute
Keeping quality high in today’s fast-moving production world is a big challenge. Traditional quality checks have worked well, but they can be slow, require a lot of work, and are prone to mistakes.
AI could change this by making quality control faster, more accurate, and easier to scale. It could…
ISO
How do health and safety incidents affect your business? If a worker is injured or becomes ill, what kind of disruption does it cause? Is your productivity affected? What’s the effect on other workers in terms of workload or psychological health and well-being?
People are the foundation of every…
Chip Bell
Innovation is vital to the success of all businesses. Innovate or perish is the new mantra. Leaders must perpetually reinvent their processes, products, and services, because they typically have multiple competitors offering similar offerings. Only through innovation can most organizations…
Scott Ginsberg
Manufacturers face a critical challenge: capturing, standardizing, and scaling workforce knowledge. Skilled workers are retiring, and labor shortages are persisting. Outdated, paper-based documentation can no longer keep up. These methods create bottlenecks that slow productivity and make vital…
Felipe Monteiro
Global risks are rising, and many companies are struggling to adapt. The World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risks Report makes it clear that challenges like escalating global tensions and conflicts, climate change, economic instability, and supply chain disruptions are interconnected and build on…
Gleb Tsipursky
One transformative strategy that can revolutionize how organizations embrace generative AI is peer mentoring. By leveraging the power of personal connections and shared expertise, peer mentoring accelerates learning, fosters collaboration, and fuels innovation. When mastering gen AI tools can mean…
Seb Murray
What happens when workplace colleagues land on opposing sides of an external competition? Henning Piezunka, an associate professor of management at Wharton, tackles this question in a recent study, using sports data to shed light on how outside rivalries can shape collaboration within the workplace…
Torsten Schimanski
Workforce development is an essential yet frequently overlooked aspect of supply chain management in manufacturing. Similar to how disruptions in material sourcing or logistics can halt operations, talent shortages and skill gaps create bottlenecks that jeopardize efficiency, quality, and growth. …
Donald J. Wheeler
Outliers are values that don’t “fit in” with the rest of the data. These extreme values are commonly considered a nuisance when we seek to summarize the data with our descriptive statistics. This article will show how to turn these nuisances into useful information.
The earliest statistical tests…
Oliver Franz
Maybe you’re pulling reports from three different platforms, trying to reconcile numbers that don’t quite match. Maybe you’re manually copying and pasting from multiple spreadsheets, hoping you didn’t introduce any errors along the way. Or maybe you’re waiting on IT to clean up, prep data, and…
