All Features
Ryan E. Day
Industrial Custom Products (ICP) is a world leader in prototyping, developing, and manufacturing high-quality OEM and custom thermoformed and vacuum formed plastic components, as well as die cut and dieless knife-cut parts. What makes ICP unique among its competitors is its award-winning quality,…
Knowledge at Wharton
A recent family biking vacation in the Dolomites region of Italy had my family and I all swept up in the charms of Northern Italy. Snow-capped peaks near the Austrian border, endless apple orchards, award-winning Chenin Blanc, and quaint Italian villages with healthy doses of affogato (strong…
Annette Franz
There’s a lot of bad press out there about journey mapping. And there’s a lot of bad journey mapping (or what people think is journey mapping). A few months ago, I shared my six-step journey mapping process. Remember, journey mapping isn’t just a tool; it’s also a process. Know the tool and create…
Knowledge at Wharton
For decades, relatively easy access to space and the big profits to go with it have dangled elusively just over the horizon. With a little more R&D money and a few more advances in the technology, the thinking went, space would be ours.
Are we there yet? More than a few signs are pointing in…
Victor Prince
If you work long enough, you will have a micro-managing boss or two. These bosses think they know your job better than you do. Maybe they had your job before they got promoted to management. They focus on how you do your job instead of on the results you produce. They think that because you are…
Caroline Rook
Toby Gould was both excited and petrified on the morning of Dec. 12, 2018. He and the three other nonprofessional rowers in his team were due to set off from La Gomera in the Canary Islands in a rowing boat equipped with only as much kit and freeze-dried food as a 29 × 6 ft boat can carry. Ahead of…
Barrett Thompson
A hot topic of conversation for many B2B industrial companies is the talent and skills gap due to the generational shift in the workforce from baby boomers to millennials. According to Ben Willmott, head of public policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, “Too many employers…
Harry Hertz
This blog, “Blogrige,” is about organizational performance, but first I need to set the stage.
One of the most prized commodities in many organizations, including mine, is space. Space is tight. Organizational (business) units are always looking to keep their current space and grab more space from…
Jose R. Costa
Few people would deny the crucial role agility plays in helping a person succeed in today’s ever-changing business environment. The best leaders read the shifting marketplace and course-correct to help their businesses stay ahead of the curve. Yet while “agility” may be a trendy concept, the key to…
Sameer Hasija, Vivek Choudhary
One fine morning in 1909, Henry Ford made a surprise announcement during a company meeting. In the future, Ford Motor would stick to a single car model, the Model T, in black only. No other choices, or as he said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black…
Brian Lagas
‘Why are our changeovers taking so long?”
If you’ve asked this question on the shop floor, more than likely you were met with blank stares by your employees. Open-ended questions like this are overwhelming, so employees try to find quick answers that don’t really address the problem. They don’t…
Knowledge at Wharton
CEOs are stepping forward to confront public policy issues that often extend beyond their core business, in part at the urging of their employees, write Caroline Kaeb and David Scheffer in this opinion piece. Kaeb is co-chair of the Business and Human Rights Pillar and a senior fellow of the…
Jennifer Rosa
It takes more than a flashy website and clever promotional emails to compete in the manufacturing marketing arena. Chances are, your larger competitors are pitching similar products and services to the same client base. Your company’s industrial solution may be to offer state-of-the-art features at…
Susan Fowler
Are you lazy? Do you think most people are basically lazy? Do you enjoy being disengaged at work? Do you think millions of people worldwide enjoy being disengaged? Is that why we need to be prodded, bribed, praised, and pushed into doing what we’re tasked to do? If managers did not hold us…
Chad Kymal, Gregory F. Gruska
During the early 1980s, GM, Ford, and Chrysler established the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG), a not-for-profit organization with the mission “To improve its members’ competitiveness through a cooperative effort of North American vehicle manufacturers and their suppliers.” In the late…
Isaac Maw
How often do you check your phone at work? Maybe you’re reading this article on it right now (Don’t worry; we won’t tell.). Smartphones were a revolution for workplace distractions, but they can also be tools for productivity.
I recently attended the IBM Watson IoT Exchange event in Orlando,…
Shobhendu Prabhakar
In India, Mahatma Gandhi is one of the most revered leaders of our time. He was a man who devoted his life to truth and nonviolence. You may be wondering why I’m talking about him here. Well, we all enter our place of work with a set of values that influence how we see and approach our work. So it’…
Ryan E. Day
Midwest Metrology Solutions (MMS) is a company in Indiana that provides onsite precision measurement services using state-of-the-art metrology equipment and software. With an extensive knowledge of geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), a primary focus on quality, and a proven track…
Christine Alemany
No matter how siloed roles or departments are, no one works in a bubble. What happens in marketing affects finance. And finance’s forecasts have ramifications for customer service. In such an interdependent world, managers must learn to open up with all stakeholders or risk losing others’ faith—and…
Mike Figliuolo
Creating a business plan is the most fundamental step in building a business, and the importance of it cannot be underscored enough. You may ask, “Why do I need a business plan? Why can’t I just launch my business and get to market?”
First, you must define your business and how you’re going to…
Harish Jose
I must confess up front that the title of this column is misleading. Similar to the Spoon Boy in the movie, The Matrix, I will say, “There is no lean problem or a Six Sigma problem. All these problems are our mental constructs of a perceived phenomenon.”
A problem statement is a model of the…
Davis Balestracci
Recently, I’ve had a sad, increasing sense of déjà vu. Twitter has become even more vacuous, and LinkedIn has quickly devolved into a business version of Facebook. Literally right after I finished this draft, I read a newspaper headline: “Twitter Use Eroding Intelligence. Now there’s data to prove…
Boris Liedtke
‘Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants,” said Henry Ford in 1909, “so long as it’s black.” Ford’s strategy of standardization and efficiency made a runaway success of the Model T car and built Ford Motor Co. into one of the world’s biggest automakers. But 110 years on,…
Jon Speer
This notion of risk-based processes within quality systems is something that has become part of our formal lexicon following the release of ISO 13485:2016, the globally harmonized standard for medical device quality management systems (QMS).
Well before these risk-based processes became a quality…
Annet Aris
Even tedious jobs like cleaning out archives can sometimes lead to great insights. Sifting through my old files recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find a treasure trove of old memories and forgotten facts. Among these papers were notebooks from my engineering studies; I realized that I no…
