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...
Lucca Henrion
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...
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...
Yoav Kutner
Like business-to-consumer (B2C) ecommerce, business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce allows customers to purchase parts and supplies via an online portal. The difference is that in B2B ecommerce, both the...
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...
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...
Aarti Gumaledar
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...
Ashley Y. Metcalf
Lean supply chains are designed based on several key principles. First, the general philosophy of lean is to reduce or eliminate nonvalue-added waste. The concept of reducing waste is always...
Jill Neimark
If you’ve ever stayed in a relationship too long or stuck with a project that was going nowhere, you’re not alone. Humans are generally reluctant to give up on something they’ve already committed...
Steven Ouellette
What is the most important thing for your business to be working on right now? Would everyone else working there agree? Is everyone working toward the business’s goals? How do you know?
Most...
Sheronda Jeffries
Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, UK officials have seized millions of substandard face masks at Heathrow Airport. These masks could have put millions at risk for contracting or...
Philippe Aghion
Imagine a ship at sea, at risk of sinking in a tempest. Is it better to empower the crew to do whatever it takes to save the ship, or should every decision be made by the captain and top officers?...
Corey Brown
Lockout/tagout (LOTO) procedures are common in industrial and manufacturing environments. Despite this, failure to adequately train employees on LOTO procedures continues to be one of the U.S....
Matthew Bundy
Untitled Document
Burning plastic cart carrying a fax machine, a laptop computer, and a three-ring binder. Click here for larger image. Credit: FCD/NIST
Several centuries ago, scientists...
Zach Winn
These days businesses have enough to worry about without thinking about their insurance. Unfortunately, tasks like managing insurance claims and completing annual renewals require a lot of thinking...
Gleb Tsipursky
Should quality professionals be worried about the new Covid strains originating in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and elsewhere, and recently identified in the United States?
Authorities have...
James J. Kline
Ever since the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) included risk-based thinking in ISO 9001:2015, an idea has arisen among some in the quality profession that quality managers can...
NordVPN Teams
According to Gartner, 99 percent of the vulnerabilities exploited in 2020 have been ones known about by security and IT professionals at the time of the incident. However, taking care of them is...
Bryan Christiansen
A manufacturing facility can’t operate without a maintenance team. Frankly, most businesses can’t. In one way or another, we all rely on different machines and infrastructure to deliver our products...
Richard Harpster
As someone who has helped companies in a wide variety of industries for the last 30 years solve many problems using risk-based thinking, I cannot think of an issue that I have worked on that is more...
