All Features
Shobhendu Prabhakar
Someone recently asked me why quality failures and safety incidents continue to occur despite organizations communicating their quality and safety visions to the workforce, developing and implementing quality and safety management systems, and campaigning day in and day out about quality and safety…
Ryan E. Day
Brodie International provides liquid flow-meters and equipment for the petroleum and industrial markets. The company specializes in producing high-precision meters and valves that are used in the custody transfer of petroleum products.
The challenge
Brodie products involve components with complex…
Chris Woolston, Knowable Magazine
Companies spend millions of dollars and burn countless hours conducting performance reviews and devising checklists to assess their employees, and business scholars have studied the issue with great urgency and intensity. The results so far? By all available evidence, formal attempts to rate…
Bill Laverty
Operations management plays an important role in the manufacturing process, but similar to a stage crew at a theater, operations managers do all their best work behind the scenes. The best operations managers strive to go unnoticed, and why shouldn’t they? A seamless supply-chain process should…
Harry Hertz
Recently I’ve seen some startling statistics from Gallup and Glassdoor about employee and customer engagement. I hope those statistics do not represent data from any organization you or I associate with. The actions of senior leaders, as well as setting the right focus on employees, can prevent…
Chris Woolston, Knowable Magazine
More than a decade has passed, but Mary Mawritz can still hear metal-tipped tassels flapping against leather loafers—the signature sound of her boss roaming the halls of his real estate company.
“Whenever I heard that jingling, I would get sick to my stomach because I knew he was approaching,” she…
Ryan E. Day
Most of us have heard of kaizen—continuous improvement of philosophy and methodology. In business, this involves all employees working to improve a company's processes to lean it out, to run with less waste. But most of us who are familiar with kaizen think of it as something you do.
Especially, we…
Jim Benson
We need to hold people accountable. I invite you to just look at that sentence for a minute. I hear it in every organization we work with. Every. Single. Time.
Look at the sentence. Now, consider for a moment, why you would say it. Go on.
Accountability models rarely do root cause analysis…
Tara García Mathewson
Once students learn how to sound out words, reading is easy. They can speak the words they see. But whether they understand them is a different question entirely. Reading comprehension is complicated. Teachers, though, can help students learn concrete skills to become better readers. One way is by…
Ryan E. Day
More and more, manufacturers are becoming the target of hackers, but what can they do about it, if anything? It seems every month, maybe even every week, we hear about some sort of data breach or cyberattack. Think Facebook, Google, and Marriott. As consumers we’ve almost become inured to the idea…
Harish Jose
Today I’m looking at Factory Physics and the Toyota Production System (TPS). My main references for the post are the 1977 paper co-authored by ex-Toyota president Fujio Cho and key ideas from Factory Physics (Waveland Press, 2011).
One of my favorite definitions of lean comes from Wallace J. Hopp…
Beth Humberd, Scott Latham
Walmart recently announced it plans to deploy robots to scan shelves, scrub floors, and perform other mundane tasks in its stores as the retail giant seeks to lower labor costs.
Although the retail giant did not say which jobs, if any, might be lost as a result, the announcement—and the many more…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Back in the good old days, if you were in a position of authority, you could just announce what needed to be done and assume it would be carried out. But times have changed.
As companies expand and become more complex, no matter what organizational structure is in place, people must work with each…
Paul Foster
When you look at standards like IATF 16949 or ISO 9001, the requirements boil down to two essential elements: improving customer satisfaction and reducing risk.
They go hand in hand because effective risk management means safer products and happier customers—and fewer problems for their suppliers…
Jeffrey Phillips
One of my favorite quotes comes from George Bernard Shaw, who said that all change in life originates from unreasonable people. Reasonable people, he said, will accept the status quo and change their lives to adapt to the status quo. Unreasonable people won’t. Unreasonable people force change…
Mike Micklewright
Knowledge of kaizen theory, principles, tools, and experience in application are of course very important in leading successful kaizen events that drive real bottom-line results. However, equally important are the facilitation skills of the person who is leading the event and the team.
Leading a…
Morgan Sliff
Boeing has been rife with issues lately. While the recent Ethiopian Airlines crash has dominated headlines and elicited an FBI investigation into the company, another federal body has stated it will be keeping a closer eye on Boeing’s safety shortfalls.
Boeing is now in hot water with the U.S. Air…
Dan Gardner
Established businesses rely on so-called best practices to retain their market share by limiting risk, but what happens when an established practice isn’t actually the best way to solve a problem?
This philosophy lies at the core of our company, Code & Theory, and defines how we engage and…
Ryan E. Day
If you have worked in the quality field for anytime at all, you have probably heard of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award—it’s the highest level of national recognition for performance excellence that a U.S. organization can receive. The award focuses on performance in five key areas and…
Ryan E. Day
If your manufacturing organization is going to grow, you know you need an inspection solution beyond the capabilities of micrometers and calipers. You know you need to gather more data in a faster and more reliable manner. It’s time to invest in a 3D inspection solution like a coordinate measuring…
Chip Bell
Parking lot. We use it in the meeting-management world to mean agenda items that are tabled for later discussion. These are generally posted on a sheet of flip-chart paper, taped on the meeting wall, and then placed on the agenda of the next meeting so they are not forgotten as topics for…
Mike Figliuolo
Have you ever found yourself in the midst of a business problem that you’re not sure how to solve? This five-step problem solving process is a great place to begin working through any business issue.
At one point I worked with a financial services firm, and we had this really cool program that did…
Stuart Hearn
Managers have a profound effect on employee engagement. This is something we have known for quite a few years. According to a 2015 Gallup poll, managers account for at least a 70-percent variance in employee engagement scores. When employees and managers have a healthy, respectful, and honest…
Richard Ruiz
When a customer asks to see your layered process audit (LPA) documentation, will you be ready? For many manufacturers, the answer is no.
Instead of having proof of an effective audit process, many companies are left scrambling for data that show low audit compliance and few actual results.…
Ryan E. Day
According to the International Labor Organization, around the world every day 7,600 people die from work-related accidents or diseases—that’s more than 2.78 million people every year. To address the issue, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has developed a standard, ISO 45001…
