All Features
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Japanese products were synonymous with cheaply made. Anyone over the age of 50 probably remembers cheap Japanese transistor radios when they were a kid. We all believed, in the day, that the more transistors a radio had, the better. That wasn’t necessarily true, but try…
William A. Levinson
A job safety analysis (JSA) worksheet is almost identical in organization to a job breakdown sheet and standard work, all of which assess a job (or process) on a step-by-step basis. This suggests combining standard work with job safety analysis to support ISO 45001.
The concept can be carried even…
Beatrice Weder di Mauro
As the 21st century dawned, Germany was known as the “sick man of Europe,” with lower GDP growth and higher unemployment than peer nations such as France, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Today, it is widely admired as one of the world’s strongest economies and the undisputed economic leader of the…
Tim Lozier
Corrective action is often an effective means of identifying and correcting quality and compliance events within the organization that can arise through the result of complaints, audits, incidents, nonconformances, or any adverse events. Traditionally, the corrective action process is designed to…
Maria Guadalupe
Your competition is no longer what it used to be. In this age of information at our fingertips, same-day delivery, and seamless payment options, customers now expect more from business than ever before. Companies must adapt to thrive.
Agile, the flexible way of working, has spread from software…
Mike Figliuolo
You think you’re well on the way toward building and leading a high-performing team. You’ve got a clear vision and mission, and a nice set of prioritized initiatives. You have all the right people. But what starts differentiating a regular team from a high-performing team is chemistry and trust…
Bill Petti
You have plenty of trended data on employee performance. You have a cutting-edge dashboard and seamless reporting capabilities. This makes you data-driven, right?
Not quite.
Optimizing your decision-making requires more than retrospective analyses. It takes shifting from knowing how long employees…
Mike Richman
There are many ways that we lose attention on tasks at hand. From nosy and noisy colleagues to extraneous emails and meetings to burdensome and often pointless short-term projects, even the most dedicated professional can misplace the ability to find meaning and value in the daily routine. And that…
Tom Middleton
Markets and manufacturing practices continue to evolve, and companies now outsource to an increasing number of global manufacturing and supply partners. As companies have pursued this broadened supply chain strategy, the ability to manage both business and quality risks has become more challenging…
Matthew E. May
Process improvers the world over rally around root cause analysis as if it were the holy grail of all things organizational. But is it?
Understanding the root cause of a problem certainly makes sense in the context of a present day situation carrying the potential for a correct answer or solution…
Doug Surrett
The importance of supply chain solutions relative to a company’s efforts to maintain and improve quality are almost impossible to underplay. When enacting quality improvement programs, any company would do well to examine its supply chain model and processes as a fundamental means of improving…
MIT Sloan School of Management
Traditional corporate hierarchies tend to rely on static design. There’s the CEO at the top, followed by directors and managers. Red tape and inefficient processes can bog down decisions.
Dynamic work design is a more effective method of managing workflow, especially intellectual work, says MIT…
Knowledge at Wharton
Volatile markets, challenging consumer demands, and the technological disruptions resulting from digitization and Industry 4.0 are producing unprecedented rates of change. In response, companies have worked to increase organizational agility, hoping to foster innovation and shorten go-to-market…
Ryan E. Day
You run a manufacturing business, so you know how it goes. The cost of doing business and manufacturing product never decreases. You know that your revenue must increase just to keep up. You also know that merely maintaining your revenue status quo will only ensure you get your lunch eaten by…
Bruce Hamilton
Last month I joined Eric Buhrens, CEO at Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), to host a leadership team from Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center. They were on a study mission to many of Boston’s fine hospitals and were winding up their week with a visit to LEI. Early in the discussion, one of our guests…
Paul Foster
Equipment downtime gets expensive fast in automotive and aerospace manufacturing, a risk many companies try to mitigate by storing spare parts onsite. A machine breaks down, haul out the parts, and hopefully you’re back in business with minimal disruption.
The problem is, manufacturers get so…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Supply chains’ last-mile delivery has become the new Pony Express. Like that famous but short-lived courier service, the global supply chain is focused on completing the final segment between supplier and customer—which in reality is anywhere between six and nine miles, according to a recent study—…
Grant Nadell
Boeing is demanding its suppliers reduce their prices by 10 percent, according to a February 2018 article published in Bloomberg Businessweek. It’s a hard pill for many to swallow, given that that these cuts are on top of the roughly 15-percent cuts demanded in 2012, when the company launched its…
Ryan E. Day
Unily is a leading digital workplace platform designed by BrightStarr to improve engagement, productivity, and efficiency for global enterprises. Unily is also a SaaS solution. That is, it’s served up via the cloud. Meaning that—with more than a million users, including the likes of Shell, Hershey’…
Mark Rosenthal
A couple of weeks ago I posed the question, “Are you overproducing improvements?” and compared a typical improvement “blitz” with a large monument machine that produces in large batches.
I’d like to dive a little deeper into some of the paradoxes and implications of 1:1 flow of anything,…
Harish Jose
I have been writing about kaizen a lot recently. It is a simple idea: change for the better. Generally, kaizen stands for small incremental improvements. Here I’m going to look at what is the best kind of kaizen.
The twist in the dumpling
A few posts back, I talked about the order for kaizen,…
Fred Schenkelberg
Mean time between failures (MTBF) is a symptom of a bigger problem. It’s possibly a lack of interest in reliability (which I doubt is the case). Or it’s a bit of fear of reliability.
Many shy away from the statistics involved. Some simply don’t want to know the currently unknown. It could be the…
Christopher Martin
A couple months back I stopped at a local fast-food place for a quick kid’s meal (not for me) after picking up one of my little ones from school. Inside, we were greeted by an employee in an otherwise empty dining area, and no line. As we approached the counter, he asked how we were and if we were…
Evan McLaughlin
As the vice president of quality for a $1.5 billion-dollar industrial corporation, Hermann Miskelly is responsible for leading its continuous improvement effort. Now in his 10th year of a lean Six Sigma deployment, he has overseen the execution of more than 4,000 major improvement projects and…
Mary Hallock
In lean we talk about “seeing the waste” and using visual tools. Many of us who use these terms have had a lot of training in engineering, manufacturing, and other highly technical areas. However, the skills needed to “see” problems may lie more firmly in the study of art.
I recently read an…
