Nicola Olivetti
According to a report by PwC, industrial sectors worldwide plan to invest $900 billion in Industry 4.0 each year. Despite these growing technology investments, only a few technologies are...
Jesse Allred
Lean manufacturing is a philosophy focused on maximizing productivity and eliminating waste while creating a quality product. One of the most powerful strategies in the lean toolbox is total...
Ryan E. Day
In the article, “ANSI’s Role in the Wide World of Standards,” (Quality Digest, March 12, 2019), we looked at where standards originate and how companies are involved in developing them. In this...
Amadou Diallo
At James Lick High School the slate-gray Chromebooks are ubiquitous. Rolling cabinets stocked with dozens of the laptops sit in classrooms where teachers assign them to students for everything from...
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...
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...
Chris Woolston
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...
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...
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...
Chris Woolston
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.
“...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Beth Humberd
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
