All Features
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…
Ruth P. Stevens
In business-to-business (B2B) direct marketing, I’m often asked about what kind of response rates to expect about the most productive media channels, the best lists, the best time to conduct a campaign, the most effective qualification questions. I always answer the same way, much to the…
Protolabs
Technology giant HP has developed and launched multi-jet fusion (MJF), an industrial-grade 3D printing technology that quickly and accurately produces functional prototypes and end-use parts for a variety of applications. Protolabs served as one of several test sites for this additive manufacturing…
Olympus
Modern 3D laser confocal scanning microscopes can resolve fine surface-topography detail as minute as a few nanometers, quickly and easily. It is the solution that advanced manufacturing industries turn to for efficient quality assurance surface inspections.
The changing needs of surface and…
Jon Speer
“I wish there was a way for the FDA to give me a heads-up about my stuff, prior to submission….”
That sentiment was really the basis behind the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) presubmission tool, as I was discussing recently with medical-device quality assurance and regulatory affiars…
Mark Rosenthal
Imagine a factory with a large monument machine. It takes several days to set up. When it does run, it runs very fast, much faster than you can actually use its output. Therefore, you take the excess output and store it to use later. Actually, you don’t know how many items you need to make, so you…
Ryan E. Day
So, the Quality Digest team is considering a transition to working remotely for the most part. I and two other associates already do. In part one of this series, I outlined my ad-hoc attempt at creating a computer work space at home. The result was not very pretty.
As I said in part one, my home…
Eric Stoop
Roughly 7 in 10 manufacturers have implemented lean manufacturing principles in their organizations, with 5S, Six Sigma, and kaizen representing the most popular strategies today.
One tool that supports these specific approaches and lean manufacturing principles more generally is a layered process…
Mike Richman
On the Apr. 20 episode of QDL, we brought you interviews on manufacturing’s digital transformation and the primacy of photogrammetry for large-volume, close-tolerance metrology, plus news about logistical efficiencies and worker motivations (or lack thereof). Here’s a closer look at the show:
“…
Scott Berkun
The great surprise for people with good ideas is the gap between how an idea feels in their minds and how it feels when they try to put the idea to work.
When a good idea comes together, it feels fantastic. Good ideas often come with a wave of euphoria, a literal dopamine high, and we’re joyously…
Sal Lucido
Policies and procedures tell your employees, partners, vendors, and customers how your system operates. With changing regulations and expectations, a static library is not enough. Policies are dynamic and require a system to manage their creation, documentation, distribution, and management. Here’s…
Jeffrey Phillips
I have been thinking a lot about why innovation fails. Not about why supposedly innovative new products fail, because there are multiple reasons for that. A product could be too early or too late in the market window, or it could simply have the wrong pricing or distribution. A new product may lack…
Steven Brand
By 2025, nearly 25 percent of the U.S. population is expected to be 60 years of age or older. With this demographic preparing to exit the workforce and enter retirement, what can be done to retain their knowledge and pass it down to the next generation of employees? After all, a good portion of the…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Too much of a good thing brings out its downside. Ever had too much team time? It makes you long for a solo vacation on a desert island.
One of the best portrayals of “too much of a good thing” was in Black Mirror’s Nose Dive (Season 3). In what initially looks like a utopian culture where everyone…