All Features
Debashis Sarkar
The cheating at Kobe Steel shook not just Japan but the entire manufacturing world. As Kobe Steel CEO Hiroya Kawasaki revealed, about 500 companies had received its falsely certified products, which affected not only those companies but also its entire supply chain. However, the issue at Kobe was…
James Tehrani
People get overly tired. People get distracted; they get stressed and make poor decisions. People multitask when they shouldn’t. People lack training at times.
Our brains and bodies are machines, but they are imperfect ones. Even the most thorough and careful person will become an “err apparent”…
Ryan E. Day
Before transitioning to journalism, I worked in manufacturing, production, and high-volume auto repair for decades. When I finally swapped my blue collar for white, I figured my old body would appreciate the switch to something less physically demanding. And it did—for about six months. I learned…
AssurX
When a change management system is designed effectively, it defines how strategies, procedures, and technologies will be applied to address changes in the business environment.
Implementing a change management process for quality and compliance requires planning and preparation. Starting with a…
Ryan E. Day
In part one of this article, we explored how Woodland Trade Co. (WTC) leveraged high-accuracy portable CMMs to help land tight-tolerance aerospace contracts, and even earn Boeing’s Supplier of the Year award. Here in part two, WTC’s QA manager William Shanks reveals the advanced technology that…
Kari Miller
Industry 4.0, also known as smart factory 4.0, is labeled as the fourth industrial revolution, yet many don’t understand it or how it will affect the things they do; quality management is no exception. The executives in your organization, however, are most certainly monitoring this paradigm-…
Mike Richman
What is the primary element required by an organization—or an individual—when they begin to seek improved outcomes? It’s not dedication, or desire, or knowledge, or even skill. Rather, it’s critically important to begin by getting clear, perfectly clear, about what you’re doing and why. Only then…
Bob Hunt
Much has been written about the benefits of identifying and leveraging an organization’s core competencies to gain competitive advantage. But are organizations putting this concept into practice, and are they doing it strategically? Do they understand that by not doing so they risk losing…
Harish Jose
In today’s column, I will be looking at kaizen and kaikaku through the lens of the explore/exploit model. Kaizen is often translated from Japanese as “continuous improvement” or “change for better.” Kaikaku, another Japanese term, is translated as “radical change or improvement.” Kakushin is…
James daSilva
One of the common complaints you’ll hear today is executives saying how there isn’t enough talent out there, not enough people with the right skills or even the willingness to learn. They say that people—almost always “young people”—are too eager to jump ship.
What are companies to do when there’…
Laurel Thoennes @ QD
Employers can’t find people with the skills needed for the today’s workplace, because high schools and universities fail to teach students useful job skills. The skills gap is a decades-old and well-known problem that will remain unsolved unless we flip priorities not only in our school systems…
Ephy Torenberg
The evolving trends of automation are affecting quality management business processes for manufacturing organizations of all sizes. In this article, we’ll look at the business case for automation; consider the basic opportunities and challenges found at the start of a quality automation project;…
Dan Jacob
Developing high-quality products is more important today than ever before. Market visibility to product quality has never been higher, and competitive pressures continue to squeeze margins and time to market. Manufacturers must consistently deliver better, faster, cheaper. It’s easy to deliver on…
Thomas Kochan
More than 200 CEOs have said they will raise wages or give bonuses as a result of the large corporate income tax cut passed late last year by Congress.
Some view their plans as simply a public relations move, others as a response to tighter labor markets or worker pressures. Pretty much everyone…
Eric Stoop
If you had your AS9100 transition audit tomorrow, could you say right now whether you would pass? More important, do you know where the gaps are in your processes that could trigger nonconformities?
AS9100 is the leading standard for aerospace management systems, required by original equipment…
Jeff Dewar, Mike Richman
Just as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award program was defunded by the federal government during the Obama Administration, President Trump and Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), are now contemplating the eventual demise of several long-standing…
Mike McDonald
Fear. Anxiety. Stress. Anger. Not exactly the emotions we’re hoping to invoke in our employees, right? Not exactly the key to motivational management, anyway.
Unfortunately, those are the emotions many people feel when it’s time to discuss their work metrics. Employees dread the idea of their…
Paul Foster
What sets the top 20 percent of innovation leaders apart from their competitors? According to LNS Research, one key difference is that a majority (52%) of the top tier has real-time visibility into manufacturing quality metrics, compared to just 9 percent of the competition.
Organizations collect…
Jason Furness
In a previous article I wrote about the reasons why so many lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and other improvement programs fail. In this article I’m going to expand on reason No. 1: the Academy Award Syndrome.
Academy Award Syndrome
The Academy Award Syndrome is where a program or project is…
Mike Brandt
At the heart of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are two critical words you will see in almost every article and write-up where Industry 4.0 is mentioned. Those two words are “digital” and “smart,” and they represent a complete shift in enablement and employee productivity in the modern…
Jim Benson
Tonianne DeMaria and I run the Personal Kanban, Modus Institute, and Modus Cooperandi Corp-o-plex pretty much duo-handed. There’s a lot of work. The rules of Personal Kanban apply to us, too. We are constantly experimenting with new ways to visualize our work and limit our work-in-process (WIP).…
Ryan E. Day
Manufacturing activities have strong ties to economic prosperity. Deloitte’s 2016 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index states, “Nations and companies are striving to advance to the next technology frontier and raise their economic well-being.” It’s no surprise that the manufacturing sector is…
John Toon
Can companies rely on the results of one or two scientific studies to design a new industrial process or launch a new product? In at least one area of materials chemistry, the answer may be yes—but only 80 percent of the time.
The replicability of results from scientific studies has become a…
Dan Chalk
Although many manufacturing organizations have held firm to traditional operational processes for generations, the time has come for transformational change. There is an ongoing shift in cultural expectations of how, when, and where work happens, and it is driven by consumer choice. Industry…
Stephen McCarthy
Cost of quality (CoQ) is certainly not a new topic. It was first described in 1956 by American quality control expert Armand V. Feigenbaum in a Harvard Business Review article. As you likely already know, CoQ consists of four categories: internal and external failures, and appraisal and prevention…