All Features
Anna Nagurney
The American economy is underpinned by networks. Road networks carry traffic and freight; the internet and telecommunications networks carry our voices and digital information; the electricity grid is a network carrying energy; financial networks transfer money from bank accounts to merchants.…
Sandrine Tranchard
Depression and mental health conditions are on the rise globally. Affecting more than 300 million people of all ages across the world, depression causes immense suffering to people and their families, as well as placing a great economic cost on society. Its consequences and solutions were…
Laurel Thoennes @ QD
Traffic crawled. Ahead of me was a pickup, its bumper thick with stickers. From the one most cracked and faded, I saw the word “welfare.” Just before the driver switched lanes, I made out the rest: “Work harder—there are millions on welfare depending on you.” That triggered a memory so vivid I no…
Mark Whitworth
Supplier quality assurance (SQA) is the process that ensures a supplier reliably provides goods or services that satisfy the customer’s needs. This process is collaborative to make certain the supplier’s offerings meet the agreed-upon requirements with minimum inspection or modification.…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
As manufacturing becomes increasingly oblivious of where one country stops and another begins, the responsibilities of quality managers have extended beyond the safely measurable and into the loosely regulated wilds of global competition. Quality control now requires a sense of how different…
Michael Jovanis
Sponsored Content
Particles of metal in children’s medicine. Adulterated baby formula. Spontaneously combusting smartphones. When scandal is only a tweet away, companies can’t hide from quality failures.
High-profile quality problems like these can not only harm consumers, but also lead to huge…
Jim Benson
The notion of a successful distributed team seems like a wonderful yet unobtainable dream.
But stop and think: How often are your nondistributed teams successful? When have they been successful, and why? It’s never because of your plan, or because you hired the best people. It’s not because you…
Dirk Dusharme
‘Made in the U.S.A.” Do people really care about those words on the label, and more important, how motivated are they to buy American-made products? The answer is yes... and sort of. Yes, consumers in the United States say they want to “buy American” and are willing to pay up for it. According to…
Bruce Hamilton
Most often when we think of a wheel, it’s in the context of transportation, one of the more obvious and ever-present of the 7 wastes in lean. In fact, the first likely use of a wheel and axle was not for transport but for processing—actual work.
According to the Smithsonian, the potter’s wheel…
Adams Nager
Depending on whom you ask, it’s either the best of times or the worst of times for global trade. Protectionists villainize trade as damaging to U.S. workers, while on the other side of the coin, pure laissez faire free traders consider trade as a pure positive for the United States.
Mexico and…
Andrew Sloan
At times it can be difficult to have a common-sense discussion about the relationship between business and the natural environment. The discourse (maybe argument is a better word) tends to be highly charged, and the opposing camps seem to have lost the ability to listen to each other.
The…
Jeffrey Phillips
The attempt to eliminate noise from an operating system or a business process is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile challenge, until one considers the question: What is the real signal? What is creating the noise?
In many businesses today, there are several signals, what we might call noise…
Roger Jensen
For several decades, manufacturers have been pursuing lean on their shop floors to reduce costs and improve lead times through waste elimination and process improvement. They have been less successful, however, in reaping lean’s potential benefits in their purchasing, planning, and supply chain…
Dirk Dusharme
Do we have another automotive cheating scandal? Could helping our economy be as easy as just paying our vendors faster? Last week’s Quality Digest Live contained answers to those questions and a discussion between myself and my co-host, Quality Digest publisher Mike Richman. During the show, we…
Jean-Noel Barrot
Operating a small business, the backbone of the U.S. economy, has always been tough. But small businesses have been disproportionately hurt by the Great Recession, losing 40 percent more jobs than the rest of the private sector combined. Interestingly, as my research with Harvard’s Ramana Nanda…
Stefan Geib
While the fallout of the United Kingdom’s decision to exit the European Union has sent shockwaves throughout the political and economic world, Brexit is merely a footnote in the global supply chain risk story. According to the latest risk index from the Chartered Institute of Procurement &…
Daniel Blake, Caterina Moschieri
Pulling out of a country is an expensive proposition for a multinational firm, but it is sometimes required for the corporate bottom line. If the host country changes laws or even expropriates a subsidiary, it is often time to leave or divest.
Divestiture—pulling out assets or closing down part…
Anna Nagurney
When we talk about supply chains, we may conjure up images of manufacturing plants, warehouses, trucks, and shipping docks. There is another, truly unique supply chain for a product vitally important to healthcare and life, and it is very volatile at the moment: the blood supply chain.
Human…
Ruth P. Stevens
Business marketers have much to gain from retention marketing. Business customers tend to be fewer in number, and each is more valuable—meaning you can’t afford to lose even one. But how do you keep your customers active and buying from you, vs. the competition? How do you prevent defection?
Let’s…
DNV GL
According the International Organization of Standardization (ISO), there are more than 300,000 certifications to ISO 14001 in 171 countries around the world, making it the most relied-upon symbol of environmental stewardship and sustainable business practice. True to its core tenant of continual…
Penelope B. Prime
Chinese goods seem to be everywhere these days. Consider this: At the Olympics in Rio this summer, Chinese companies supplied the mascot dolls; much of the sports equipment; the security surveillance system; and the uniforms for the volunteers, technical personnel, and even the torch-bearers.
Do…
Kyle Pheland, Belinda Jones
Change is inevitable in every organization. Planned or not, forces inside and outside the enterprise can sometimes encumber a workforce and lead to nonvalue-added processes. Growing spurts, major technology implementations, or even small supply-chain organizational projects can present more issues…
Michael A. Witt
Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.
While globalization has benefited humanity in many ways, its continued progress is in serious doubt. As I wrote previously, the two leading political science theories, liberalism and realism, both predict that globalization…
Martin Green
I think curiosity is at the root of all scientific careers. That, and insecurity. In my formative years, I felt compelled to assign a rational explanation to everything. I didn’t know it then, but I was practicing to be a scientist—and having lots of fun.
I remember entertaining numerous…
Michael A. Witt
For most of the past 25 years, globalization was seen as an unstoppable force, as sure to advance as the sun rises in the east. But increasingly, it looks more vulnerable than inexorable. Causes for concern are easy to find. For instance, the last set of World Trade Organization negotiations over…