All Features
Mike Figliuolo
Email is the bane of our existence. Sure, it’s awesome for funny cat videos, chain letters, and getting awesome blogs like this one (see what I did there?), but it can also cause massive amounts of stress and waste tremendous amounts of time.
One of the first things I do when I take on a new…
NIST
Every year, employers across the United States open their doors to curious kids, inviting them to experience a day in the life of their parents at work. On April 25, 2025, Take a Child to Work Day and Beyond will give children whose parents work in manufacturing a fun opportunity to explore…
Bryan Christiansen
Failure analysis helps uncover the root cause of equipment issues so you can fix problems and prevent them from happening again. This guide outlines a clear, six-step process to conduct effective failure analysis and write a report that adds long-term value.
Failure analysis techniques vary widely…
Quality Digest, Donald J. Wheeler
Dr. Donald J. Wheeler has been one of Quality Digest’s most highly read authors for decades. His teaching on the use of control charts in industrial settings has long been considered the gold standard. He has conducted more than 1,100 seminars in 17 countries on six continents, and his books have…
Akhilesh Gulati
As director of quality at a manufacturing plant, James faced the reality of shift every day. As the plant embraced new technologies and adapted to changing global dynamics, he knew that quality management could no longer be reactive. The question was whether he could turn these shifts into…
Gleb Tsipursky
Once hailed as both an ethical mandate and a strategic necessity after the upheaval of 2020, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives now face intense scrutiny and pushback. Major corporations—ranging from Walmart to Google—are quietly retreating from these programs amid escalating…
Quality Digest
If you’re a corporate employer, you must know the importance of training and its effects on your firm’s growth. Teaching employees with the help of corporate training is an essential step that every firm should follow to reach its goals. Additionally, incorporating OSHA training ensures workplace…
Akli Adjaoute
Keeping quality high in today’s fast-moving production world is a big challenge. Traditional quality checks have worked well, but they can be slow, require a lot of work, and are prone to mistakes.
AI could change this by making quality control faster, more accurate, and easier to scale. It could…
Gleb Tsipursky
One transformative strategy that can revolutionize how organizations embrace generative AI is peer mentoring. By leveraging the power of personal connections and shared expertise, peer mentoring accelerates learning, fosters collaboration, and fuels innovation. When mastering gen AI tools can mean…
Seb Murray
What happens when workplace colleagues land on opposing sides of an external competition? Henning Piezunka, an associate professor of management at Wharton, tackles this question in a recent study, using sports data to shed light on how outside rivalries can shape collaboration within the workplace…
Torsten Schimanski
Workforce development is an essential yet frequently overlooked aspect of supply chain management in manufacturing. Similar to how disruptions in material sourcing or logistics can halt operations, talent shortages and skill gaps create bottlenecks that jeopardize efficiency, quality, and growth. …
Donald J. Wheeler
Outliers are values that don’t “fit in” with the rest of the data. These extreme values are commonly considered a nuisance when we seek to summarize the data with our descriptive statistics. This article will show how to turn these nuisances into useful information.
The earliest statistical tests…
Oliver Franz
Maybe you’re pulling reports from three different platforms, trying to reconcile numbers that don’t quite match. Maybe you’re manually copying and pasting from multiple spreadsheets, hoping you didn’t introduce any errors along the way. Or maybe you’re waiting on IT to clean up, prep data, and…
Mike Figliuolo
A leader’s daily decision checklist is daunting: From hiring or firing to major business changes, every judgment call carries with it some level of risk. A bad choice could result in a toxic hire or a new product launch that crashes and burns. Perhaps more frightening is this: One poor decision…
Christine Schaefer
With the right approach, artificial intelligence isn’t “just a tool.” It can be “a real-time decision-making partner”—one that “empowers the workforce, making knowledge more accessible while ensuring that organizations have faster and smarter operations.” So says Ron Norris, retired director of…
Gleb Tsipursky
In the current professional landscape, idea generation is revered as a hallmark of creativity and innovation. Organizations celebrate those who can generate new and groundbreaking concepts, often overlooking the subtler art of idea curation.
However, the rapid advancement of generative AI is…
Mike Figliuolo
Things are awesome at work until that dreadful day your boss (with whom you have an awesome relationship) tells you, “Hey, I’ve hired a new person who will be reporting to me, and you’ll now report to that person.” Just like that, you’ve officially been layered. And we all know getting layered is…
Etienne Nichols
Have you ever wondered what your medtech company looks like from the point of view of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration investigator? Well, this is your chance to find out.
Greenlight Guru invited Vincent Cafiso, a former FDA investigator, to the Global Medical Device Podcast to share his…
Aimee Levitt
It’s a cliche that the most innovative ideas come in a flash of inspiration: Archimedes in his bathtub, Newton and the apple.
But anyone whose job depends on coming up with new ideas knows that’s not entirely true, mostly because there’s no such thing as a totally novel or original idea. New ideas…
Stephanie Ojeda
Quality risk management (QRM) has become a crucial tool for ensuring regulatory compliance worldwide. It plays a central role in ISO management system standards and regulations, as well as the EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR/IVDR), FDA 21 CFR 820, and ICH Q10 in the pharmaceutical and biotech…
Mike Figliuolo
We all have enemies. Some of us have many. But when we spend our time and energy focused on attacking them and counterattacking their inevitable strikes, we’re the ones losing.
In getting us to attack, our enemy has taken us away from productive pursuits. They’ve hung a dark cloud over our days.…
Gleb Tsipursky
The transformative potential of generative AI in learning and development (L&D) is a topic of growing interest among business leaders. And if you think your workers aren’t using gen AI, you might be seriously off-base.
According to a global study of 14,000 workers by Salesforce in late 2023,…
Roy VanGemert Jr.
What if you could meet your new employees a few years before their start date? Imagine a future where skilled workers are readily available in your local market, eager to contribute and connected to your company’s mission.
By investing in a sustainable local talent pipeline, manufacturers improve…
Donald J. Wheeler
The Man of La Mancha never got to the unreachable goal—and if you’re being judged by overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), then your manager may also be dreaming an impossible dream. This column will look at problems associated with the use of OEE values.
OEE is a value often used in lean…
Harry Hertz
My story begins with Hurricane Milton, one of two tragic hurricanes to hit the west coast of Florida last year. Milton went right over Sarasota, where I live part of the year. It was a devastating storm; tree and plant debris still remain on the sides of many roads. Big root balls are still upended…
