All Features
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
When I was 7 years old, I went into the woods behind my house, built a fire, then fried an egg over it in an old pie tin. When the egg was done, I ate it. I didn’t even like eggs, but because I had cooked it on my own, it was delicious.
I was so proud of my achievement that I ran inside and told…
Aliyah Kovner
It’s 1 p.m. on a sunny afternoon in July—smack dab in the middle of summer break—and a perfect 75° outside, but Jonathan Park is laser-focused. Though he could be strolling down a beach, or at home browsing social media, this 16-year-old is bent over a lab bench, intently pipetting reagents to run…
Eric Weisbrod
In manufacturing, standardization in production and process control leads to increased profitability and cuts down on many siloed problems that can plague even the most quality-focused organization. But when you have multiple, disparate plants around the country or the globe, standardization can…
David Blustein
On the surface, the well-being of the American worker seems rosy. Unemployment in the United States hovers near a 50-year low, and employers describe growing shortages of workers in a wide array of fields. But looking beyond the numbers tells a different story.
My new book, The Importance of Work…
Laurel Thomas
Soldiers develop attachments to the robots that help them diffuse bombs in the field. Despite numerous warnings about privacy, millions of us trust smart speakers like Alexa to listen into our daily lives. Some of us name our cars and even shed tears when we trade them in for shiny new vehicles.…
Andrei Vakulenko
Taylor Attachments, based in the United Kingdom, custom designs and produces tractor headstock conversion brackets. These are attachments for farm handlers and loaders, for mounting everything from buckets to forks, grapples, saws, carriers, bale stabbers, grabbers, hitches, backhoes, tillers, yard…
Ryan E. Day
Although certification to major standards is often the threshold to winning next-level contracts, it is when your organization synthesizes the standard’s values that real payoff is realized. Chief among those values is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is paramount to attracting new…
Annette Franz
Being a customer experience (CX) professional is hard enough; misinformation just makes our work more challenging. Misinformation or confusing information by a person with a ton of followers and a ton of influence makes our work even more challenging.
Recently, Seth Godin published a post on his…
Vibhas Rattanjee
Leadership development might be one of the most significant loss-making ventures in modern business. Companies spend big money on developing leaders—about $3.4 billion annually by some estimates—yet research shows that 50 to 60 percent of executives fail to achieve the strategy they were hired to…
Susan Whitehead
It’s a Catch-22 for a manufacturing supervisor: You need to train new hires properly to master the skills for the job, but your own daily job duties can’t wait. Putting time aside to train workers is especially challenging if you’re a small to medium-sized manufacturer (SMM) with tight, daily…
DP Technology
Founded in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2001, Green Tools is a leading manufacturer of cutting tools, providing circular saws and other woodcutting machines for the sawmill, furniture, and woodworking industries throughout Russia.
Green Tools began as a small reseller of woodworking tools produced…
Isaac Maw
Machine learning can be used for more than violating your privacy for a social media challenge. For example, one fascinating application has been developed by Instrumental AI, which uses machine learning to detect defects and anomalies in photographs of parts during various stages of assembly,…
Ziv Carmon
Counterfeiting is widespread and rapidly expanding. In 2015, the value of fake and pirated products globally was estimated at $1.7 trillion, equivalent to the GDP of Canada. The scope of this phenomenon is vast. In both developing and developed countries, counterfeiting affects many sectors,…
Stephen McCarthy
In our constantly evolving, data-rich universe, collecting, interpreting, and understanding process data can be tricky. But it is increasingly important if we want to maintain sustainable quality across product development and manufacturing processes. This challenge is particularly evident in the…
Jim Benson
Responsibility. It’s a hard word to come to grips with. What is the responsible thing to do right now? What is my personal responsibility? What is my responsibility as a team, family, company, state, or country member? What do I expect from others?
The world now is in transition, from being…
Harish Jose
After reviewing Mark Graban’s wonderful book, Measures of Success (Constancy, 2018), I started rereading Walter Shewhart’s books, Statistical Method From the Viewpoint of Quality Control (Dover reprint 1986, originally edited by W. Edwards. Deming), and Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured…
Dat Duthinh
One of the undergraduate engineering courses that left a deep and lasting impression on me was a course on innovation and aesthetics in engineering taught by David Billington at Princeton University. So, when I read the story of a skyscraper in New York that had to undergo secret emergency repairs…
Paul Laughlin
How do you develop domain knowledge in your analysts, so their data use, interpretation, and recommendations make sense? I’ve mentioned in a previous article, about the difficulties of offshoring analytics, how vital domain knowledge can be. Yet, I find most articles or speakers focus on the need…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
While I was facilitating a retreat for a group of 15 men, all in their late 30s and 40s, all high-level executives and all high achievers, an interesting topic arose. One of the men asked for help dealing with his wife, who was complaining he worked too much. He wanted help in getting her to…
Julien Pollack, Petr Matous
Someone we know recently told us about a team-building event that proved anything but.
The chief executive who arranged it loved mountain biking. So he chose a venue to share his passion with his team. On the day, he shot around the track. Others with less experience took up to three hours longer…
William A. Levinson
The martial arts rank, Shodan, for a first-degree black belt, does not mean “expert”; it means “first step.” ISO 9001:2015 is similarly a valuable and vital first step toward world-class performance, but it is only that—a first step. It covers only by implication many of the risks and opportunities…
Jennifer Lopez
Globalization of the medical device market as well as its supporting supply chains continues to increase year after year. This has forced regulatory bodies to grapple with finding a way to narrow the gap between international and domestic regulation. In spring 2018 the United States Food and Drug…
Jack Dunigan
It happens easily enough and usually innocently enough. You start a business or organization then endure what is often a long and expensive learning curve. Along the way you learn. You learn a lot. You discover the competencies and incompetencies of those working with you. You learn how to manage…
ZEISS Industrial Quality Solutions
Decanter centrifuges from Hiller GmbH, headquartered in Vilsbiburg, Germany, are in demand globally. These centrifuges separate solid and fluid materials, such as in the production of olive oil or wine, or for wastewater treatment. The multiton machines achieve high yields unmatched by competitors…
Leading2Lean
It’s no news that U.S. manufacturing has a workforce problem. However, a new survey conducted by Leading2Lean (L2L) offers some unexpected hope. The survey reveals that a new generation of workers could spur industrywide innovation.
The 2019 L2L Manufacturing Index, an annual measurement of the…
