Lean

A food company spends months and significant budget on consumer research before launching a new product. The survey scores are strong, so the store managers stock it. Six months later, the product is quietly pulled from the shelves. The consumers who said they would buy it didn’t.

In the larger organizations I worked for as a quality leader, supplier auditing was almost always calendar-driven. Sometimes supplier audits happened once a year; in other places, they might happen twice. I’d build the schedule to accommodate that, and the system would just run.

…

Quality Digest recently spoke with David Isaacson, the executive director of portfolio marketing at Octave. Besides his work on marketing strategies, he also helps people manage, understand, and better control their operations with software solutions that protect industry assets and people while…

Industrial robots don’t just shape pay today. Research from Pinar Yildirim, a Wharton professor of economics and marketing, shows they also make workers less likely to move into higher-paying occupations, cutting expected lifetime earnings.

“Workers aren’t necessarily losing their…

Think fast: What’s the No. 1 rule of troubleshooting?

Get to the root cause. It’s the foundation principle drilled into every problem solver: Find the underlying cause for a problem—not just a symptom or contributing issue—then fix it.

But what if getting to root cause and…

Focusing on metrics is key to achieving your desired business results—but it can be difficult to determine which metrics actually matter. There are five major questions you need to answer to ensure the metrics you’re measuring matter, and that you can take action based on what they tell you.…