Continual product and process innovation are crucial for commercially successful products to maintain their industry dominance, according to MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) industry co-director Vah Erdekian.

RFID tags are not like bar codes. Just because you see a tag doesn’t mean your RFID equipment will see it. Conversely, if you can’t see a tag, that doesn’t mean your RFID equipment won’t read it.

In 2011, the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), a proponent of knowledge management, benchmarking, and best practices business research, talked to a series of large organizations to learn how they measure quality.

During the Robert W. Baird 41st annual Industrial Conference, which was held Nov. 8–9, 2011, in Chicago, teams from Baird Equity Research put together macro-sector comments based on presentations and breakout sessions from more than 100 public companies.

Whenever manufacturing nonconformances are discovered, immediate action is required to ensure that a flawed product is quickly identified, contained, and corrected at the suppliers’—and often the customers’—locations.

Suppose you came upon a man in the woods, working to saw down a tree. He is exhausted from working for hours. You suggest he could take a break to sharpen the saw because it will help the work go faster. “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw!” he exclaims.

It is well-known that negative interactions have a bigger impact than positive ones, and that people tend to remember a person’s unfavorable qualities more vividly than their positive traits.

Bah! The NBA makes me mad. Seriously, why can’t the basketball players and the execs resolve this current lockout? I want to have something to watch after football season is over.

When you try to improve your athletic abilities (e.g., playing tennis, swimming), how do you go about it? There are quite a few options, including observing how those who are best-in-class perform.

As most of us know, on Oct. 5, 2011, we lost Steve Jobs, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Amid all the reports of his life and death, one of his phrases stood out to me: “Stay hungry.