In just five short months, two Boeing 737 Max 8 airliners crashed, killing a total of 346 passengers and crew members. Both crashes occurred shortly after takeoff, and the similarities between the two catastrophes raised fundamental questions about the aircraft’s safety. It was grounded by nation after nation, with only Canada and the United States holding out.

Within maintenance management, the term MTBF (mean time between failures) is the most important key performance indicator after physical availability.

The term “set up to succeed” means people have been given most of what they need to do their job well.

Robots have been a part of industry longer than you might think. The patent for the first industrial robot, Unimate, was granted in 1961. While robots were sometimes utilized by larger manufacturers, such as automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), they were rarely an option for small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs).

Many people work on their goals by engaging in positive actions—hitting the gym, planning a trip, or taking guitar lessons. But they may be overlooking one of the most important tools for effecting change: the power of thought.

In 2013, thousands of consumers in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland bought, prepared—and ate—beef lasagna, hamburgers, and frozen dinners. What they didn’t know is what they were actually putting in their mouths.

Imagine building a brand over decades. Hundreds of millions of dollars invested in design and development. Sponsorships with celebrity athletes and professional and college teams. Leading-edge marketing making your company one of the top 20 brands in the world. It only takes one incident to unravel all this investment.

The spring and summer of 2000 were a long time ago, but I learned some lessons during those months that have stayed with me. In fact, the learning from that experience is still happening as I continue to connect it to things I see today.

I was a member of a team working hard to stand up a new production line of a new product. The rate pressures were very high, the production, production control, and quality processes were immature.

At a high level, the parts flow was supposed to work like this:

Engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) needed a way to secure smart manufacturing systems using the digital thread, so they turned to the new kid on the block... blockchain, that is.

I went to a meeting about innovation recently with a former client, and a discussion about digital transformation broke out. It was both interesting and strange.

Most corporations are struggling to comprehend the changes in front of them, but at the same time are so fixated on short-term thinking that they struggle to see the tsunami that is emerging just over the horizon. They know it’s there. They know they should prepare. They just don’t have the time to consider it or the contextual frameworks to understand it.