The first of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) half online, half in-person supply chain management master’s degree programs is making a profit and bringing dozens of new degree-seeking students to campus.

Our August 11, 2017, episode of QDL looked at the role of technology in after-market service, stairs that help you up, Fidget Cubes, and more.

“Climbing Stairs Just Got Easier With Energy-Recycling Steps”

These stairs actually help you go up.

Making the most of its position as an important seaport, Venice’s remarkable economic development during the Middle Ages relied on network effects, contractual innovation, and coordination among the players involved in long-distance trade. Companies today still exploit these mechanisms to succeed in underserved markets.

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As widely useful and broadly applicable as it may be, the ISO 9001 standard covering general requirements for quality management systems (QMS) cannot address all stakeholder needs in every sector. Component functions and operations of discrete industries often require additional standards to ensure that sector-specific procedures are undertaken and completed in a standardized and generally accepted manner.

During the 1950s, W. Edwards Deming championed quality management philosophies that helped Japan develop into a world-class industrial center. In 1954, Joseph M. Juran was invited to lecture by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers. His visit marked a turning point in Japan’s quality control activities. In 2005, Gordon Styles planted his own flag of quality in the East. Styles, however, did it by founding a high-tech manufacturing facility in Dongguan, China—not exactly known as a hotbed of quality exports.

The American economy is underpinned by networks. Road networks carry traffic and freight; the internet and telecommunications networks carry our voices and digital information; the electricity grid is a network carrying energy; financial networks transfer money from bank accounts to merchants. They’re vast, often global systems—but a local disruption can really block them up.

As manufacturing becomes increasingly oblivious of where one country stops and another begins, the responsibilities of quality managers have extended beyond the safely measurable and into the loosely regulated wilds of global competition. Quality control now requires a sense of how different cultures perceive the art of doing business. (Hint: It’s not always about teamwork and doing the right thing.)

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Particles of metal in children’s medicine. Adulterated baby formula. Spontaneously combusting smartphones. When scandal is only a tweet away, companies can’t hide from quality failures.

For several decades, manufacturers have been pursuing lean on their shop floors to reduce costs and improve lead times through waste elimination and process improvement. They have been less successful, however, in reaping lean’s potential benefits in their purchasing, planning, and supply chain operations, areas that promise significant potential improvement.

Do we have another automotive cheating scandal? Could helping our economy be as easy as just paying our vendors faster? Last week’s Quality Digest Live contained answers to those questions and a discussion between myself and my co-host, Quality Digest publisher Mike Richman. During the show, we covered:

“How Speeding Up Payments to Small Businesses Creates Jobs”