Evaluating Effective Supplier Quality Assurance
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The supplier quality assurance process can be divided into nine key steps
Manufacturing Without Borders
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Can anti-bribery laws help global businesses?
How to Break Out of the QMS Investment Cycle
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A disconnected QMS is complicated by manual steps and workarounds.
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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.
Distributed Teams, Not Distributed Silos
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Distributed team: We have the tools but need to know when and how to use them.
The notion of a successful distributed team seems like a wonderful yet unobtainable dream.
Do You ‘Buy American?’ Why?
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Manufacturers in many sectors are innovating to make high-quality products with less labor.
Cartwheels
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Too often, rather than rethinking the cause of the waste, we automate around it.
Most often when we think of a wheel, it’s in the context of transportation, one of the more obvious and ever-present of the 7 wastes in lean. In fact, the first likely use of a wheel and axle was not for transport but for processing—actual work.
Why U.S. Trade With Mexico and China Could Not Be More Different
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No matter how you stack it, Mexico is a better trading partner than China
Credit: Blake Thornberry
Depending on whom you ask, it’s either the best of times or the worst of times for global trade. Protectionists villainize trade as damaging to U.S.
Why Going Green Can Bring in the Green $$$
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It is possible to be pro-business and pro-environment at the same time
Signal vs. Noise
The attempt to eliminate noise from an operating system or a business process is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile challenge, until one considers the question: What is the real signal? What is creating the noise?
Lean Purchasing for Manufacturers
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Purchasing and supply-chain management are often ignored when it comes to lean implementations.