In 1996, the TSSC (Toyota Production System Support Center) began working with my company to create one-by-one production capability in our product assembly.

Does this situation sound familiar? You’re sitting in a meeting, and you and your colleagues are energetically discussing how to handle an important issue or challenge.

In September 2021, I was fortunate to attend the FABTECH conference in Chicago, a sprawling trade show with what must have been billions of dollars of manufacturing equipment on display: robots, automation, 3D printers, you name it.

Negotiators are often told they should eschew competitive negotiations, where parties fight for what’s on the table. They should instead increase the size of the pie and seek win-win scenarios. But in reality, competitive negotiations are often unavoidable.

More and more people are doing their shopping from home these days, and whether they’re ordering groceries, home office equipment, or Covid-19 tests, they increasingly expect their deliveries to be fast and on time.

Food Co., a pseudonym for a large food processing plant in the U.S. Northeast, had been operating successfully for several years when the plant manager realized he had a problem he couldn’t solve alone.

Bringing innovation inside an established firm, even one that has created novel ideas in the past, is not as simple as just purchasing bundled external knowledge and expecting it to work wonders at headquarters right away.

This article is the sixth in a monthly series by the the America Works initiative.

The manufacturing skills gap has been a topic of discussion for several years.