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Strategy

Manufacturing-quality: How exactly do you hit the mark?

“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.” It is presumed that Henry Ford made that insightful statement, but I doubt it. Ford’s take on quality was entirely strategic—he was an industrialist after all. Sure, he knew integrity was important but I believe he had a different idea for quality as it relates to the manufacturing floor. I think it’s a definition worthy enough to kick around ...
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Industrial specialty products are customer focused

A great distributor knows; customers define the specialty products he will purvey. It’s what makes an industrial product a “specialty” in the first place. He knows an anti-flutter could be an unusual specialty to one customer yet an essential stock to another. What’s important, it’s your business—you define the specialties. A great distributor understands that your needs are unique—it’s a customer...
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Collaboration—critical, but attractive choices

Call it what you like but relationships where collaboration thrive is a one-plus-one equals-three proposition. Task by task, you can achieve shared goals that are more meaningful within your company, more valuable to your customers and more strategic within the supply chain. Companies that want to grow seek the competitive advantage gained from collaborative efforts. They see the disruptive comple...
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From data to wisdom: charting your shop’s new path

Before metalworking coolants are drawn, lubricants changed, adhesives applied or before any conversion coating solution is even dreamt about, data are being collected and managed somewhere along the food chain. I am no expert in data science but I do appreciate how much (and how fast) industry is being tantalized with the power of data. What’s relevant for any shop is that meaningful data manageme...
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25 Industrious news bits challenge YOU to connect the dots

It’s not so much in the collecting of the dots as it is in the connecting a link to your business that matters. Just last week one of my favorites, the best selling business author, Seth Godin wrote “Connecting dots, solving the problem that hasn't been solved before, seeing the pattern before it is made obvious, is more essential than ever before. Why then, do we spend so much time collecting dot...
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Quality Assurance? Call me crazy

With some companies, recording customer phone calls is common practice. Under the guise of “quality improvement,” or Quality Assurance, you can expect a utility or an insurance company to offer you the fair and familiar warning. “This call might be monitored or recorded for quality assurance purposes ….” Something like that. I’m never really sure. All they said was it “might” be recorded. I must s...
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Lubrication and predictive maintenance

A game to win Recently, billionaire and technology magnate, Bill Gates, subjected himself to an open game of chess with the newly crowned world champion (23-year-old Norwegian, Magnus Carlson). Save publicity, I’m not sure what the motive was because Bill was greased in exactly 1 minute, 20 seconds—after just nine moves of chess. Always the pragmatic, Gates told the audience during the first coupl...
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“Manufacturing punches above its weight”

Supply chains, out for the count. If you survived the last five years you have to be doing something right. Think back to 2008 and remember the world’s largest economy contracting like a blown front tire by 3.9 percent (fourth quarter 2007 to third quarter 2009) marking the worst economic slump since the Great Depression and the first decrease(s) in the GDP in 17 years. In spite of all that, the m...
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Robotics: the basis of a paradigm shift

Rethinking what we already know It’s quite possible that we’ll look back on these times as nothing more than the period when robots saved our butts. It will have been the last chapter of the impulsive off-shoring experiment (see more). Hopefully we’ll see it as the time that we made that end run that moved us from fixating on symptomatic job losses to experimenting with new realms of efficiency an...
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