As a speaker at the 2012 IndustryWeek Best Plants conference last week in Indianapolis, I had the chance to sit in on some of the sessions and keynotes. I found one keynote speaker, Mary Adringa, CEO and President of Vermeer, an international, family-owned agricultural, construction, environmental and industrial equipment manufacturing company, particularly interesting. Mary [...]
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Manufacturing: If it can boost the stock market, why aren't people more interested in working in it?The recent events at August National Golf Club where the CEO of IBM, Virginia Rometty is not being offered membership due to her gender, demonstrate that its membership is made up of Cro-Magnon men who haven’t yet reached even the Bronze Age. Interesting how the club is more than happy to take IBM’s sponsorship money, but is stubbornly sticking to [...] I couldn’t resist making a few comments about the new show on NBC, “Outsourced” which aired last week. For those of you who haven’t heard of it or seen it, the show is about a call center in the U.S. being outsourced to India. If you think about it, do you know of any [...] Recently on the blog, The Conversation, there was a fabulous post and short video by Harvard Business School Professor Youngme Moon, “The Anti-Creativity Checklist“. Professor Moon’s premise in her video, which presents 14 ways that companies stifle creativity (see below), is that companies are programmed to prevent change and new ideas from taking hold. This [...] An article in today’s WSJ, “Companies More Prone to Go Vertical,” discussed the current trend for some companies such as Oracle, Pepsi, IBM, General Motors, Boeing and Apple, to cite a few, to return to the practice of vertical integration. Vertical integration can be defined as the degree to which a company owns its upstream suppliers and [...] Firing the customer is something taught in business schools and often mentioned as an approach for small companies to get rid of problem customers. The subject came up again recently in a WSJ article that reported on small businesses, who, despite the recession, are deciding to shed their high-maintenance and unprofitable customers. It’s a popular [...] It was only a matter of time before the ever-popular Six Sigma would reach the college classroom. I was reading an article about how York College in Southeastern Pennsylvania has begun to offer a course in Six Sigma in its MBA program. This is one of many MBA programs now offering Six Sigma courses. [...] Attending the annual AME Lean Conference was energizing and inspiring. The conference delegates are a different crowd. They are practitioners of the lean enterprise. This is apparent if you spend any time with these folks. You know you’re at a lean conference when delegates: Complain that the buffet layout is not lean and discuss ways to [...] Davis Ballistracchi recently penned an insightful piece for Quality Digest, Why Did Total Quality Management Fail? One of the key reasons is management. They talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. They sit on the sidelines, cheering employees on, but nothing changes because management doesn’t change. Management blocks the change rather than enabling [...] Supply managers and buyers have always had the challenge not just of finding suppliers but finding suppliers who are both high-performing and “best value”. Numerous supplier evaluation and supplier performance management software solutions are now available, where ten years ago very few options existed. Most options that I’m aware of are either SaaS (software [...] |
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