Manufacturing organizations face an increasingly complex and unforgiving Environmental, Health & Safety and Quality (EHSQ) environment. Yet, many companies are still relying on traditional tools to manage EHSQ risks that fall short of meeting today’s challenges. Intelex Technologies’ white paper, “Gather, Predict, Change: How Smart Leaders Tame Risky Systems,” provides an overview of the limitations of traditional EHSQ management approaches and outlines three steps to developing a proactive, forward-looking, system-level approach to managing EHSQ risks. Get your copy today: http://bit.ly/2FVmYm2.
Read More →Women at Work: An Interview with Allison Grealis, President, Women in Manufacturing
Allison Grealis is founder and president of Women in Manufacturing (WiM), a national trade association focused on supporting, promoting and inspiring women in the manufacturing sector. She is also the vice president of membership and association services of the Precision Metalforming Association (PMA), a full-service trade association representing the metalforming industry. Since joining PMA in 2001, Grealis has held a variety of positions that included district, committee and division management; affinity partner relations; sponsorship sales; new product and service development; and member services. Grealis earned her Bachelor of Arts in English with a certificate in Women’s Studies from Ohio University and a Masters in Public Administration from the University of Akron. Presently, Grealis serves as the president of the Greater Cleveland Society of Association Executives and as a board member of Our Lady of the Elms High School. We are thrilled to have Allison join us at the American Manufacturing Summit. She will be Chair of our People & Workforce Management Stream, as well as hosting a Lunch and Learn on “Succession Planning: Support, Promote, and Inspire Women in Manufacturing”, and participating in a panel on avoiding the skills shortage in the next 10 years. We sat down with Allison in advance of the event to ask her some questions about where manufacturing is going and how to support women in the industry.
Read More →IBM: Be ready for Industry 4.0 with Cognitive Manufacturing
Is your business ready for industry 4.0? Automation and the need for an exchange and flow of data to create meaningful insights is growing, and with it is the need for businesses to prepare themselves for Industry 4.0. Cognitive manufacturing can help prepare manufacturers with Industry 4.0, as it can be used to bring insight across the entire value chain by connecting data points across systems, equipments and processes. It can help businesses “gain the visibility, flexibility and agility to grow, evolve and succeed in the digital age.” Cognitive manufacturing allows leaders to see the greater picture developed by data collected in real-time. Decision makers can then make choices based on the facts and data presented to them in a timely manner, find areas of weaknesses and opportunities to improve in the supply chain. Learn how Cognitive Manufacturing can help your business get ready for Industry 4.0 in IBM’s ebook: ibm.biz/BeReadyeBook!
Read More →Leadership Spotlight: Karl Weiss, VP, Material Handling and Underground Division, Caterpillar Inc.
We are thrilled to have Karl Weiss, VP, Material Handling and Underground Division, at Caterpillar Inc., join us as the Opening Keynote speaker at the American Manufacturing Summit, which will be held in Lombard, IL from March 27-28. He will be the discussing “Manufacturing Strategy and Helping Customers Win Through Operational Excellence”. Since joining Caterpillar in 1992, Karl has had various assignments within product development at Caterpillar’s Decatur, Joliet, and Aurora facilities, primarily focused on large machine structural design. He has also taken on international assignments in Geneva, Switzerland and Beijing, China. Since 2013, Karl has been a Caterpillar Inc. Vice President, previously of the Earthmoving division and currently of the Material Handling and Underground division. We sat down with Karl in advance of the event to talk about his career, his own leadership style, and what he will be talking about at the American Manufacturing Summit. Questions Answered: How would you describe your leadership style? What are the most important minutes of the day to sustain and grow your organizational goals? What is the best piece of advice you’ve received in your career? What was the toughest challenge you’ve faced in your career and how did you overcome it? What is the smallest change you have made within your role that has made the biggest impact?
Read More →Transforming Health & Safety with Mobile Technology
What got us to where we are today will not get us to where we want to be tomorrow. Decades of awareness building, training, and record keeping on Occupational Health and Safety – spearheaded by private and public enterprises and prodded along by governments – have got us to where we are today. These efforts have moved us incrementally along a path over the past four decades from literally dozens of deaths per day in the US alone, to a quarter of this number today.
Read More →The Quality 4.0 Impact and Strategy Handbook
The most recent decade has seen rapid advances in connectivity, mobility, analytics, scalability, and data, spawning what has been called the fourth industrial revolution, or Industry 4.0. This fourth industrial revolution has digitalized operations and resulted in transformations in manufacturing efficiency, supply chain performance, product innovation, and in some cases enabled entirely new business models. This transformation should be top of mind for quality leaders, as quality improvement and monitoring are among the top use cases for Industry 4.0. Quality 4.0 is closely aligning quality management with Industry 4.0 to enable enterprise efficiencies, performance, innovation and business models. However, much of the market isn’t focusing on Quality 4.0, since many quality teams are still trying to solve yesterday’s problems: inefficiency caused by fragmented systems, manual metrics calculations, quality teams independently performing quality work with minimal cross-functional ownership, and ineffective supplier communication, among others.
Read More →Teams 2.0 – Rebooting Team Engagement and Execution
In many organizations today, team functionality is actually working against overall business success and efficiency. Organizations have become a slave to team models that are inefficient, unproductive, and bureaucratic. This Q&A with Competitive Solutions, Inc. answers the following questions about Rebooting Team Engagement and Execution: What are the main issues you see businesses experiencing in team engagement in execution? Why does team functionality work against overall business success and efficiency? What are non-negotiable systems, and how can organizational leaders use these systems to transform the business? When are continuous improvement tools no longer effective? In your experience, what has the outcome been like when team engagement and execution are rebooted?
Read More →ISO 45001 May Be Particularly Beneficial To Manufacturing
ISO 45001 will heap a whole lot more responsibility on to the already full plates of top managers. The standard puts business management on the hook to create, orchestrate, maintain, monitor, develop and actively promote a system that takes occupational health and safety (OH&S) policies and embeds these into the culture and operation of a business’s everyday activities. The corollary to this is that leaders will need to find a way to ensure sufficient financial, personnel and time resources are devoted to the successful implementation of a management system for OH&S. At the heart of the ISO 45001 standard is a need for worker involvement through participation in decision making, evaluation procedures, implementation and feedback mechanisms.
Read More →Reducing Customer Wait Times and Saving Sight with the Toyota Production System
Jamie Bonini, VP, Toyota Production System Support Center at Toyota, joined us at the American Automotive Summit to discuss “Driving Profitability for the Future: Redefining Competitiveness through Achieving and Sustaining Lean Excellence.” Bonini describes the Toyota Production System as “an organizational culture of highly engaged people that come to work every day to do their work and make their work better.” This culture is created and sustained by a system that has three elements: a philosophy (on how to operate and how to treat your people), some technical tools, and a managerial role, which is to relentlessly engage and develop people to solve problems to drive improvement. The Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC) aims to share this organizational culture to improve businesses and the world. Their mission is “to contribute to society by sharing the Toyota Production System (TPS) with nonprofits, government entities, and manufacturers throughout North America to better serve customers or people in need.” Bonini shared with the audience a few case studies about how they are bringing the TPS approach to varied organizations, including a family-owned job shop making stainless steel components in Chicago, and the State of New York. One case that was particularly touching was about the work they have done at an ophthalmology clinic in Los Angeles, where TSSC has applied TPS to reduce speed and wait times for eye surgeries.
Read More →Saving Lives and Limbs With Big Data – A White Paper by Intelex Technologies
In almost all cases, workplace injuries and casualties are preventable. Intelex Technologies, the leading software provider of Environment, Health, Safety, and Quality Management, has been capturing data on the events leading up to workplace incidents, the circumstances surrounding them, and the after-effects for over a decade, to provide data that can prevent workplace incidents from occurring. “In the white paper “Saving Lives and Limbs With Big Data,” Intelex Data Science Advisor Dr. Gary Edwards, challenges the traditional Safety Triangle as the ultimate guide to safety and explains their Data Science findings that have the potential for eliminating the most catastrophic incidents.” Learn about their findings and access their white paper here, http://bit.ly/2rkSMgU.
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