Manufacture Smarter Blog

8/17/2018 - BY: GEORGE SINGOS
While company-wide alignment is essential to realizing strategic goals, progress cannot be made without maintaining a strong sense of how well the business is performing. This is where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) come into play. By establishing, monitoring and analyzing KPIs, such as on-time delivery, changeover time or schedule bumping, companies will be equipped with the data and guidance necessary to align their business toward success.

8/10/2018 - BY: JOHN SPILLSON
Everything we do as manufacturers, and food processors, can be described as a process.  FMEAs help identify what can go wrong within a process as you create, make or assemble your product. Although this is often associated with a manufacturing process, it can be applied to any process (which involves inputs being turned into outputs). FMEAs are used to analyze possible failures or risks, along with the potential severity, chance of occurrence and detection rate of each risk.

8/3/2018 - BY: DALE WICKER
If your company is registered to one of the ISO Quality Management Systems (ISO 9001, AS9100, ISO 13485, IATF 16949), then you are required to perform internal audits at planned intervals to verify the conformance of your system.

7/27/2018 - BY: MIGUEL GOMEZ
What is the vision that drives your company? Why do you operate each day? What do you hope to achieve? Do your employees have the same goals? Many organizations find that their larger company visions can be forgotten in day-to-day firefighting. This is detrimental to success as workers at every level are left unaware of what they should be doing or how their work contributes to larger business goals.

7/20/2018 - BY: BETSY WILLIAMS
At Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) in Traverse City, the tradition of sharing and learning from others on a lean journey launched the Northern Michigan Lean Learning Consortium (LLC) 10 years ago. Two years later, the Michigan Lean Consortium (MLC) was founded by a group of nine forward-thinking individuals who firmly believed that if every Michigan organization used lean principles, the state's economy would rebound.

7/13/2018 - BY: ELLIOT FORSYTH
Having skilled, competent employees is key to an organization’s success. This is no longer easy for manufacturers to come by, however, as a massive talent shortage has emerged in the industry in recent years, leaving many jobs unfilled and tasks undone. It is expected that this talent gap will result in millions of positions remaining vacant in the years to come, a number that will only continue to grow if nothing is done to counteract this trend.

6/22/2018 - BY: JOHN SPILLSON
In 2011 President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) into law, bringing about the most sweeping changes the food safety industry has seen in 70 years. This introduced the Food Safety Plan (FSP), which is the primary document that guides your Preventive Controls Food Safety System.

6/15/2018 - BY: ROGER TOMLINSON
All successful project managers have one crucial ability in common, which ensures their projects never get derailed or end in disaster: effective risk management. This essential aspect of managing projects involves identifying, assessing and responding to potential project risks.

6/8/2018 - BY: SHELLY STOBIERSKI
While “artificial intelligence” is a trendy buzz term in manufacturing today, there’s another type of intelligence that offers you a valuable strategic advantage: competitive intelligence. This method of market research is based on using tactics to continuously monitor the market and gather information to help your company keep up with the latest innovations, trends, competitor news and potential customers.

6/1/2018 - BY: ANDY NICHOLS
An important requirement of ISO 9001 (and its “cousins,” AS9100 and IATF 16949) deals with internal quality management audits. One purpose of this internal audit program is to look at the processes within the quality management system. Common questions that internal auditors raise during this practice include, “How do I audit a process?” and “Which processes should I start with?”