This is a post entirely inspired by David Fredericksen, Assistant Manager of Production Engineering at NVIC, a foundry in central Indiana. He and I got a back-and-forth debate going on LinkedIn over the weekend, focused on the topic of unionization that was raised in a video I’d posted. He raised some excellent points in his […]

The always-intriguing Don Peppers published an excellent piece on LinkedIn today about the new focus on customer experience, and why it took so long to get where we are. His thesis is that it all came from the marketing approach of Jerome McCarthy dating to 1958, which put the emphasis on “product, price, place, and promotion.” Do […]

Well, I’ve been awfully spotty posting here. That’s because I’m writing seven full-length articles a month about manufacturing over at Forbes.com. I published my 50th a few weeks ago, and the ideas just keep pouring in. It has been loads of fun (and lots of hard work, yes). Almost my whole career, three decades now, […]

One of my most respected LinkedIn contacts is Phil Rink, a fellow engineer who writes the Jimi & Isaac series of children’s books, and is generally well-informed about anything he chooses to comment on. I just recently finished the second book of his series, Jimi & Isaac 1b: Curve Ball. (I love reading good kids’ books – […]

Another entry in the “interesting tidbits of history” category… I’m deep in the midst of a riveting book about the industrial side of the US involvement in WWII, Freedom’s Forge: How American Business Produced Victory in WWII by Arthur Herman. An aside in the book involves the medical innovation helped along by Henry Kaiser, who got his […]

I recently signed on as a contributor for Forbes, to write manufacturing articles for them. Here’s my first one.

Charles Kantz, a supply chain consultant, posted the following questions on LinkedIn today: Are DC/Whses going to disappear? If there is so much effort put into planning and improving lead times while reducing inventory along with planning out the supply chain, why is there a need for warehouse and DC’s here in the US? Shouldn’t […]

The best-running manufacturing plant I ever worked in (and I’ve worked in a lot of ‘em) used no Continuous Improvement (CI) methodologies. No Lean, no Six Sigma, no TPM, no TPS, no TQS, none of it (at least none in any programmatic way – though I don’t think you can run a manufacturing plant without […]

The chattering classes are all atwitter over the decline in US manufacturing jobs. And rightly so; the hollowing out of our manufacturing sector is a social problem, a fiscal problem, and even a national security problem. Now, there are a whole lot of factors that have contributed to the decline in US manufacturing employment, so […]

Photo by Robert F. Sargent, US Coast Guard It’s one of the most iconic images from WWII. Usually it’s used to highlight the impossibly courageous men shown storming Omaha Beach during D-Day, and quite appropriately so. This article, though, focuses instead on the boat, and its inventor and manufacturer, Andrew Jackson Higgins. Who’s ever heard […]