Manufacturers Make Strides

Many companies around the world lose billions each year due to downtime. Machine downtime is an unintended reduction or halt in a production process or machine. There are numerous reasons why this can happen, but the main question is, how can you reduce or even avoid machine downtime? In this episode, I have outlined five key steps you can take to address machine downtime systematically to ensure...

Visual product inspection is critical, but we’re all only human – and humans are prone to error. While your factory likely has plenty of verification testing and automated inspections in place, it’s not uncommon for problems to continue slipping through the cracks. Thankfully, there are 4 simple steps you can take to ensure better cosmetic inspections, now and in the future.    In this episode, I...

There’s little worse than having a slow production process. You can easily talk to unproductive employees, but slow machines are a different story altogether. Do you know what you call a process that has one thing slowing it down? A bottleneck. In order to run a successful manufacturing process, you need to look at possible bottlenecks that might be slowing down other processes in your production...

What does it mean to have good visibility of your production processes? Well, simply put, you need to know exactly what’s going on in your production process in order to make the right decisions when it comes down to the crunch. When companies don’t have sufficient visibility, collecting data will become a timely and tedious operation. What’s more, the data they’re collecting is probably out of da...

2019 was a dark time for the Takata Corporation. Why? Manufacturing faults. Car manufacturer Toyota had to recall 1.7 million vehicles due to airbag faults that Takata supplied. This not only posed huge safety risks for drivers but could directly affect Toyota’s reputation. Because of Takata’s manufacturing mistake, they eventually had to file for bankruptcy… Turns out, according to Wikipedia, Tak...