Quality giants like Joseph M. Juran, W. Edwards Deming and Armand V. Feigenbaum ushered in the era of total quality management (TQM) movement about seven decades ago.
It is an exciting time to be in manufacturing. Across the globe, the industry is reinventing itself through artificial intelligence, automation, and data analytics that improve speed, visibility, and precision.
In metal additive manufacturing, “traceability” has become a badge of seriousness. We can trace powder batches. We can trace build jobs. We can trace post-processing steps. We can trace inspection results. Great.
Lean thinking is often associated with manufacturing floors, production lines, and complex value stream maps. Yet waste exists in every type of process. Once you begin to see it, you realize that inefficiencies appear not only in factories but also in the everyday services we interact with.
Before I get into the focus of this column, I’d venture to guess that many quality professionals reading this column’s title did an about take thinking this guy has lost his mind. To discover the real intent, read on…