Impact Dakota Blog is a blog dedicated to supporting North Dakota’s manufacturing community improve People, Purpose, Processes and Performance. Entries provide information on opportunities, new ideas, quick tips, celebrations of success, and well, frankly, anything to help you become a better manufacturer.
Strategic and business planning is critical for manufacturers. Sometimes, companies are reluctant to engage in planning because they view it as an interruption to every-day productivity. It can seem challenging to justify investing time into planning while your products need to be made, but strategic planning is instrumental in saving your organization time and money in the long-term.
Lean manufacturing, also known as lean production (or simply as "lean"), is the systematic method that eliminates various types of waste in a manufacturing process. Lean takes into account waste created through overburden and unevenness in production workloads. Lean reveals what processes or components add value and which processes do not add value. This is done by reducing or eliminating everything else in the process to find the most efficient work path. Value is defined from the customer’s perspective and is very intuitive.
I’m a bit emotional these days. My youngest—my baby—just graduated from high school. It’s the end of an era for our family: The years of homework, packing lunches, attending sporting events, and endless nagging to study for exams are finally over. It’s a bittersweet time as a mom. If I think about it too much, I get a little teary-eyed. I’m so proud of my son—he got into his dream school with a full scholarship!—yet I worry if we’ve taught him everything he needs to know. I’ve been waking up at night, thinking of things I still need to tell him. He assures me, with an eye roll that only a teenager can do, that he knows everything. I just hope we’ve done enough to prepare him.
3D printing of metal objects is a booming industry, with the market for products and services worth more than an estimated $2.3 billion in 2015 – a nearly five-fold growth since 2010.* For this type of manufacturing, a metal part is built up successively, layer by layer, over minutes or hours. Sometimes thousands of layers are added together to make a single piece – a reason why this process is conventionally referred to as “additive manufacturing” (AM).
If you’re contemplating hosting a Manufacturing Day Event, you probably have a lot of questions, ranging from “What is a Manufacturing Day event?” to “What sorts of resources are available to help me make my event a success?”
Chapter 4 “Context of the organization” of ISO 9001:2015 includes the requirement to understand the needs and expectations of interested parties. Section 4.2 states simple requirements to identify interested parties relevant to the quality management system, determine the parties’ needs, and review this information on a regular basis.
Manufacturing is changing at an extraordinary pace and in unbelievable ways.
Are you frustrated with the number of leads in your pipeline? Are you unsatisfied with the lack of brand awareness for your organization? If you answered “yes” to either of these questions, you have opportunities to leverage your marketing efforts.
Energy costs can be significant expenses for manufacturers of all shapes and sizes. Your processes may require vast amounts of energy to keep production moving—heating, cooling, lighting and more. Scaling back your energy expenses can improve your bottom line and lead to increased profitability. If you do not have a strategic plan to conserve energy, it is time for action.
A manufacturer can be innovative in various ways beyond the use of technology. Innovation can include the utilization of new business models, the development of new processes and services, and the enhancement of existing products too.