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.
One of the recent 2-day kaizen events that I facilitated included improving the warehouse operations at a manufacturing facility. This was a hands-on project and we got rid of obsolete items and consolidated many partially filled boxes of products which resulted in 50% more storage space. This, in combination with the reconfiguration of warehouse layout and adding of surplus rack system from a sister company resulted in a net increase of close to 70% in warehouse storage capacity. This helped the company to avoid building an addition to the warehouse which was estimated to cost about $100,000.
I don’t normally watch horror movies, but there is a correlation between the movie “Saw” and ransomware, in particular a variant called JIGSAW. This is pretty scary stuff — the first thing you see is the creepy image of Billy the Puppet from the horror film “Saw” on your computer screen, then you find out that your data is no longer yours.
As another year draws to a close, it is natural to look back and reflect on the challenges and accomplishments we shared, individually, organizationally, and as an industry.
As the clock strikes midnight and we turn the page on another year, manufacturing around the world is pursuing a future vision for business that will transform the rule of competition, how work will be performed, how companies will be organized, and how leadership must lead.
Today is the 225th anniversary of Alexander Hamilton’s report on manufacturing to Congress. Wow! 225 years?! Ok, I realize that only us true manufacturing wonks will get all jazzed up about this epic historic event, but I believe that everyone in this country should celebrate this day the same as we do the 4th of July. Why should we? Well, I’ll tell you why.
They say opposites attract. While my husband and I have many important things in common, we are complete opposites in one area. He’s a “risk taker,” and me … well, not so much. Rather than being labeled as “risk adverse,” I prefer the term “caution giver.”
Whether they’re behind the scenes assembling products or helping you parallel park your car, robots are already playing a big role in our day-to-day lives.
The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) is a public-private partnership with a national network of thousands of trusted business advisors, manufacturing experts, and partners who support one another in discovering and leveraging services and programs for manufacturers. Each quarter, MEP Centers, which are located in every state within the U.S. and Puerto Rico, submit success stories of what they have accomplished working with manufacturers in that state. You can find these success stories archived on the MEP website.
On Manufacturing Day, with the World Series approaching, we started talking about what baseball would be like without manufacturing. And while the series is almost over (and a 68-year or 108-year curse about to be broken!), we’re still talking about it today. So we thought it would be interesting to consider baseball without manufacturing. You mean you haven’t? For starters, it would be stark: people would be standing in a field with not much to do or even wear. There’s not much to the American pastime without manufacturing…another thing that makes America great.
Countless organizations like MEP Centers and their community partners have been planning this day for months – if not the entire year. Their collective efforts have produced close to 3,000 events for hundreds of thousands of people to see what’s inside manufacturing facilities during this fifth annual celebration. Recognizing the contributions manufacturing offers the Nation, the President has proclaimed today National Manufacturing Day.