Research Desk
Independent reporting and practical guidance across manufacturing software, automation, operations, supply chains, electronics, and digital growth.
A part can measure dead-on to the print and still come off a process that’s quietly falling apart. Final inspection won’t tell you that. It sorts good parts from bad, one at a time, after you’ve already spent the money to make them. Statistical process control charts work the other way around: they watch the … Read more
You can shave thirty seconds off a machine cycle, log the win on the shift report, and still watch the order take three weeks to reach the customer. That gap is the problem value stream mapping was built to solve. Most of the time a part spends inside a factory, it is not being cut, … Read more
A preventive maintenance checklist is the cheapest reliability tool on the floor, and the most commonly ignored. Most plants own one somewhere: a laminated card taped to a machine, a spreadsheet a retired supervisor built, or a tab inside a CMMS nobody opens. The list exists. What’s missing is the discipline to run it, and … Read more
Most factory improvement dies in the follow-up. A team spots a bottleneck, promises to fix it, and six weeks later the line runs exactly as it did before. Kaizen events exist to break that pattern. Instead of spreading a fix across months of part-time meetings, a kaizen event puts the right people in one room … Read more
Walk into most quality offices and you’ll find a shelf of Six Sigma tools nobody fully uses: control charts printed and never read, a fishbone diagram from a project that closed two years ago, an FMEA spreadsheet last touched the week the part launched. The toolkit is large. The number of tools that actually move … Read more
Walk any factory floor and most of what you see looks like work. Forklifts moving, machines running, racks filling with parts. Lean manufacturing makes an uncomfortable claim: a large share of that motion adds no value a customer would ever pay for. The 8 wastes of lean manufacturing are a checklist for spotting exactly that, … Read more
Walk any trade show in 2026 and you’ll hear that AI in manufacturing changes everything. Walk the plant floor afterward and you’ll find something quieter: a vibration sensor flagging a worn bearing, a camera rejecting a bad weld, a scheduler resequencing jobs around a late steel delivery. The distance between the keynote and the machine … Read more
Ask ten people what PLC programming is and you’ll get ten ladder-logic tutorials. Ask a plant owner what they actually need to know, and it’s a different question: who should write the logic that runs your machines, what happens when that person leaves, and how you avoid paying to rebuild a line because nobody documented … Read more
Ask three plant managers for their OEE and you will often get three numbers worked out three different ways. That is the quiet problem with Overall Equipment Effectiveness: it is the most-cited number on the factory floor and one of the most misread. A line running at “90% efficiency” on the shift report can hide … Read more
You can tell how a shop really schedules by what happens when a machine drops at 10 a.m. In most factories, someone opens a spreadsheet, starts dragging rows, and quietly re-promises three customers before lunch. It works, until the day it doesn’t. As of early 2026, roughly a quarter of manufacturers still run production planning … Read more
