When your company heads in a new direction, people in your company may not be quick to embrace it right away. It’s natural for a team to resist change. But we can learn from those natural [...]
What is a contract manufacturer? Many terms are used to describe manufacturers: Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), job shops, assembly shops, printers, fabricators, molders, forgers, and so [...]
We’ve all heard the term Industry 4.0, but do we really understand what it means or what it’s referring to? What does Industry 4.0 mean? Industry 4.0 is a term referring to the ever-increasing [...]
Hold people accountable That statement echoes in management corridors. Holding people accountable is often noted as one of the primary functions of management, and is considered a key ingredient [...]
Why does a company choose to deploy Lean techniques? Let’s start with one of the most basic reasons “why”. Companies deploy Lean techniques to become more cost competitive. Everyone buys into [...]
Some people might answer the question, “Why aren’t there more good leaders?” by saying that there are not enough individuals who are born as leaders. However, leadership is not something a [...]
Why should any company consider deploying Industry 4.0? Because it can revolutionize how they do their business. SAP Insights explains the concept of Industry 4.0 well: Since the 1800s, we have [...]
The Key To Delivering Effective Performance Feedback To Your Team Delivering constructive performance feedback is rarely something that a plant manager looks forward to, but it’s one of the most [...]
A while back, CEO of Raven AI, Martin Cloake, wrote an article for LinkedIn titled, ‘Lean vs digital: why Industry 4.0’s identity crisis is costing us so much’. We sat down with Martin on the [...]
Employee engagement: it’s a challenge that can either excite or frustrate a manager. In the fast-paced environment of a manufacturing facility, it can feel nigh impossible. We interviewed Martin [...]
They say that only 1% of the world’s data is being used. When I entered the world of manufacturing, I was obsessed with that 1% of data. Convinced of its value, I manually searched the data for [...]
In the world of manufacturing management, lean manufacturing has become synonymous with the best practice of eliminating waste and providing consumers with value. While waste minimization seems [...]
In my line of work, I talk to a lot of manufacturers. While I have a background in manufacturing, I still learn from each site I visit. Every company is different, but there are some common [...]
Raven.ai announced that it raised $6.1 million in equity financing from angel investors. Notable contributors include Fresh Founders (including Shopify’s Tobi Lütke and Harley Finklestein), Rob [...]
Employers and managers know firsthand how engagement plays a large role in productivity. Troubling, a recent Gallup poll reports that engagement levels in the U.S. hover around 30 percent, [...]
Last month, the unthinkable happened. In my haste to catch my early morning flight, I forgot my cell phone at home. My phone is my tether to everything – family life, office work, meetings, [...]
Many of the best leaders I know, even the ones in AI technology, make decisions based on gut feel. That intuition is based on a mix of past experiences, biases, and raw confidence, but it often, [...]
Data Scientist. To an outsider, it’s a job title that might not sound so exciting. I spend a lot of time cleaning and organizing data, getting it ready for analysis. It’s important work for our [...]
With the fourth industrial revolution in full swing, manufacturing is undergoing massive changes. Robotics, additive printing, IIoT, artificial intelligence, and data science augment human [...]
In this digital age, most of us work with advanced technology in some form or another. The typical office worker, and I include myself in that category, uses tools like email, text, Excel, Word, [...]
With all the talk about Industry 4.0, sometimes is difficult to separate the value from the hype. As a standalone term, it can seem like a daunting, gigantic concept that can prompt reactive [...]
Two weeks ago I had the privilege of speaking on a panel at a hospital’s continuing education session for physicians. While normally the event tackles clinical subjects, this one was a bit of a [...]
Keeping employees engaged and motivated, especially in manufacturing, can be a steep hill to climb. We already know that engaged workers perform better than the disengaged – organizations with [...]
For more than 100 year Danaher‘s dental division has developed innovative and high-quality dental products. With a focus on team cohesion and efficiency, its Morrisburg, Ontario plant [...]
Smart manufacturing is a broad category of manufacturing that employs computer-integrated manufacturing, high levels of adaptability and rapid design changes, digital information technology, and [...]
It has become a bit of a cliché in data science blog posts to say that about 80 percent of a data scientist’s time is spent cleaning up the data (and the other 20 percent is spent complaining [...]
Even with existing hospital safety protocols, front-line healthcare workers are increasingly at risk of contracting COVID-19. Early figures show that 15% of infections are medical personnel. With [...]
Using state-of-the-art CNC machines, Nobel Biocare produces precision machined components that are designed to last a lifetime. By improving response time to downtime, mostly from losses due to [...]
Lean manufacturing tools have steadily been digitized over the past few decades which has helped move manufacturers from instinct driven management to KPI driven management. While historical data [...]
