Introduction A plant manager once asked his team to increase output on a line by 20 percent. The team asked for a new machine. The manager asked them to prove they needed one. Two weeks of measurement later they found something…

Introduction A part comes off the line with a shiny crack running along one edge. The supervisor says the material was bad. The operator says the machine has been running strangely. The quality inspector says it is a handling issue. Three…

Introduction Most articles on this topic tell you that green manufacturing is important. You already know that. What you probably do not know is what a factory actually does on a Monday morning to become greener. So this article is a…

Introduction A factory manager once described sustainability to me in a way that stuck. “Every kilogram of material that leaves my plant as scrap, I paid for twice. Once to buy it, and once to throw it away.” That single sentence…

Introduction Textbooks teach manufacturing processes as separate chapters. Casting in one chapter. Machining in another. Forming, joining, moulding, each in its own box. Then you visit a factory and discover that a single product uses six of those chapters at once,…

Introduction A plant manager wants to move a machine. The move looks simple on paper. Shift it three metres left, gain floor space, shorten the operator’s walk. But moving it means stopping production for a weekend, disconnecting services and relocating a…

Introduction An inspector checks painted car panels for defects. She is very good at it. She spots scratches, dust inclusions and orange peel that most people would walk past. But by the end of an eight hour shift her accuracy drops,…

Introduction Walk into a car body shop and you will see something strange. Hundreds of robots welding a car body with almost no people present. Sparks everywhere, arms moving in perfect sequence, and one operator watching from behind a screen. Now…

Introduction A modern processor chip contains tens of billions of transistors on a piece of silicon roughly the size of a fingernail. The smallest features on that chip are a few nanometres wide, which is smaller than most viruses and only…

Introduction A production line is rejecting 60 parts out of every 1000. The manager calls a meeting. Five people give five different opinions about the cause, everybody argues for an hour, and nothing changes by the next shift. Now imagine the…