Operational Excellence

February 08, 2021

Operational Excellence: Strengthen Your Design Transfer Process With Agile NPI

Finalizing design engineering development is a significant milestone in the product development lifecycle but transitioning the design to manufacturing is the most critical phase of the project. The expectations to meet a compressed product launch schedule puts extreme pressure on the new production introduction process of manufacturers.

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December 03, 2020

Operational Excellence: Redefine Recruiting to Attract and Hire the Right Talent

Hire the right talent for the position. The concept is straightforward to understand, but achieving success can be complicated without a structured recruiting process. Alfred Macha details how to evaluate the company's core values and branding, screen candidates, and select the right talent for your hiring needs.

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October 06, 2020

Operational Excellence: Process Effectiveness Qualification

Traditional supplier qualification processes have been forced to rapidly change to new approaches as suppliers have been affected by shelter-in-place directives across the globe. Alfred Macha discusses the fundamentals of assessment definitions of conformance, effectiveness, risk, and intellectual property (IP), as well as process effectiveness qualification reviews.

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August 04, 2020

Operational Excellence: Working Remotely–Redesign Your Information Systems

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, manufacturing organizations have been forced to quickly adapt to provide remote work options for manufacturing support employees. Alfred Macha shares a model to help your organization keep remote work employees fully engaged in supporting manufacturing operations.

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February 03, 2020

Operational Excellence: Sharpening Your Organization’s Competencies

Successful organizations invest in developing their employees into high performers and continuously recruit top talent to join the organization. These actions require effort and commitment from the organization’s leadership, given that employee development and strategic recruitment is a journey of growth and long-term sustainability where a positive return on investment may take years to realize.

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January 02, 2020

Operational Excellence: Hiring and Retaining Top Employees

The economy is booming, and this presents challenges for manufacturing organizations. Your top-performing employees are prime targets for competitors that are not only willing to offer a higher wage but can also offer a more attractive work environment and career growth path.

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May 26, 2020

Operational Excellence: Update Your Business Contingency Plan

With the unprecedented events with COVID-19, companies are facing worst-case scenarios and looking at ways to manage work stoppage or limited production for essential manufacturing needs. Alfred Macha provides a practical guideline to create or update your business contingency plan to help you manage your business during a crisis situation.

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April 24, 2020

Operational Excellence: The Gemba Transformation of Manufacturing With AI

Operational excellence managers have been leading organizations’ transformation with Lean Six Sigma methods for the past two decades. Alfred Macha looks at how AI can redefine gemba to accelerate changes in your operations, including covering the fundamentals of Lean and how traditional gemba works and introducing ideas on how AI can enhance improvements.

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February 12, 2020

Operational Excellence: Hiring and Retaining Top Employees

The economy is booming, and this presents challenges for manufacturing organizations. Your top-performing employees are prime targets for competitors that are not only willing to offer a higher wage but can also offer a more attractive work environment and career growth path. Alfred Macha shares a strategic approach to hire top talent and retain your best employees.

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January 29, 2020

Operational Excellence: Take Your CAPA to the Next Level With 8D

Quality professionals understand that the strength of an organization’s quality system can be determined by reviewing the corrective and preventive action (CAPA) system that has been established. ISO auditors and regulatory inspectors will assess an organization’s CAPA to evaluate the effectiveness of the quality system. Customers often use the mechanism of a corrective action request (CAR), which is part of the CAPA system, as the mechanism to request for a supplier to address a recurring quality issue. Alfred Macha explains.

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November 29, 2019

Operational Excellence: Are CMs Ready to Embrace Project Management?

Project management does not have to be complex, nor costly; on the contrary, project management can help create a culture of operational efficiency, enhanced customer engagement, and employee self-accountability and enable data-driven decision-making. Alfred Macha introduces a recommended approach to project management in a contract manufacturing environment.

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September 11, 2019

Operational Excellence: Transform Your Operations With Nadcap

Obtaining Nadcap certification can be an overwhelming endeavor for suppliers that don’t have proper guidance. In this column, Alfred Macha provides guidelines that companies have used in the past to successfully achieve Nadcap accreditation.

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August 26, 2019

Operational Excellence: Becoming the Preferred Supplier, Phase 3—Re-engineer Your Quality System

The final phase of becoming a preferred supplier is to apply a business process re-engineer approach to your quality system. Before you start with this phase, the company should have implemented Phase 1 and Phase 2, which are focused on changing its leadership mentality to embrace LEAN Six Sigma and the pillars of operational excellence. It’s paramount to have the right mindset before you re-engineer your quality system.

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August 05, 2019

Operational Excellence: Becoming the Preferred Supplier, Phase 3—Re-engineer Your Quality System

The final phase of becoming a preferred supplier is to apply a business process re-engineer approach to your quality system. Before you start with this phase, the company should have implemented Phase 1 and Phase 2, which are focused on changing its leadership mentality to embrace LEAN Six Sigma and the pillars of operational excellence. It's paramount to have the right mindset before you re-engineer your quality system.

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July 26, 2019

Operational Excellence: Becoming the Preferred Supplier, Phase 2—The Six Pillars

Your Lean Six Sigma program needs to be rightly sized to your organization’s structure for it to be sustainable. The second phase involves establishing the six pillars of operational effectiveness. Attaining quality systems certification to a base standard of ISO 9001 or industry specific QMS standard for medical devices, automotive, telecommunications, or aerospace will provide you a solid foundation to your operations.

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June 25, 2019

Operational Excellence: Becoming the Preferred Supplier, Phase 1—Transform Your Company's Culture With Lean Sigma

In the first part of this column series about becoming a preferred supplier to your customers, Alfred Macha provides the fundamental concepts to transform your company's culture with Lean Sigma. The approach introduced in this column can be adopted by any manufacturing organization. Read on.

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May 21, 2019

Process Validation Can Lead to Higher Performance Levels

In this first column from Alfred Macha, which appears in the May issue of SMT007 Magazine, the author provides a practical guideline on how to effectively implement a sustainable process validation program for contract manufacturers.

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