A new doctoral thesis at ETH Zurich investigates the behavioral implications of introducing smartwatch technology for job shop scheduling and control.
Continue readingHow explainable AI improves manufacturing jobs
This is a shortened reproduction of the article “Augmented intelligence: How explainable AI is changing manufacturing jobs for the better,” coauthored with Julian Senoner and Stefan Feuerriegel, recently published in the World Economic Forum’s Agenda.
A common narrative suggests AI is poised to replace human work on a large scale. Our research in diverse manufacturing settings and a recent World Economic Forum report on AI in manufacturing reject that vision. Instead, AI holds the potential to augment human intelligence to solve work tasks more effectively while also enriching the work experience. The key to unlocking this potential lies in explainable algorithms, which contrast the often-opaque decision-making processes in conventional AI systems.
Continue readingWarping in the real world: Remote factory meetings in 360°
Imagine you put on a virtual reality (VR) headset and immediately find yourself in an entirely different real-world place. It’s like finding a warp zone in Super Mario Bros. Or walking through Alice’s magical mirror into Wonderland or the wardrobe door into Narnia. Only, it is not a game or a fantasy novel, but reality!
We can now remotely visit sites in 360° and real-time. Our new open-access paper in Manufacturing Letters details our research collaboration with Stanley Black & Decker and Avatour. We conceptualized, realized, and tested a remote presence technology that is immersive, real-time, and interactive – all simultaneously! This emerging technology represents a radical new way of organizing remote factory meetings, shop-floor tours, inspections, audits, and training.
Continue readingIKEA’s Journey with Warehouse Drones
“Flying drones in a warehouse? But why?” I was instinctively skeptical when I first heard of drone startup Verity’s idea to fly drones in industrial warehouses. A few years later, more than a hundred Verity drones fly in IKEA’s warehouses worldwide. Here’s the lesson I learned.
Just-in-time: only for stable times?
Motivated by many media articles warning against JIT as the culprit for supply chain disruptions, the POMS College of Operational Excellence organized the webinar “Just-in-time or Just-in-case” in February 2022. Extending this online debate, five participants co-authored an article intending to provide advice for future research into JIT. After peer-review, the article “Just-in-time for supply chains in turbulent times” is now published open-access in Production and Operations Management.
Continue readingNew textbook: Introduction to Manufacturing
After seven years of in-the-making, it’s a thrill to announce the publication of Introduction to Manufacturing: An Industrial Engineering and Management Perspective—an 800-page textbook coauthored with Michel Baudin and published by Routledge.
One more time: What is lean?
What is lean? After all these years, there is still confusion. Truth is, opinions on lean differ widely. If you like heated debates, start a discussion thread on the definition of lean on LinkedIn. Many subscribe stubbornly to their own definitions and claim others “don’t get it.” In an attempt to enlighten the debate, the Journal of Operations Management (JOM) has recently published two articles that address the question.
A factory’s “rhythm” affects its pace of learning lean
Consider two assembly factories—one assembles a car every minute and the other a bus every hour. Which factory setting is the most favorable for learning lean?
Continue readingLean and the Corona pandemic: A clarification
Due to the Corona pandemic, critical supply chain shortages have occurred. Many have looked for the problem and pointed at the Just-In-time principle of Lean as one of the evils. This calls for clarification. Lean is not to blame, but part of the solution.
Read moreSolving the ventilator shortage
This is a republication of my COVID-19 article published in the World Economic Forum Agenda, April 2, 2020.
An epidemic is an emotional issue. With the lives of our friends and loved ones on the line, we tend to respond with the heart first, then the head: Close the borders! Ground the planes!
Teaching Operations Management with Virtual Reality
Factory visits are effective for teaching applied concepts in higher education, but field trips are not easy to plan and organize. What if – rather than the students going to the factories – the factories could come to the students? At ETH Zurich, we integrated virtual reality (VR) technologies into our operations management classes.
Continue readingEveryday lean
What does lean look like in everyday life? We launched a simple tweet contest in class to make the students reflect on the course material outside the lecture hall. The response and results were terrific.
Continue readingHow drones will be used in manufacturing
Emerald just published the world’s first peer-reviewed paper taking a management perspective on drones in manufacturing. Written by Omid Maghazei and myself, the paper explores the current state and future opportunities for using drones in factories. The paper published in the Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management is open access. Here are the main findings.
Human learning beats machine learning
It is exciting times for manufacturing. A plethora of recent technological developments creates radically new opportunities for how we develop, manufacture, and deliver products globally. We hear that “the robots are coming” and “jobs will be automated”. Many managers are excited, baffled, or both. Many job takers are worried.
Top 10 scientific papers on lean
Scientific thinking is a cornerstone of lean thinking, but the lean movement itself has unfortunately become largely unscientific. Here are ten academic lean papers you should know.
How new technologies shape the future of production
How will manufacturing look like in the future? As part of my engagement as Fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Production, I featured in a podcast about the future of production. Here is what I had to say about it.
Open process innovation: The future of operational excellence
This post about open process innovation first appeared in the World Economic Forum’s Agenda platform on January 11 2018, titled “The future of competitiveness is open“.
Kings and fat horses: Understanding muri, mura, muda
The “3 Ms”— muri, mura, muda — is among the most important concepts in lean production. Yet, the Ms are often misjudged.
Is 3D printing revolutionizing supply chains?
Countless newspaper articles, tech blogs, and proclaimed experts argue that 3D printing is about to turn manufacturing supply chains on the head. There is little doubt that additive manufacturing (the more precise term for 3D printing) will have its impact, but it will be limited to niches for many years to come. The more interesting question is to identify and transform the 3D print-ready niches.
The Routledge Companion to Lean Management wins the Shingo Research Award
Terrific news! It is a great honor to receive the prestigious Shingo Research Award for the Routledge Companion to Lean Management, co-edited with Dr. Daryl Powell and published with Routledge earlier this year.
Five rules of productivity improvement
If I should explain my research in two words, I would say “improving productivity”. That was also the title of my inaugural lecture at ETH Zurich today. In the lecture, I presented five rules of productivity improvement, which I summarize in this post. The full inaugural lecture is available here (lecture starts at 7 min 30 sec):
The 3 Ls of lean management
The Routledge Companion to Lean Management has hit the book shelves. Here is a summary of its main conclusions. The key message? Any lean transformation—regardless of the sector and application area—is dependent on the three essential Ls of lean: Leadership for Long-term Learning.
Augmented Reality: Ready for manufacturing industries?
In a series of posts, I will put the spotlight on technologies that eventually will change how we manufacture and deliver products and services. My objective is to demystify the “fourth industrial revolution”— Industry 4.0 — by looking at the specific technologies it concerns. First out is Augmented Reality.
Manufacturing Cost Deployment: How to select the right projects
How do firms prioritize and select improvement projects? Unfortunately, the usual method is a combination of guess and chance. Few companies are able to compute the real return on investment from proposed projects, and select the better ones through a rigorous decision process. This is not a trivial problem, but an important one: Many firms spend much money on useless improvements — fixing issues that are non-critical or have low or no effect on factory performance. In these firms, middle managers battle for the attention and investments of senior management by writing up speculative “business cases” for their proposed improvement projects. Few of these firms have heard about Manufacturing Cost Deployment — a structured method for selecting the right improvement project.
Organizing academic conferences: Behind the scenes of EurOMA 2016
We have just finished organizing the 23rd EurOMA 2016 conference at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. The European Operations Management Association (EurOMA) is the premier European association for academics in the fields of production management, operations management, and supply chain management. The EurOMA conference is hosted by a European university late June every year and draws around 500 participants from all over the world. Two years ago, NTNU won the bid for the 2016 conference – and we set an ambitious goal of organizing a flawless and unforgettable experience for all attendants. Although EurOMA offers an appropriate manual for organizing these events, someone still has to do the job… Here are some key learning points from our side.
Lean implementation tactics
Managers encounter a number of tactical questions in their lean journeys that call for decisions and actions. For example, should we have a “lean team”? Should we track lean implementation using bottom-up structures or top-down audit schemes? Should we offer financial and non-financial rewards for lean implementation to employees? These questions were recently answered in the research paper “Implementing corporate lean programs: The effect of management control practices,” by J. Schloetzer, K. Ferdows and myself, published in the Journal of Operations Management. This post* gives a summary.
Academic life explained by WuMO
Oh, you’re an “academic”… but what exactly are you doing? Among my favorite cartoonists are Mikael Wulff and Anders Morgenthaler, who together write WuMO. Here are eight handpicked WuMo cartoons that explain the essence of academic life. Enjoy!
Teaching
WuMo ©WulffMorgenthaler. Reprinted with permission of Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.
Five critical success factors for implementing lean programs
Two out of three lean programs fail to achieve their initial objectives. My latest research asked 432 practitioners from 83 factories in two multinational corporations what they see as critical factors for succeeding with lean implementation. The research summarized five critical success factors for implementing lean programs that managers must get right. Is your organization on track?
5S done right
5S. Five short Japanese words, each beginning with an “S”. The majority of employees in the industrial sector, and increasingly in the public sector, have heard about the “5Ss”. The problem? The vast majority of companies trying to “implement” 5S fails, and does so repeatedly. Many mistakes it as a concept for cleaning and tidying up—boring but necessary activities for any professional business. This post* takes a closer look at each of the five S-words, and finds that many of us might have missed the point.
Lean in the primary school?
Do concepts from the assembly line at Toyota apply to the learning environment of children from six to twelve years? One pioneering school in Rogaland, Norway, shows how some elements of lean thinking can be successfully adapted to create better conditions for teaching and learning.