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Please join us in congratulating this year's Crain's Cleveland 40 under 40!

We are so honored to live in a community with such amazing, dedicated, and passionate leaders and professionals!

For the full list, check out the article: https://loom.ly/RptPjw8

We love manufacturing! We also love engineering, and all the aspects and variants of STEM.

But we've learned first-hand that a lot of 4-year degree programs in engineering spend zero (or nearly zero) time teaching students about manufacturing, manufacturability, industrial operations, supply chain, or all the essential components that take an engineering drawing into reality.

That's why we are so excited to read about the new Engineering Technology degree program through OSU's Marion campus. It sounds like the perfect blend of theory and practice, with strong industry partnerships to ensure continued relevance in the curriculum - and a wide-open talent pipeline for graduates!

We encourage you to check out the article - and share your thoughts!
https://loom.ly/gIYJ1qY

We're betting you've heard of Lean Manufacturing, but did you know that it's a really broad topic?

It covers things like Kaizen events, 5S, poka yoke and other familiar favorites, but it can also include some very foundational - but incredibly useful - tools like a Gemba walk.

A Gemba walk is just a fancy term for going where the work is. Not putting post-it notes on a whiteboard in a conference room and making assumptions in a Lean event. Actually getting out there, shadowing operators across every shift for that particular process, looking upstream and downstream, and tracking data on what IS.

One of the other great tools that can get overlooked is SMED - single minute exchange of dies - because it sounds like it would only work for, you know... tool & die shops. WRONG!

It's a thought process and perspective that can be applied in all types of manufacturing, even high mix, low volume environments. The main steps are:

- Look at all the steps that have to happen from initializing a changeover, to finishing a complete run of a particular product, through the changeover to a different product
- Identify steps that can be done in PARALLEL with a production run - thus reducing the time that valuable manufacturing capacity is off-line
- Identify ways to streamline steps that still need to done while the machine is off-line

Sometimes you may need to develop additional tooling or fixturing, storage solutions, or other components - and it's perfectly OK to pilot your changes with 3D-printed, cardboard, wood or other prototypes. It's all about making rapid, iterative improvement!

Check out the article for more great examples of how to leverage SMED methodologies in unconventional ways!

We would love to hear your own stories about how you've applied Lean!

https://loom.ly/Xo4VkCw