Jul 15 2023
Let us focus on what Generative AI does generate, speaking exclusively from personal experience. Generative AI is the generic term for systems like ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, DALL-E, or MidJourney, that generate text, images, or other media in response to prompts. All sorts of news sources report it as a revolutionary technology poised to dramatically change how we work and communicate.
May 13 2023
Even on LinkedIn, you still see posts and comments asserting that the COVID-19 vaccines aren’t “real” and alleging that they do more harm than good. This is usually based on articles of questionable value and the author’s brother-in-law catching COVID-19 while vaccinated. Public health, however, warrants serious research and is not a matter of anecdotes.
The real question is whether the administration of these vaccines to large populations was effective in curbing the pandemic and saving lives. Today, we can answer yes to some of these questions with simple methods applied to data from the US government. Specifically, we can analyze US CDC and census data on state-by-state Excess Deaths and fractions of the population vaccinated for 2021 and 2022. The results are obvious but, sometimes, the obvious needs belaboring.
Apr 10 2023
Since the turn of the 21st century, the possession of data has become a greater source of economic power than ever before, dwarfing, in particular, analytics. It’s data about us humans, not about the physical world: our demographic segment, where we live, what we buy, our opinions, and our relationships.
This is a development that manufacturing companies have not been leading. To survive this disruption, their managers need to think more deeply about data, how they can collect it, and what they can do with it to stay competitive.
Mar 31 2023
It’s been 110 years since Frank Gilbreth first used film cameras to improve processes, 36 years since Kei Abe taught me how to do it with VHS, and six years since my last post about videos. Yet the number of manufacturing companies leveraging this tool remains minuscule. The technical hurdles are long gone, but the human ones are still in place. Managers must make it a priority to make the work easier for operators, and operators need to trust management not to use videos against them. My 2nd post on this subject was about management preparation. It’s doable, if not easy.
This post focuses on the easy part: technical issues. This is not to ignore the hard stuff but to address a few recent challenges. Smartphone cameras, by default, now generate high-definition video files so large that they impede analysis. It is, therefore, a good idea to work with lower resolutions. The software to help with time studies based on video has evolved too, and I am including introductions to a few currently available packages. Readers are invited to share their experiences with these or other tools.
Mar 5 2023
The literature on Quality does not dwell on its interactions with other components of a manufacturing system, like Production, Engineering, Production Control/Logistics, or Supply Chains. As a consequence, it is missing out on key relationships that affect the value of quality improvement.
Jul 23 2023
How Moviemakers Schedule Shoots
For all the scheduling experts who have been wondering how moviemakers schedule shoots, the current exhibition about the late German-French film actress Romy Schneider at the film festival palace in Cannes provides two examples from director Claude Sautet:
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By Michel Baudin • Management • 1 • Tags: schedule