The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an independent, nongovernmental, international organization that develops standards to ensure the quality, safety, and efficiency of products, services, and systems. As technology continues to rapidly develop, new standards are drafted and implemented by people at all levels within global industries.

The ISO 9000 family of standards pertains to quality management systems in any industry; read on to learn more about ISO 9004 and how it can benefit your manufacturing organization.

What is the ISO 9004 standard?

ISO 9004:2018 gives guidelines for enhancing an organization’s ability to achieve sustained success, which is consistent with the quality management principles given in the standards included in ISO 9000:2015. ISO 9004 provides a self-assessment tool to review the extent to which the organization has adopted the concepts within the ISO 9000 group. Also, ISO 9004:2018 is applicable to any organization, regardless of its size, type, and activity.

Elon Musk announced a humanoid robot designed to help with those repetitive, boring tasks people hate doing. Musk suggested it could run to the grocery store for you, but presumably it would handle any number of tasks involving manual labor.

Predictably, social media immediately filled with references to a string of dystopian sci-fi movies about robots where everything goes horribly wrong.

As troubling as the robot futures in movies like I, Robot, The Terminator, and others are, it’s the underlying technologies of real humanoid robots—and the intent behind them—that should be cause for concern.

Musk’s robot is being developed by Tesla. It’s a seeming departure from the company’s car-making business, until you consider that Tesla isn’t a typical automotive manufacturer. The so-called “Tesla Bot” is a concept for a sleek, 125-pound humanlike robot that will incorporate Tesla’s automotive artificial intelligence and autopilot technologies to plan and follow routes, navigate traffic—in this case, pedestrians—and avoid obstacles.

Manufacturing is stepping up investment as the U.S. economy recovers from the challenges of 2020. Nearly 40 percent of manufacturers have increased CapEx spending, with less than 7 percent planning to spend less, the National Association of Manufacturers reports.

With that investment, factories have substantial room to reduce waste and improve profitability. In many plants the key efficiency metric, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), stands at just 60 percent—meaning 40 percent of potential production capability is lost. In contrast, state-of-the-art factories regularly achieve 85 percent OEE.

Getting to real-time insight

Digital tools can be an important lever to help factories and entire manufacturing ecosystems dramatically reduce waste. As a foundation, most digital technologies start by providing real-time insight into what’s going on, what’s going wrong, and why. With that information, operators can act more quickly to fix issues as they occur and even prevent problems.

This final article in the series is about dealing with the aftermath of catastrophe. When it was originally written, not so long ago, it was a look back to the Camp Fire of 2018, and what those of us who survived learned that could help those in the future deal with their own disasters.

But the summer of 2021 has reminded us, again, that we are always living in an aftermath. As I write this new introduction, communities across Butte and Plumas counties, like Greenville, pick through the ashes of homes that still stood when I began writing this series. And flames curve around the rim of the communities of Lake Tahoe.

In the media stories about disasters, there is often a kind of curve that emerges.

Peace gives way to catastrophe. Unexpected heroes emerge, displaying service and courage. First responders, governmental, and private groups rush in to nurse the wounded and restore peace—or at least lessen the destruction that chaos leaves behind.

Teary survivors survey the wreckage that was once their anonymous corner of the world and look to the future with resolution to build it all back. Wreckage is cleared, hammers start driving into two-by-fours, and pretty soon after that, the story is “over.”