Disruption is a funny thing. You see it coming—kind of—but it’s hard to tell what it means. Back in the day, would you have foreseen the shift from taxis to Uber? Would you have predicted that HVAC units would be offered as a service rather than purchased as a product? These disruptive changes and many more were driven through use of the cloud, connectivity, machine learning, and mobile apps as important technologies that enabled digital transformation and the industrial internet of things (IIoT).

These changes took established markets by surprise, which can be defined as “an unexpected or astonishing event, fact, or thing”—something that established wisdom and the consensus view didn’t anticipate.

Today, would you predict that some of those same technologies, when applied to supplier quality management (SQM), will result in disruption within the next few years? It’s possible to argue that they can and likely will; to argue that SQM is important enough to disrupt markets, the market’s adoption of SQM is immature enough to make industry ripe for disruption, and that innovative SQM provides substantial competitive advantage.

(ACSI: Colorado Springs, CO) -- Customer satisfaction with banks is up, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Its recent report covers the finance and insurance sector, which includes retail banks, credit unions, health insurance, property and casualty insurance, life insurance, and internet investment services.

Bank customer satisfaction climbs 5.3 percent to an ACSI score of 80 on a 100-point scale. Regional and community banks lead with a combined score of 83 (+3.8%). Super-regional banks gain 3.9 percent to 79. Although national banks rank lowest, they are the most improved (+6.9% to 77). Credit unions edge up 1.2 percent to 82, slightly below the industry’s long-term average. Similar to smaller banks, credit unions offer more personalized service, and also are generally more likely to have lower fees and free checking.

“Smaller usually means higher customer satisfaction when it comes to banking services, and that still holds true, albeit to a lesser degree this year,” says Claes Fornell, ACSI founder and chairman. “ACSI data show that national banks have improved in nearly every aspect of the customer experience. But even with some of their highest scores ever, national banks still lag regional banks.”

The new revision of AS9100D is now out, and clause 10.2—“Nonconformity and corrective action” will require us to “evaluate the need for action based on human factors to ensure nonconformities do not recur.” In addition, clause 7.1.4 of both ISO 9001:2015 and AS9100D require us to consider human and physical factors in the environment for the operation of processes, including social, psychological, and physical.

These concepts are not new to quality, but for the first time they are explicitly defined as requirements in the quality management system standards. The concept of “error proofing” gained momentum during the 1960s.

Human factors are central to many aspects of a quality management system and link back to W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points for Management in his seminal work, Out of the Crisis (MIT Press, 2000 edition).

We recognize that humans are prone to errors, so how can we design the process and environment to prevent and reduce human errors?

There were no Olympic medals up for grabs when Sim Yi Hui and Jane Lee, the co-founders of the Singapore Women’s Everest Team, set out to recruit team members to climb the world’s tallest mountain in 2004. “When we first formed the team my goal was just to climb the mountain,” Sim Yi Hui told me on stage at the recent FT Family Business Forum Asia. “It was really a pure passion to want to climb.”

Little did she know at the time but her goal would get a lot bigger. Once the newspapers caught wind of Yi Hui’s dream, she and her team members became the “Singapore Women’s Everest climbing team,” the first group of Singaporean women to attempt to reach the summit of the mountain. The nation was watching and expectations were rising.

Most leadership advice is based on anecdotal observation and basic common sense. Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Kathryn Shaw tried a different tack: data-driven analysis.

Through research done in collaboration with a very large, undisclosed technology-based company that has a penchant for collecting data, Shaw found that employees who work under good bosses were more productive. “There are bad bosses out there,” she says, “but what’s not talked about as much is that there are also good bosses.”

Shaw, along with fellow Stanford GSB professor Edward Lazear and Harvard Business School’s Christopher Stanton, published a 2015 paper titled “The Value of Bosses,” in which they gathered data from the tech company in an attempt to see whether they could show that bosses matter and, if so, how much. As part of their research, the authors asked company employees and managers, “What are the traits of a good boss?” They found that bosses matter substantially.

The U.S. Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, has named four organizations as the 2016 recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest presidential honor for sustainable excellence through visionary leadership, organizational alignment, systemic improvement and innovation.

This year’s recipients—two small businesses and two healthcare providers—represent four states, including the first awardee from Idaho. The companies feature four distinctly different operations, including the first winner ever from the long-term care and rehabilitation field and the first awardee from the textile industry since 1989.

In today’s global supply chain, shipping a product across the world isn’t as simple as loading it onto a truck, train, or boat and signing a few papers. International shipments often involve coordination between counterparts in the countries of origin and destination, complete and accurate paperwork required for those nations and any in between, physical locations chosen strategically, and capital to create a solid supply chain with redundancies.

Many problems can happen that will delay or reroute shipments, such as natural disasters, an improper code on a document, or a product shortage. Beyond a delay is an even worse outcome: One mistake could cost you tens of thousands of dollars in fines. To efficiently move goods from one side of the globe to the other requires knowledgeable and experienced staff, and reliable tools and software. This is where a third-party logistics (3PL) company steps in to help businesses provide a seamless and positive customer experience.

Editor’s note: This is part one of a four-part series offering the author’s perspective on how different aspects of manufacturing may be affected in the future. Part two covers production management; in part three, inventory management; and in part four, product quality.

It’s time to get your compliance programs in order to meet some looming international regulatory compliance demands, experts including former Food and Drug Administration officials say. Having a firm grip on quality management processes—especially document management and change control—will be critical to comply with such a disparate group of regulations working with so many regulatory bodies. These new regulations and others already on the books reemphasize the importance of having an automated QMS with integrated quality processes tailored to the increasingly complex demands of medical-device regulatory compliance.

Changes to the global economy during the last two decades have dramatically altered the landscape of business and industry. Globalization has enabled an ever-lengthening supply chain, which confers greater complexity and risk to every step of the process, whether for material goods or for services. Manufacturers are long familiar with this equation, but companies in the service and transactional sectors must now be mindful of the increased risk that comes from outsourcing and offshoring.

The recently released ISO 9001:2015 quality management system (QMS) standard will provide better insight into the nature of risk and how it can best be ameliorated, as well as moving preventive tools upstream to better manage risk.