How US plants really run, across quality, operations, maintenance, safety and continuous improvement, told by the people who run them.
Plants run on procedures, audits and forms. They keep running because of people who know where the paper and the floor disagree. In the industry’s podcasts, the most frequent guests are consultants and vendors. On Paper is where the leaders who run plants talk, and where we write down what they teach.
A 2012 rule of thumb from the Elsmar Cove quality forum says the line should find the most. What practitioners have said about clean first-layer sheets since 2005, read as questions for whoever runs the program.
The grading scale used in the Medical Device Single Audit Program adds a grade when a nonconformity comes back, FDA warning letters read repeat failures as a leadership problem, and forum members explain why a repeat can point to the corrective action process.
Ten US conferences, in date order, where the people who run quality, continuous improvement and operations in plants go to hear from each other.
Twenty minutes with a leader who runs a plant or a production system. Every guest gets the same question: how do you know your system works between assessments? Then we ask for scenes.
Short pieces on what the floor says in public. Every note links its sources.
When enough guests have answered the question, we publish what the answers add up to.
No pitch. SmartHow stays out of the answers.
On Paper is presented by SmartHow, a software company for plant management systems. It’s hosted by Gabriel Gonçalves, SmartHow’s CEO, who moved from Brazil to San Francisco this year to sell to US factories. When a guest’s company is a SmartHow customer or partner, we say so.