All Features
Chip Bell
One of my favorite movies is Stripes. Starring Saturday Night Live comedians Bill Murray and John Candy, the 1981 hit movie features a scene in which new Army recruits (including Murray and Candy) are in a “get-acquainted” circle with their basic training platoon sergeant. Each recruit tells the…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
What is quality intelligence, exactly? It’s more than marketing spin. More, even, than the sum of its many control charts. It’s not collecting data simply to further go/no-go actions. And it doesn’t mean turning the cognitive wheel entirely over to artificial intelligence, either—far from it.
We…
Ryan E. Day
An organization can achieve great results when everyone is working together, looking at the same information generated from the same data, and using the same rules. Changes can be made that affect a company’s bottom line through operational improvements, product quality, and process optimization.…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Blame it on Moore’s law. We live in a digital Pangaea, a world of borderless data driven by technology, and the speed and density with which data can be transmitted and handled. It’s a world in which data-driven decisions cause daily fluctuations in markets and supply chains. Data come at us so…
Ryan E. Day
It’s no secret that manufacturing companies operate in an inherently unstable environment. Every operational weakness poses a risk to efficiency, quality, and ultimately, to profitability. All too often, it takes a crisis—like Covid-19 shutdowns—to reveal operational weaknesses that have been…
Eric Weisbrod
For nearly a century, statistical process control (SPC) has been the cornerstone of quality management and process control. But traditional SPC can’t keep up as the pace of manufacturing accelerates. Twenty-first century manufacturing lines produce multiple products and create thousands of data…
Maggie Pavlick
Masks, gowns, and other personal protective equipment (PPE) are essential for protecting healthcare workers. However, the textiles and materials used to make such items can absorb and carry viruses and bacteria, inadvertently spreading the disease the wearer sought to contain.
When the coronavirus…
Puerto Rico Manufacturing Extension
El-Com Systems Corp. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of El-COM Systems Solutions based in California. The local company has been in Puerto Rico since 2016 operating in Caguas. The company is dedicated to manufacturing complex electromechanical subsystems and assemblies for the global aerospace and…
Dawn Bailey
In this article series, we explain some of the successful strategies and programs shared by Baldrige Award recipients to highlight categories of the Baldrige Criteria and how your organization might consider using them as inspiration.
Part of the purpose of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality…
Vandana Suresh
Plastics are a popular 3D printing material, allowing users to create a variety of objects, from simple toys to custom prosthetic parts. But these printed parts are mechanically weak—a flaw caused by the imperfect bonding between the individual printed layers that make up the 3D part.
Now,…
Davis Balestracci
What is the Vasa? It was a Swedish warship built in 1628. It was supposed to be the grandest, largest, and most powerful warship of its time. King Gustavus Adolphus himself took a keen personal interest and insisted on an entire extra deck above the waterline to add to the majesty and comfort of…
Dave Cook
We are experiencing the biggest remote-work experiment in history—but many are beginning to imagine life after lockdown. Amid unprecedented global job losses, concerns about transport infrastructure, and the continuing need for workplace social distancing, governments are launching back-to-work…
Mary Ann Pacelli
Last year’s Manufacturing Day (MFG Day) was an enormous success for U.S. manufacturers looking to engage the next generation of manufacturers. But how can you ensure the spark you kindled in the next generation finds fuel? Now more than ever, it’s critical to inform students and potential young…
David Braun
No matter how well designed, there are no running shoes that allow runners to keep up with cyclists. The bicycle was a key invention that doubled human-powered speed. But what if a new kind of shoe could allow people to run faster by mimicking cycling mechanics?
This is the question my students in…
Ryan E. Day
The Covid-19 pandemic is disrupting business across the globe, and supply chains are being stressed to their limits by sudden and drastic increases in online commerce. As organizations strive to continue delivering physical product, the industrial internet of things (IIoT) is being considered as a…
Brian Lagas
When most people think of lean processes, they believe the goal is to optimize things in a step-by-step approach. The result that companies using lean methods can look forward to is incremental improvements brought about by the elimination of waste.
Individuals who stick with this definition often…
NIST
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a novel, accurate, easy-to-operate, time- and labor-saving way to provide calibrated scale-bar standards for testing the performance of terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) systems.
TLS technology is widely employed to…
Gleb Tsipursky
So many companies are shifting their employees to working from home to address the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Yet they’re not considering the potential quality disasters that can occur as a result of this transition.
An example of this is what one of my coaching clients experienced more than a…
Sangeet Paul Choudary
The digitization of patient data and the adoption of cloud-based healthcare management systems have created efficiencies and new business models across the value chain. Advancements in AI provide superior decision support systems to doctors, while connected devices enable the remote delivery of…
Jason Chester
During the last several decades, many forward-thinking manufacturers have adopted factory automation for all that it promises—greater efficiency, consistency, productivity, and cost savings. In fact, if you walk through most modern manufacturing plants, you’ll see lines of machines performing a…
Charles Tarrio, Thomas Lucatorto
In 2019, after decades of effort, manufacturers used a new technology to create smartphones with individual circuit features as small as 7 nanometers (nm), or billionths of a meter, enabling them to cram 8.5 billion electronic devices, known as transistors, on a single small chip. Fitting more…
Alan Rudolph, Raymond Goodrich
We [Alan Rudolph and Raymond Goodrich] are both biotechnology researchers and are currently seeking to repurpose an existing medical manufacturing platform to quickly develop a vaccine candidate for Covid-19.
This process is used for the treatment of blood products such as plasma, platelets, and…
Donald J. Wheeler, Al Pfadt
Each day we receive data that seek to quantify the Covid-19 pandemic. These daily values tell us how things have changed from yesterday, and give us the current totals, but they are difficult to understand simply because they are only a small piece of the puzzle. And like pieces of a puzzle, data…
Jennifer Chu
The brain is one of our most vulnerable organs, as soft as the softest tofu. Brain implants, on the other hand, are typically made from metal and other rigid materials that, over time, can cause inflammation and the buildup of scar tissue.
MIT engineers are working on developing soft, flexible…
The Hechinger Report
Students generally learn about moles, atoms, compounds, and the intricacies of the periodic table in college, but Daniel Fried is convinced kids can learn complex biochemistry topics as early as elementary school.
Fried is an assistant professor of chemistry at Saint Peter’s University in New…
