All Features
Ryan E. Day
Every year, Manufacturing Day brings attention to the career path that has financed millions of growing families throughout the decades—including mine. This attention also recalls the ongoing shortage of people to fill the thousands of available jobs in manufacturing. The same can be said for the…
Yen Duong, Knowable Magazine
If you think it’s hard to tell how you’re doing at your job, imagine being a hockey goalie. Let’s say you block every shot in a game. Was that performance due to your superior skills? Or maybe just to a lack of skill in your opponents?
Evaluating ice hockey players' performance is getting easier,…
Jim Benson
Editor’s note: Read episode two in the Respect for People series here.
I was standing in a back room of the Honolulu Museum of Art that was off limits to the public. In this one room, protected from bugs, humidity, and light, was the world’s largest collection of Japanese woodblock prints. (My…
Annette Franz
I write about organizational culture and core values quite often. One of my most recent articles on this topic was about whether employees believe in their companies’ core values. I shared this statistic from Gallup: Only 23 percent of U.S. employees believe that they can apply the core values to…
Jamie Seo Yeon Song
The internet has radically democratized the means of marketing cultural products. Enormous advertising budgets are no longer necessary to get the word out about a new release; companies can connect directly with vast numbers of current or potential consumers through Twitter, Facebook, or whatever…
Visual Workplace Inc.
(Visual Workplace: Byron Center, MI) -- Huddle boards are a powerful tool for many industries. They provide a visual way for teams to collaborate on and assess the tasks necessary to complete a project. Visual Workplace offers a wide array of predesigned huddle boards or contact us to create your…
Anthony D. Burns
Not long ago, we had a client inquire about virtual reality (VR) and quality training. VR and its close relative, augmented reality (AR), are hot technologies right now, not just in entertainment, but also in industry, including their use in training. So it’s no surprise that clients inquire about…
Jody Muelaner
Attribute gauges are a type of measurement instrument or process that gives a binary pass/fail measurement result. Examples of attribute gauges include go/no-go plug gauges, feeler gauges, and many other types of special-purpose hard gauges. Many visual-inspection processes may also be considered…
Inderjit Arora
Every company uses a system to understand the requirements and inputs of its customers, and then plans to deliver outputs meeting those requirements as a conforming product or service. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) publishes management system standards that, when…
Jody Muelaner
I’ve written a lot about how to evaluate the uncertainty measurements. My articles have ranged from basic introductions to metrology and uncertainty budgets, to more advanced topics such as sensitivity coefficients and Monte Carlo simulation. To date, all of the examples I’ve used have been for…
L.S. Starrett Co.
(The L.S Starrett Company: Athol, MA) -- The L.S. Starrett Company has announced it will open its doors again this year to welcome students and schools, state representatives, and the community to participate in its third annual Manufacturing Day on Fri., Oct. 4, 2019, from 10 a.m.–2 p.m. at…
Dylan Walsh
In principle, the mountaineer’s work is simple: “To win the game he has first to reach the mountain’s summit,” said George Mallory, who took part in Britain’s first three attempts on Everest during the 1920s. “But, further, he has to descend in safety.”
The tension between these two goals—…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
In a previous column (“Why Innovate? To Make Money, of Course!”), I wrote that in order to make money from innovation, you need to find a good problem to solve. I suggested that a good way to find such a problem is to look at some of your daily tasks and identify the ones you detest. I then…
Harish Jose
One of my favorite equations from Factory Physics, by Wallace Hopp and Mark Spearman (Waveland Press, third edition, 2011) is Kingman’s formula, usually represented as “VUT.”
The VUT equation is named after Sir John Kingman, a British mathematician:
The first factor represents variability and is…
Jeffrey Hirsch
Science fiction has long imagined a future in which humans constantly interact with robots and intelligent machines. This future is already happening in warehouses and manufacturing businesses. Other workers use virtual or augmented reality as part of their employment training, to assist them in…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
More often than not, an effective implementation of operator-led visuality produces a 15- to 30-percent increase in productivity on the cell or departmental level, beginning with the implementation of the “visual where” (or, as our trainers like to call it, 5S on steroids). But that effectiveness…
Chad Kymal
Organizations in the automotive and related industries such as steel, plastics, and semiconductors have been heavily influenced by automotive industry standards and practices like IATF 16949, advanced product quality planning (APQP), failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA), and production parts…
David Midgley
Ask any manager at a large organization why the purchasing department matters, and the first factor he will mention will probably be costs. But cost control, though a core competency, is far from the only way purchasing affects firm performance.Every contract signed with a supplier represents a…
Bruce Hamilton
Reflecting on Douglas McGregor’s X and Y theories of human motivation, Shigeo Shingo took the position that each of us by nature has a dual tendency: sometimes lazy and self-interested, and other times motivated and generous. Which of these behaviors dominates is directly related to the environment…
Andy Sutton
I felt compelled to write my first-ever article following a conversation I was part of on LinkedIn recently. To cut a long story short, I commented on a post that was berating data science leaders who don’t have a data science background. I didn’t agree with the perspective that only data…
Bill Kraus
Continuous improvement is generally considered to be a journey in pursuit of perfection and is regularly associated with the concept of lean manufacturing. In early 1990, reflecting on the Toyota Production System, the National Institute of Standards and Technology Manufacturing Extension…
Rachel Ehrenberg, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
If you’re lucky, you’ve tasted a perfectly ripe fruit—a sublime peach, perhaps, or a buttery avocado. But odds are most of the fruit you’ve eaten tastes more like wet cardboard. Although plant breeders have mastered growing large, perfect-…
The Conference Board
(Conference Board: New York) -- A nationwide survey reveals that Americans are feeling better about their jobs than they have in years, according to a recent poll conducted by the Conference Board.
The survey shows that about 54 percent of U.S. workers are satisfied with their employment.…
Ryan E. Day
For more than 50 years, Tri-State Plastics has been honing its skills in thermoforming, CNC machining, die cutting, assembly, and fabricating plastic parts for government and military applications. A restructuring of company ownership saw the organization pivot toward the lucrative but challenging…
David Mitchell
Using a novel capability to reason about shape, function, and attachment of unrelated parts, researchers have for the first time successfully trained an intelligent agent to create basic tools by combining objects.
The breakthrough comes from Georgia Tech’s Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning…
