All Features
Mike Figliuolo
Leadership is perilous territory. People’s lives are at stake (sometimes literally). Although avoiding the following seven deadly sins won’t guarantee you’ll be a great leader, succumbing to them will guarantee you’ll have a significant learning moment. (Translation: You’ll fail miserably, but…
Stephanie Ojeda
In the highly regulated world of life sciences, data integrity isn’t optional; it’s essential. The ALCOA principles—attributable, legible, contemporaneous, original, and accurate—provide a foundational framework for ensuring data are reliable and trustworthy.
With the rise of digital…
Quality Digest
(IEEE: Piscataway, NJ) -- The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, has released the results of “The Impact of Technology in 2025 and Beyond: An IEEE Global Study,” a new…
Quality Digest
(Steel Dynamics Inc.: Fort Wayne, IN) -- Steel Dynamics has recently joined the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership (GPP). Steel Dynamics was recognized by the EPA as No. 21 on its list of Green Power Partners from the Fortune 500, and No. 33 on its National Top 100 list…
Harish Jose
In this article, I look at the idea of “sweeping-in” in systems approach. Sweeping-in can be described as the process of opening up the inquiry of a system by expanding its boundaries. Philosopher and systems scientist C. West Churchman discussed this process in several works, including Thought and…
Johan Sjöberg
As dairies scramble to meet sustainability targets ahead of the first year of responding to the European Union Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the significant losses in push-out processes have been identified as low-hanging fruit by many companies.
From 2025, listed companies in the…
Quality Digest
(Renishaw: West Dundee, IL) -- Renishaw’s new TEMPUS technology enables users of RenAM 500 series metal additive manufacturing (AM) systems to reduce build times by up to 50%. Using advanced scanning algorithms that sequence the layer data to maximize productivity while maintaining part quality,…
Quality Digest
(AMT: McLean, VA) -- Orders of manufacturing technology, measured by the U.S. Manufacturing Technology Orders (USMTO) report published by AMT (the Association for Manufacturing Technology), totaled $360.8 million in August 2024. These orders for metalworking machinery increased 22.7% from July 2024…
John Tschohl
Speed is one of the most strategic elements a company can use to attract and retain customers and drive its revenues.
What do I mean when I talk about speed? In this context, speed means dramatically reducing the amount of time needed to complete a task by altering factors such as empowerment,…
Adam Zewe
In the 1960s cartoon series The Jetsons, Rosie the robotic maid seamlessly switches from vacuuming the house to cooking dinner to taking out the trash. But in real life, training a general-purpose robot remains a major challenge.
Typically, engineers collect data that are specific to a certain…
Quality Digest
(Taqtile: Seattle) -- Industrial organizations with multiple sites and multiple operations staffed by hundreds and even thousands of employees need to meticulously and efficiently manage the dissemination of work instructions and related data to their deskless staff. The ability to simplify,…
Quality Digest
(PI Americas: New York) -- PI Americas has introduced several new families of motorized linear and rotary stages tailored for precision automation, motion control, and positioning applications in the photonics, semiconductor, imaging, and metrology industry. All product lines are powered by…
NIST
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced that five organizations will receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s only presidential award for performance excellence. Among the recipients…
Quality Digest
(Rockwell: Milwaukee) -- Rockwell Automation, the world’s largest company dedicated to industrial automation and digital transformation, has launched its connected worker solution from Plex by Rockwell Automation. These industry-leading capabilities were developed to help users enhance productivity…
Adam Zewe
Despite their impressive capabilities, large language models (LLMs) are far from perfect. These artificial intelligence models sometimes “hallucinate” by generating incorrect or unsupported information in response to a query.
Due to this hallucination problem, an LLM’s responses are often verified…
Sandy Ressler
Wilhelm Weber gets the distinction of having the unit of magnetic flux, the weber (Wb), named in his honor. Magnetic flux measures the total magnetic field that passes through a surface.
(Wondering how to pronounce weber? Hear all about it from one of our researchers.)
The amount of magnetic flux…
Jones Loflin
Recently, while driving through North Dakota on a crisp fall evening, I found myself surrounded by the sights and sounds of harvest. Combines and trucks moved through golden cornfields, reaping the season’s bounty. I imagined the farmers, exhausted but satisfied, reflecting on the season’s…
Quality Digest
(meviy: Schaumburg, IL) -- A cutting-edge parts procurement platform, meviy, developed by MISUMI Group, announces the latest addition to its sheet-metal service: anodized aluminum (prefinished) sheets. Customers can now access these high-quality, prefinished sheets with lead times as short as five…
Gleb Tsipursky
The 2024 U.S. presidential election is shaping up to be one of the closest in recent history, with Kamala Harris and Donald Trump locked in a dead heat in many polls. This razor-thin margin amplifies the effect of even small demographic changes, such as those driven by the recent surge in remote…
James Chan
Facility and equipment maintenance is most effective when performed proactively and regularly. This kind of routine maintenance can take many forms, ranging from the most basic approaches to complicated strategies using sensors and data to trigger maintenance. Time-based maintenance (TBM) is a…
Quality Digest
(GFT: New York) -- Manufacturers are in the midst of one of the most significant transformations of their time, defined in large part by new AI-powered efficiencies. But for many companies, decades of siloed data stand between them and this new reality.
GFT has been working with Google Cloud since…
Quality Digest
(Sandvik Coromant: Sandviken, Sweden) -- Cutting tools specialist Sandvik Coromant has upgraded the damping mechanism of its Silent Tools turning adaptors for even more consistent performance and improved surface finish during internal turning operations at long overhangs. The new adaptors…
Gleb Tsipursky
The recent $22.1 million verdict in the case of Billesdon vs. Wells Fargo Securities has cast a spotlight on the increasing legal risks companies face when they ignore work-from-home (WFH) requests under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This landmark case underscores the critical need for…
Bruce Hamilton
For an organization to develop a sustainable, continuous improvement culture, it must, as we say at Greater Boston Manufacturing Partnership, involve everybody, every day—i.e., process improvement must become an everyday part of everyone’s job. That’s the ideal.
The reality, however, according to…
NIST
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new laser-based technique that could dramatically improve our ability to analyze a variety of materials and gases, including greenhouse gases. This new method, called “free-form dual…
