All Features
NIST
A convocation of delegates representing 60 countries voted last month in Versailles, France, to implement the most significant change to the International System of Units (SI) in more than 130 years. For the first time, all measurement units will be defined by natural phenomena rather than by…
Scott A. Hindle
Walter Shewhart, father of statistical process control and creator of the control chart, put a premium on the time order sequence of data. Since many statistics and graphs are unaffected by this, you might wonder what the fuss is about. Read on to see why.
Figure 1 shows a series of measurements…
Minitab LLC
Machine learning as a tool in your analytical toolkit can help accelerate the discovery of insights in data that can create a more efficient manufacturing process and drive innovation.
Machine learning in the spotlight
The growth in availability of technologies that give us the ability to monitor,…
NIST
A convocation of delegates representing 60 countries voted last month in Versailles, France, to implement the most significant change to the International System of Units (SI) in more than 130 years. For the first time, all measurement units will be defined by natural phenomena rather than by…
Davis Balestracci
I always enjoy my fellow columnist Arun Hariharan’s musings. He has worked in the field of quality for more than 30 years and, like me, has obtained reasonable results. But he has also made his share of the inevitable growing-pain mistakes—lessons we both had to learn the hard way in an environment…
Wudan Yan, Knowable Magazine
Nearly every month, it seems, comes a new report. In March 2018, there was news of contaminated romaine lettuce, which eventually led to five deaths and sickened more than 200 people across the United States and Canada. In May 2018, about 100 people in California got sick after eating raw oysters…
U.S. Department of Education
In June 2017, President Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Expanding Apprenticeships in America.” It calls for the creation of a special task force to identify strategies and proposals to promote apprenticeships in the United States. To meet this challenge, Department of Labor Secretary Alex…
American National Standards Institute ANSI
(ANSI: New York) -- The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) has signed an agreement to acquire full interests in the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board LLC (ANAB), strengthening ANSI’s and ANAB’s abilities to provide the highest quality third-party accreditation services for diverse…
Steven Brand
Each year, billions in funding for research and development as well as workforce initiatives is available for small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) to help them get off the ground or aid in expansion efforts. Here are eight organizations that can help your business flourish in today’s…
Donald J. Wheeler
Process behavior charts are the interface between your data and your brain. But you have to begin by making a choice about which type of chart to use. You can either plot the individual values themselves, or you can organize your data into rational subgroups and plot the subgroup averages. This…
Caroline Preston
The high school students clustered around a 4 ft-tall red robot with long arms and cartoonish eyes. A so-called collaborative robot, programmed to work with humans at Prent Corp., a packaging company, it looked cute, not intimidating.
But on this annual Manufacturing Day, which during the last few…
Buehler
(Buehler: Lake Bluff, IL) -- Buehler, an Illinois Tool Works (ITW) company, is sponsoring a new webinar for the testing of ferrous materials Dec. 4–6, 2018, in English, French, and German languages.
Buehler is offering this webinar to cover a variety of issues commonly encountered in both…
3D Systems
In today’s hypercompetitive environment, companies can’t afford to lag behind when it comes to the quality of their products—or the tools and technologies they use to ensure them. During the past two decades, 3D scanning has become an essential component of many companies’ quality control…
Ariana Tantillo
The ability to program computers is crucial to almost all modern scientific experiments, which often involve extremely complex calculations and massive amounts of data. However, scientists typically have not been formally trained in science-specific programming to develop customized computational…
NIST
The U.S. Department of Commerce announced that the 2018 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award will be given to two educational institutions, an organ donor group, a hospital, and a project management firm. A presidential-level honor, the award recognizes exemplary U.S. organizations and…
InspectionXpert
(InspectionXpert: Apex, NC) -- InspectionXpert Corp., a software development company, broke the Guinness World Record for the World’s Largest Paper Ball. Made from cardboard, paper, and paper cord, the final ball came in at 576 lb, 9-ft 8.6-in. tall, and 33-ft around.
InspectionXpert broke the…
Phillips Precision Inc.
(Phillips Precision’s Products Division: Boylston, MA) -- Phillips Precision announces its Sturdy Lever Clamp as part of the Inspection Arsenal, the first universal fixturing system providing a complete set of tools for all inspections.
The heavy-duty Sturdy Lever cantilevered clamp is ideal for…
Wiley
(Wiley: Hoboken, NJ) -- Scaling a business is not for the faint of heart. It’s a mind-bending journey that causes millions of business owners around the globe to either throw in the towel or avoid risk entirely and suffer from smallness and mediocrity.
Most of these businesses fail because they…
Annette Franz
I’ve written previously about 11 myths and mistakes about journey mapping, but I should add one more myth, which is really the umbrella myth that likely encompasses all the others: Journey mapping is just a tool.
Nope, it’s not just a tool; it’s not just a workshop: It’s a process. Journey mapping…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In this episode we look at lessons learned (or not) from GE, the difference between ISO and FDA “requirements,” and this year's Baldridge recipients.
“GE’s Lessons Won’t Determine Whether You Succeed or Fail”
Does the success or failure of GE’s CEO really matter that much when it comes to how most…
Nicole Radziwill
Even though most businesses have invested in quality management and performance improvement, each organization is unique. People, processes, and machines must be coordinated to achieve desired outcomes. This is not easy.
Whether you’re in discrete manufacturing, a process industry, or a service…
Eric Stoop
The frequently referenced learning pyramid asserts than an average student retains 75 percent of information learned through practice, compared to just 5 percent of what he hears in a lecture. Although experts may dispute the relevance of these figures when applied to modern society, all of us can…
Mike Richman
This Thursday, for the first Thanksgiving in decades, I won’t be watching football, drinking beer, and stuffing myself into oblivion. Instead, I’ll be serving the homeless, giving clothes, and making myself useful.
Thanksgiving is always a time to give thanks—I mean, it’s right there in the holiday…
Megan Ray Nichols
There is rising enthusiasm all over the country and the world when it comes to apprenticeships. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 2013 to 2017, the number of those participating in apprenticeship programs grew from 375,000 to almost 534,000, an increase of about 42 percent. In 2017…
greenlight.guru
(Greenlight Guru: Indianapolis) -- Greenlight Guru, the only quality management software platform designed specifically for medical device companies, announces a new integration with Jira, creating an adaptive system for managing product development and post-market quality for devices with software…
