All Features
Mencom Corp.
(Mencom Corp: Oakwood, GA) -- Automation is a key part of almost all manufacturing today. Why? The many benefits include reduced costs, increased productivity, improved quality, and greater efficiency.
Reduced costs. What once took one or more people to do can now be accomplished with one robot,…
Dan Perreault
Sponsored Content
The CMM, or coordinate measuring machine, has long been the standard for dimensional inspection of complex parts across a variety of industries. But has the CMM outlived its usefulness? Is this technology now obsolete in the face of new technologies such as 3D scanning?
The …
Frost and Sullivan
(Frost & Sullivan: San Antonio, TX) -- Various industries, including food and beverage, environmental, biopharmaceuticals, clinical research and diagnostics have been driving the global laboratory analytical instrumentation market. The food industry has been a particularly prominent end user…
Annette Franz
Are you listening to your customers? Do you understand what they’re trying to achieve? Are you using what you learn to actually design a better experience for them?
I was thrilled to be interviewed by Leah Berry and to a be part of her 30 Experts in 30 Days series; she asked me questions about…
Jeffrey Phillips
I recently had the opportunity to speak to a leadership team that is considering building an innovation capability in their business. I was asked a question I get infrequently, but one I always enjoy answering. The question is this: “What keeps businesses from innovating effectively?”
The answer…
Jess Scheer
T
he world’s worst-kept business secret is that most acquisitions fail. Depending on what metric you use to evaluate success, mergers miss their intended goals by as much as 85 percent of the time. With a failure rate that high, there’s no single cause, and there’s no silver bullet that will…
Davis Balestracci
As most of you know, one of my mantras for change agents is, “Those darn humans! God bless ’em,” i.e., don’t be surprised by anything. People never seem to mind change... for other people or departments.
Ever heard this: “It’s about time someone did something about that. They really needed to…
NIST
The prospect of a “hydrogen economy”—in which vehicles powered by fuel cells would travel the nation’s roadways emitting nothing from their tailpipes but wisps of water vapor—was making headlines 12 years ago.
In his 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush issued a challenge to…
Pilgrim Quality Solutions
(Pilgrim: Tampa, FL) -- Pilgrim Quality Solutions, a global provider of enterprise quality management software and services for life sciences, has introduced SmartSolve Mobile Audit, a mobile application created specifically to improve auditor productivity, particularly when conducting audits at…
Marc Silverstein
Because many types of image analyses are performed to meet the different needs of industries and applications, imaging software and microscope companies have created software that serves as a “jack of all trades,” offering a variety of tools that apparently allow you to accomplish just about…
NIST
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Once known only as the creator of the nation’s highest award for organizational performance excellence, the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program now offers executive leadership development training that is revolutionizing how leaders themselves use the Baldrige…
Mike Figliuolo
Time is your most precious resource. If you’re not mindful about how you invest it in your team members, you won’t be happy with the “returns” you get. Being more effective requires you to look at your time in a new light.
Do leaders work, or do they sit back and supervise others? Where you stand…
Matthew Barsalou
I gave a rather successful talk on communicating design of experiments (DoE) at the recent ENBIS 14 conference in Linz, Austria. Things went mostly well, but it’s also fair to say many attendees had one major criticism: I didn’t explain why one factor at a time testing (OFAT) isn’t ideal. That…
Frost and Sullivan
(Frost & Sullivan: Mountain View, CA) -- The complex relationship between technology proliferation and rapidly evolving social norms is going to redefine U.S. society and business over the next 10 years. Against a backdrop of the 2016 political election, the United States finds itself engaging…
Marta Collier
The lazy days of summer are a thing of the past. Through a remarkably diverse set of summer camps and other enrichment programs, kids all over Arkansas spent the summer of 2015 participating in activities designed to spark their curiosity and teach them the joy of creating. That joy—and the 21st…
Maurice DeCastro
Would you market your business today the same way you were marketing it 30 years ago? Would you use the same technology? Would you lead your team the same way? I’m guessing most leaders would answer each question with a resounding “No.”
If that’s the case, why has the work culture for business…
William A. Levinson
We all know what happens when we assume. For example, traditional designed experiments assume that residuals, the differences between the actual and modeled data, follow the normal distribution (as seen in figure 1). These experiments include t tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA), factorial…
Michelle LaBrosse
When project managers establish effective routines for their daily work as well as for managing their teams, they develop healthy project management (PM) “hygiene.” This metaphor relates to having consistent processes in place, and it’s what project management is all about. Consistent routines…
Harry Hertz
As the following diagram of the Baldrige framework indicates, the basis of the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence is a set of core values and concepts that are embedded in high-performing organizations.
These core values and concepts (listed below) are the foundation for integrating key…
DE-STA-CO
(DE-STA-CO: Auburn Hills, MI) -- With the new 52H-3E series, DE-STA-CO is offering a very individualized, adjustable manual power clamp primarily for prototype fixtures. The manual power clamps are available in two sizes—50 and 63. They have a completely closed aluminum housing that protects the…
Akhilesh Gulati
The big data revolution is requiring a seismic shift inside organizations, both in the way we build relationships and the way we make decisions. Each is now driven by data rather than intuition.
In general, decision making is accomplished via a thought process of selecting a logical choice from…
Michael Causey
Ironically, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is sometimes wary of issuing guidances out of concern it will appear to be imposing new rules that will stifle innovation, according to Ken Skodacek, a policy analyst for the Clinical Trials Program at the Center for Devices and Radiological…
inTEST Thermal Solutions
(inTEST Thermal Solutions: Mansfield, MA) -- The integration of rapid temperature cycling with the Keysight B1506A Power Device Analyzer has been introduced by inTEST Thermal Solutions and Keysight. The Temptronic ThermoStream temperature forcing system automates temperature cycling of power…
Arun Hariharan
In my previous article, “Is Poor Quality ISO 9001’s Fault?” I shared the example of the chairman of a large company who ridiculed ISO 9001, saying, “Even the municipal office of this city is ISO 9001-certified. And we all know how bad the municipality is. I don’t believe ISO 9001 can do my…
Kevin Meyer
Awhile ago I discussed the value created by writing by hand. By writing on whiteboards or scribbling in a notebook, ownership, learning, and understanding is created. Similarly, truly understanding numbers creates ownership, learning, and understanding—thereby creating the potential for action.
I’…
