All Features
(ZEISS: Oberkochen, Germany) -- Free and open-source software (FOSS) has been the driving force of innovative software development for many years and is largely responsible for the blossoming of modern software ecosystems. The source code at its core is publicly available and can be viewed, further…
(Torrey Pines Scientific: Carlsbad, CA) -- Torrey Pines Scientific announces its Echotherm Model IC20XR compact, Peltier-driven, chilling/heating dry bath. It can freeze, chill, or heat samples from -10°C to 110°C (14°F–230°F) at your workstation, and can be supplied with the broadest variety of…
Tom Taormina
The quality profession has been evolving since the Industrial Revolution. I’ve lived part of this journey since the 1970s and have experienced its effect. ASQ and other organizations have continually pushed the envelope in creating training and certifications in the skill sets we’ve developed over…
Chip Reavley
The business challenges of the past few years—labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, and inflation—have accelerated the long-term trend toward automated packaging operations. All types of manufacturers and distributors, including food and beverage, pharmaceuticals, automotive, and e-commerce…
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology has joined the O-RAN Alliance: a nonprofit organization made up of mobile network operators, vendors, and academic and government institutions working to make radio access network (RAN)…
Jennifer Chu
(MIT: Cambridge, MA) -- Take apart your laptop screen and at its heart you’ll find a plate patterned with pixels of red, green, and blue LEDs, arranged end to end like a meticulous Lite-Brite display. When electrically powered, the LEDs together can produce every shade in the rainbow to generate…
William A. Levinson
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) is growing in popularity as a metric to guide investment decisions. What does ESG have to do with productivity, quality, or stakeholders, aka relevant interested parties? The answer is—with the exception of generally accepted practices for workplace…
When MasterControl hosted the Masters Summit 2022 in Salt Lake City, Quality Digest CEO Jeff Dewar was one of the panelists. That gave him a chance to catch up with Jon Beckstrand, CEO of MasterControl, a company which provides its quality management system to more than 1,000 clients, primarily in…
Matt Zajechowski
We spend about one-third of our waking hours at work. That’s often more time than we spend asleep or hanging out with our family and friends. It’s no wonder then that workplaces develop their own languages.
Workplace jargon can help streamline our jobs and bond us to our colleagues. But sometimes…
(Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK) -- Thermo Fisher Scientific has simplified the workflow for its SureTect PCR (polymerase chain reaction) system by introducing streamlined handling and fail-safe color-coded plates and reagents to smart, intuitive software and instrumentation.
In the pursuit of food…
(Hexagon: Cobham, Surrey, U.K.) -- Hexagon has announced the winner of the second cohort of its Sixth Sense open innovation platform, which nurtures startups creating solutions to pressing manufacturing challenges.
Hexagon is a global digital reality solutions provider with technology that…
(AW-Lake: Oak Creek, WI) -- AW-Lake is supplying flow monitors to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for use on its research vessels as part of a process to measure the temperature and salt content of the world’s oceans.
NOAA previously was unaware when a pump clogged…
Etienne Nichols
In a highly regulated industry like medical technology, manufacturing processes must undergo either process verification or process validation to ensure they’re consistently producing the correct result. The question is, which one should you use?
Verification and validation are two different…
Phanish Puranam, Daniel A. Levinthal, Özgecan Koçak
Knowledge-intensive work is quite different from the physical manufacturing work that birthed the corporate hierarchies widely prevalent today. Consider the incompetent Pointy-Haired Boss in the Dilbert comic strip: He can’t lead through wisdom or better information, and he’s unable to control his…
(PR Newswire: Boston, MA) -- Membrane materials are of fundamental importance for fuel cells—so significant, in fact, that they typically give their name to the fuel cell, as is the case for proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells. IDTechEx forecasts the market for ion-exchange membranes in PEM…
(HEIDENHAIN: Traunreut, Germany) -- To assist in training the next generation of manufacturing professionals, ACU-RITE is offering deep discounts on its line of DROs and MILLPWR G2 CNC retrofit packages.
Additionally, HEIDENHAIN offers a collection of educational services and products to meet the…
Gleb Tsipursky
Shortly before the layoffs at Salesforce, Marc Benioff, co-founder and co-CEO of Salesforce, sent a companywide Slack message complaining about the low productivity of recent hires made during the pandemic and asked, “Are we not building tribal knowledge with new employees without an office culture…
Del Williams
(Cablevey Conveyors: Oskaloosa, IA) -- The food processing industry continues to experience significant growth. Budgets trend upward for conveying equipment and maintenance in the year ahead, with 82 percent of those surveyed reporting their budgets will be increasing in the next 12 months.
To…
Julie Davis
If you feel like there are fewer workers to be found these days, rest assured—you are correct. A decrease in the rate of births, declining since the 1970s, coupled with decreasing labor market participation, more job openings, a shortfall of immigrants, and a surge of retirements, is creating a…
(Siemens: Plano, TX) -- Digital Industries Software announces its latest release of Simcenter software for mechanical simulation helps streamline electrification engineering projects, assists new aircraft meet margins of safety, simplifies durability testing across many industries and much more.
“…
Mike Figliuolo
You put a lot of time and energy into leading slackers, but you don’t get anything back in terms of results. Your job as a leader is to figure out what will motivate them to perform.
Slackers are in the lower left corner of the leadership matrix. They have the talent to get work done, but they…
Matt Fieldman
As 2022 came to a close, I was as amazed as I am every year by all the “___ of the Year” lists. It seems like every media outlet creates its own list of the year’s 10 best books, and then there’s the Sherwin-Williams Color of the Year, the Merriam-Webster Word of the Year, and so on.
This got me…
(CERATIZIT S.A.: Mamer, Luxembourg) -- Water isn’t only the elixir of life— it has also established itself in industrial production for cooling, cleaning, or as a solvent. Furthermore, waterjet cutting is recognized as a reliable alternative to conventional cutting processes. Extremely smooth cut…
(Fastems: Tampere, Finland, and West Chester, OH) -- A new complimentary service for all Fastems customers, “myFastems” provides more advanced digital services for customers using Fastems’ Manufacturing Management Software (MMS) Version 6 and above. Considered a software-as-a-service, myFastems…
The MEP National Network
Issues affecting the workforce today are both immediate—such as the aging out of many experienced baby boomers —and long term—such as meeting employees’ changed expectations of workplace flexibility, pay, career paths, and innovative benefits.
Onboarding and retaining people who are new to the…
