All Features

Diana Blazaitiene
Pandemic fatigue, tense geopolitical situations, and increasing professional burnout might all lead to employees ghosting—or completely cutting off all communication without any explanation—their employers. A 2021 study shows that about 28 percent of employees admit to having ghosted their employer…

Sam Hunter, Gina Ligon
There’s a well-known aphorism that generals are always fighting the last war. It’s a natural human tendency to focus on the kinds of threats you’re used to while playing down the likelihood or importance of some new sort of attack.
Of course, novel threats can crop up anytime and anywhere. An…
(Nadcap: Warrendale, PA) -- Modern 3D printing began during the early 1980s as a way to produce rapid prototype parts. According to a new whitepaper from the National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program (Nadcap), additive manufacturing (AM), as it’s now called, is rapidly…
(Flexbar Machine Corp.: Islandia, NY) - - The new LiteSurf system from Flexbar Machine Corp. features integrated Bluetooth and USB connection to Android smartphones, tablets, and PCs, allowing a quick and easy way to transmit surface roughness measurements. Thanks to the Roughness Studio Basic app…
(UpNano: Vienna) -- A novel device allows the compensation of miniscule roughness in two-photon polymerization (2PP) 3D-printing substrates while printing. The so called “Substrate Tilt Frame” has now been introduced internationally by UpNano GmbH.
The newly developed Substrate Tilt Frame helps…

Tom Taormina
Chipmunks live in wooded areas, scurrying around outside and feeding on nature. Mice burrow into walls and attics, looking for nesting material and food. They’re considered pests because they leave their nasty droppings where we live. So for many of us, chipmunks are cute but mice are repulsive. On…

OpusWorks
Over two days, engage in eight unique best practice sessions with 11 process improvement and thought leaders at S.O.A.R. 2022, OpusWorks’ annual virtual conference.
Designed to present highly actionable information and game-changing strategies from highly experienced and inspiring human beings, S.O…

Theodore Kinni
Conventional wisdom holds that disruptive innovation is beyond the ken of large, incumbent companies. But then there are companies like Microsoft, which transformed its ubiquitous Office software suite into the Office 365 subscription service.
“If Microsoft had done that as a startup, it would be…
(StoreConnect: San Francisco) -- One of the biggest news stories of the past several years has been the Great Resignation. Millennials in particular have felt the brunt of workforce changes from the pandemic and have been pushing back. Nearly 60 percent of millennials feel workplace burnout has…
(Gartner: Stamford, CT) -- A recent survey by Gartner Inc. found that 80 percent of executives think automation can be applied to any business decision. As automation becomes embedded in digital business, the survey revealed how organizations are developing their use of artificial intelligence (AI…

Harish Jose
In today’s column, I’m looking at the Ohno Circle in light of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s ideas. I’ll try to stay away from the neologisms used by Heidegger and will only scratch the surface of his deep insights.
One of the best explanations of the Ohno Circle comes from one of Taiichi…

Melinda Rose
A team of researchers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and the Georgia Institute of Technology has 3D-printed a dual-phase, nanostructured, high-entropy alloy that exceeds the strength and ductility of other state-of-the-art additively manufactured materials. The alloy could lead to…
(SME: Southfield, MI) -- Committed to advancing manufacturing professionals, academia, and communities, SME will participate in IMTS 2022 at Chicago’s McCormick Place, Sept. 11–17, 2022, featuring seven focus areas that explore manufacturing education, workforce development, and career advancement…
Rachel Yang
(MIT: Cambridge, MA) -- To help combat climate change, many car manufacturers are racing to add more electric vehicles to their lineups. But to convince prospective buyers, manufacturers need to improve how far these cars can go on a single charge. One of the main challenges is figuring out how to…

Bryan Christiansen
CNC (for computer numerical control) machines have made manufacturing easier, faster, and more precise. Supported by the development of IoT technology, the CNC machine market is set to experience significant growth. With that in mind, this seems like a great time to discuss the intricacies of CNC…

Kate Zabriskie
Despite our best efforts, it’s not as easy as it looks to get the job training equation right.
“I learned so much during orientation. It’s too bad I won’t use most of it for six months. I took some notes, but I’m sure I won’t remember half of what they told me to do.”
“I’m overwhelmed. I learned a…
(New Scale Robotics: Rochester, NY) -- New Scale Robotics has deployed six Q-Span Workstation EDU kits at the Finger Lakes Workforce Development (FWD) Center at Monroe Community College (MCC) in Rochester, New York. The ready-to-use kits help colleges and universities add hands-on robotics and…
(HEIDENHAIN: Schaumburg, IL) -- The new metrology-focused digital readout by ACU-RITE will be introduced in the HEIDENHAIN booth next month at the IMTS show in Chicago (September 12-17). The new ACU-RITE-brand DRO203Q known as “The Q” utilizes the power of the established ACU-RITE DRO203 hardware…

jeffdewar
This is the second installment of a five-part series.
Some weeks ago, I attended ASQ’s 2022 World Conference on Quality and Improvement (WCQI) with Quality Digest’s editor in chief, Dirk Dusharme, in Anaheim, California. It was the first in-person conference since Covid hit the world, and…

Mona Rhodes
Standards of customer service rose in 2022, and your business needs to keep up if you want to be successful in the digital age. Each customer interaction is crucial, especially since PWC revealed that 32 percent of customers will stop doing business with a brand when they experience poor service.…

Sara Harrison
Have you ever had a really bad boss? Think Alec Baldwin as Blake in Glengarry Glen Ross, who announces that “coffee’s for closers only” and then threatens the salesmen he supervises with a number of choice terms not suitable to repeat here. Few leaders use quite so much verbal abuse, profanity, and…
(Radiant Vision Systems: Redmond, WA) -- Radiant Vision Systems, a leading provider of imaging systems for scientific evaluation of light sources and displays, announces that its ProMetric I61 (61-megapixel) Imaging Colorimeter was recognized among the best by the 2022 Laser Focus World Innovators…
(PR Newswire: Cambridge, MA) -- According to research released in MIT Sloan Management Review, inaccurate or false information, if repeated often enough, can result in an illusion of truth, thereby placing executive decision-making at risk.
Researchers from Esade Business School, Purdue University…
(Digital Twin Consortium: Boston) -- The Digital Twin Consortium announced a liaison agreement with the National Institute of Building Sciences (NIBS) to advance the use of digital twins in the building industry.
“We are excited about working with NIBS on leveraging digital twins to extend…

Donald J. Wheeler
Many people have been taught that capability indexes only apply to “normally distributed data.” This article will consider the various components of this idea to shed some light on what has, all too often, been based on superstition.
Capability indexes are statistics
Capability and performance…