All Features
Boris Babic, Sara Gerke, Theodoros Evgeniou, I. Glenn Cohen
For many of us, our electronic device can be a communications lifeline, entertainment system, and professional networking hub. If trends continue, it may become our health advisor as well.
Direct-to-consumer (DTC) medical apps are a growing segment of the $10 billion market for healthcare…
Dileep Thatte
In 2018, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed that, every year, June 7 would be celebrated as World Food Safety Day. In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations decided to jointly facilitate the observance.
The…
Saligrama Agnihothri
Health-tracking devices and apps are becoming part of everyday life. More than 300,000 mobile phone applications claim to help with managing diverse personal health issues, from monitoring blood glucose levels to conceiving a child.
But so far the potential for health-tracking apps to improve…
Gleb Tsipursky
Due to strong employee resistance and turnover, Google recently backtracked from its plan to force all employees to return to the office and allowed many to work remotely. Amazon also backtracked on its plans to have a fully office-centric culture and allowed employees to have a hybrid schedule.…
Dawn Bailey
The spirit of service—for a small clinic started in 1913 to provide free care to Los Angeles (LA)—lives today in the servant-leader aspirations of 2019 Baldrige Award recipient Adventist Health White Memorial (AHWM), a 353-bed, safety-net hospital.
The community of two million people that AHWM…
Clare Naden
Travel and tourism took a beating during the Covid-19 pandemic, with borders closed, airlines grounded, and many establishments shut for months. Now as the industry attempts to recover in this new context, constantly changing rules and regulations are making it a far-from-simple task. What’s more,…
John Preston
‘This government is obsessed with skilling up our population,” said Boris Johnson in his recent speech on “leveling up.” There’s still a fair amount of uncertainty about exactly what the United Kingdom prime minister’s plan to level up the regions will involve, but manufacturing and skills seem…
Gleb Tsipursky
When a threat seems clear to you, it’s hard to believe others will deny it. Yet smart people deny serious risks surprisingly often.
A case-in-point example comes from my experience helping a midsize regional insurance company conduct a strategic pivot to thrive in the post-Covid world in January…
Silke von Gemmingen
Due to digitalization in Industry 4.0, internal logistics is subject to constant change. Internal traceability—i.e., tracking goods in the warehouse or production facility—increasingly plays a key role. Manufacturers and consumers are placing more emphasis on the safety and quality of products.…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist and collaborators have demonstrated the first-ever “defect microscope” that can track how populations of defects deep inside macroscopic materials move collectively.
The research, which appeared last month in Science Advances, shows a…
Adrian Hernandez, C. Michael White
T
he U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regularly inspects manufacturing facilities to ensure that drugs meet rigorous quality standards. These standards are vital to protect patients from drugs that are incorrectly dosed, contaminated, or ineffective.
But over the past few years, tens of…
Phanish Puranam
As businesses increasingly adopt AI-driven decision making, experts agree that the most interesting questions are not about whether humans can beat machines or vice versa, but how the two forms of intelligence can most fruitfully collaborate—and how organizations can best facilitate those…
Steven Severt
When it comes to ongoing certification of your quality management system (QMS), whether it’s certified to ISO 9001, ISO 13485, IATF 16949, or AS9100, how many times have you found yourself “preparing for an external audit?”
Picture the scene: You’ve got the dates set on the calendar months in…
Steven Stein
Supply chain management (SCM) has been defined as “the design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand, and measuring…
Terry Onica, Cathy Fisher
With recent disruptions critically impacting the automotive supply chain and costing manufacturers millions in lost production and sales, it is clear that supply delivery issues now need the same level of attention as vehicle safety and quality. What is really at the root of ongoing delivery…
Christopher Allan Smith
This series is about getting you through a catastrophe. The first three articles (see “All articles in this series”) were about preparing and responding to the world around you when it’s consumed by calamity. As our world here was. In this article, we deal with how to handle all the information,…
Christopher Allan Smith
I was a strange kid. Who knows where our fears come from? What I do know is Godzilla is somewhere near the core of one of my weirder fascinations. When I was four, I watched Godzilla vs. King Kong on TV with my father. It made a mark.
One part megalophobia, one part awesome nature, one part primal…
Duke University
Price discounts and other promotions on consumer goods can boost a product’s sales in the short term, but that same strategy may destroy a brand’s equity, according to research from Carl Mela, a marketing professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Brands often focus on the short-term…
Kimberly Merriman, David Greenway, Tamara Montag-Smit
As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers about remote work.
A good example of this is a recent op-ed written by the CEO of a Washington, D.C., magazine that suggested…
Joseph Near, David Darais
In previous articles we have explored what differential privacy is, how it works, and how to answer questions about data in ways that protect privacy. All of the algorithms we’ve discussed have been demonstrated via mathematical proof to be effective for protecting privacy. However, when…
Gleb Tsipursky
Quality professionals are often told that “failing to plan is planning to fail.” You might be surprised to learn that this phrase is a misleading myth at best and actively dangerous at worst. Making plans is important, but our gut reaction is to plan for the best-case outcomes, ignoring the high…
Ryan McKenna
To date, this series focused on relatively simple data analyses, such as learning one summary statistic about our data at a time. In reality, we’re often interested in a slightly more sophisticated analysis, so we can learn multiple trends and takeaways at once and paint a richer picture of our…
Arron Angle
Iwas talking to a friend recently, and the subject of organizational health came up. With my quality background my ears perked up, and I asked him to explain what he thought organizational health meant.
The friend went on for several minutes explaining that organizational health was all about six…
Christopher Allan Smith
This series is about planning for the worst that can face us.
It’s jumping-off point is the National Institute of Standards and Technology publication, “A Case Study of the Camp Fire—Fire Progression Timeline,” an epic and thorough study about the wildfire that changed the lives of my family,…
James Wells
I was talking recently with a friend who runs an academic program at a major U.S. university. She was telling me about solving a problem in her department and how the solution was obvious so she just did it. She then related how one of her colleagues protested that she should have used some Six…
