All Features
Christopher Allan Smith
By 6:25 a.m., my fate was sealed.
That morning, 10 miles from my front door in Paradise, California, a poorly maintained power line owned by Pacific Gas & Electric arced, dropping molten metal into the brush at its base and starting a fire.
At the time, I was rousing myself and my high-school-…
Don Cox
Despite the high ratio of intelligent work-from-home (WFH) business professionals, the current cybersecurity landscape for that work model could best be described as disorganized and dysfunctional. Hackers have been busy exploiting these cyber risks, as evidenced from the reported 300-percent…
Barbara Cuthill
The internet of things (IoT) offers many attractions for small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) that may want to integrate IoT into their facilities and operations, or who seek to enter the IoT market with innovative products. However, when venturing into the IoT waters, it’s helpful to be…
David Darais, Joseph Near
In our last article, we discussed how to determine how many people drink pumpkin spice lattes in a given time period without learning their identifying information. But say, for example, you would like to know the total amount spent on pumpkin spice lattes this year, or the average price of a…
Jon Speer
The medical device technical file is a must-have document for devices to be sold in the European Union (EU) marketplace. The file contains detailed information about your medical device, its design, intended use claims, composition, and clinical evaluations. It’s essentially an “everything you must…
Chip Bell
Iam often asked by customer service leaders how to get the CEO to care about customers. They are convinced there is a missed tactic that, if implemented, would have the C-suite camping out in the contact center and inviting customers to board meetings. When I outline a number of possible approaches…
David Darais, Joseph Near
How many people drink pumpkin spice lattes in October, and how would you calculate this without learning specifically who is drinking them, and who is not?
Although they seem simple or trivial, counting queries are used extremely often. Counting queries such as histograms can express many useful…
Graham Freeman
Here’s an unfortunate truth: The story of the Covid-19 pandemic is one of epic quality failures in almost every area imaginable. Although there have been some admirable successes, such as the food and beverage organizations that have ensured the continued safe delivery of food supplies to most…
Bob Holmes, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Most of us won’t soon forget that disconcerting moment last spring when grocery store shelves were suddenly bare where the flour, pasta, and other staples should have been. The news told of farmers dumping milk—nearly four million gallons a…
Rita Men
Ending the pandemic depends on achieving herd immunity, estimated at 70 percent or even 80 percent to 90 percent of a population. With some 30 percent of Americans telling pollsters they have no interest in getting vaccinated, that’s cutting it a bit close. The numbers are even worse in many other…
Del Williams
On conveyor systems in the food processing industry, some powdered and bulk solid materials such as grains, sugar, and creamer are ignition-sensitive in specific concentrations, particularly when exposed to static electricity discharge. Key concerns are conveyor-system connection points such as…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Quality professionals no longer focus solely on product or service quality. Today, the quality function is involved in almost every aspect of a company, from customer interactions and compliance management to environmental health and safety, supply chain management, risk management, and more.
A…
Joseph Near, David Darais
It’s not so simple to deploy a practical system that satisfies differential privacy. Our example in the last post was a simple Python program that adds Laplace noise to a function computed over the sensitive data. For this to work in practice, we’d need to collect all the sensitive data on one…
Michael Mallen
The concept of cost of quality (COQ) has been around for decades, but applying it to business is difficult. The adage “quality is free” (coined by Philip B. Cosby in his book by the same title) does not simply mean that you don’t have to pay for it. It means that you are likely already paying to…
Sharona Hoffman
Artificial intelligence holds great promise for improving human health by helping doctors make accurate diagnoses and treatment decisions. It can also lead to discrimination that can harm minorities, women, and economically disadvantaged people.
The question is, when healthcare algorithms…
Michael P. Powell
The promise of advanced manufacturing technologies—also known as smart factories or Industry 4.0—is that by networking our machines, computers, sensors, and systems, we will (among other things) enable automation, improve safety, and ultimately become more productive and efficient. And there is no…
Manfred Kets de Vries
Serge faced a conundrum. One of his business partners was in a legal dispute with Serge’s father, Charlie, and asked for his help. Serge knew that his father was prone to suing everyone who crossed his path—including family members. The business partner had repeatedly tried to end this legal fight…
Tinglong Dai, Christopher Tang, Ho-Yin Mak
More than 50 million Americans have received at least one dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. So far, Americans have been largely brand-agnostic, but that’s about to change as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine rolls out.
The vaccine has been hailed as a game changer. It requires…
Joseph Near, David Darais, Kaitlin Boeckl
Does your organization want to aggregate and analyze data to learn trends, but in a way that protects privacy? Or perhaps you are already using differential privacy tools, but want to expand (or share) your knowledge? In either case, NIST’s blog series on differential privacy is for you.
Why are…
Theodore Kinni
There is no shortage of advice regarding the art and craft of business strategy. Yet, in 2019, when the consulting firm Strategy& surveyed 6,000 executives, only 37 percent said their companies had well-defined strategies, and only 35 percent believed that their strategies would lead to success…
Sébastien Breteau
It’s been about one year since the Covid-19 impact intensified from a seemingly isolated health scare to a worldwide, ubiquitous tragedy that has upended daily life as we know it. Ever since consumers first faced widespread product shortages of essential items during the early days of the pandemic…
Nate Burke
Undeniably, the power of data is unmatched. With an abundance of data collection opportunities available online, and with an increasing number of businesses taking them, the potential and value of such information is richer than ever before. And businesses are benefiting.
Particularly where data…
Mark Schmit
During the Sept. 18, 2020, session of the “National Conversation with Manufacturers,” our three West Coast manufacturing leaders on the panel kept coming back to their critical need for skilled workers.
The conversation was one in a series of 11 virtual listening sessions hosted by the National…
Lucca Henrion, Duo Zhang, Victor Li, Volker Sick
One of the big contributors to climate change is right beneath your feet, and transforming it could be a powerful solution for keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
The production of cement, the binding element in concrete, accounted for 7 percent of total global carbon dioxide emissions…
James Wells
When is a product “good enough” to accept? This is the classic challenge of quality. High customer expectations demand that suspect products be thoroughly scrutinized and a high standard set for their release. Customers expect this, and quality staff strive to achieve it.
The other side of the tug…
