All Features
Jon Finerty
In today’s highly competitive business environment, a trusted supply chain that functions seamlessly is essential. Even small errors can affect the entire supply chain, resulting in lost revenue, unsatisfied customers, and irreparable damage to your brand.
Now more than ever, companies need the…
Stephanie Ojeda
Effective complaint handling is fundamental to life-sciences quality management, with implications for operations, product design, risk management, and more.
It’s also critical to ISO 9001, FDA Quality System Regulation (QSR), and EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR) compliance.
Manufacturers that…
Automated Precision Inc.
Siemens-Mobility’s factory in Graz, Austria, is a development center and manufacturing plant for high-tech bogies, an important component of the global rail vehicle industry. Whether bogies for streetcars, locomotives, passenger coaches, or high-speed multiple units, the Siemens Mobility World…
Ken Voytek
It’s time for U.S. manufacturers to focus on productivity or they will lose their long-term advantage. Productivity is fundamentally about increasing output rather than decreasing costs and inputs while output remains static. We faced this challenge during the 1980s and 1990s but didn’t learn much…
Mike Figliuolo
Twice in the last week I’ve heard about “idiot bosses.” Being the inquisitive guy I am, I probed for the root cause of such comments. Rather than simply asking what the cause is, I decided to address the symptoms first.
Q: “Tell me more about this idiot boss.”
A: “I’m so fed up with him. He’s…
InnovMetric Software
Pratt Miller was founded in 1989 by Gary Pratt and Jim Miller. Their aim was to create a world-class engineering company that could take automotive-based programs all the way from concept to reality. Since then, Pratt Miller has become a respected industry leader, providing automotive and…
Gleb Tsipursky
A new study from the University of Birmingham has found that managers have developed a more positive outlook on the benefits of hybrid work productivity since the Covid-19 pandemic. The research surveyed 597 managers and found that 51.8% of them agreed that working from home improves employee…
Evan Milberg
The year is 2033: The owner of a planned high-rise in a big city is looking to build prefabricated modules with recyclable, low-carbon materials. Work is expected to begin as soon as possible, so the contractor can’t afford to spend a great deal of time figuring out how much of each material will…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
As part of last year’s Masters Summit, hosted by the quality software specialists at MasterControl, Jeff Dewar, Quality Digest’s publisher, approached a few attendees for some candid comments. Since most people there were quality professionals of one sort or another, he cast a wide net and simply…
National Physical Laboratory
Graphene and related 2D materials (GR2Ms) could help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the production of advanced materials. Using GR2M nanoplatelets in applications, such as reinforcing concrete or improving battery performance, will require a dramatic increase in GR2M production. As production…
Anders Rasmussen
Enterprise resource planning (ERP), product life cycle management (PLM), and customer relationship management (CRM) systems were transformative when they were first developed. They made it possible for businesses to establish centralized data repositories for customer, product, or financial…
NIST
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have developed a novel tabletop device that takes three-dimensional X-ray (CT) images of integrated circuits. The highly detailed scans produced by the prototype device inspect the billions of electrical…
Aaron Heinrich, MetalForming
In metal stamping, especially in critical automotive applications, sometimes it’s not enough simply to close the control loop. Traditional control algorithms rely on eliminating an error between what is happening—as indicated by feedback from system sensors—and what should happen. High-speed motion…
Dave Gilson
Many people think of negotiation as a fight, but it’s really about collaboration, Margaret Neale explains to me as we begin our walk. “What negotiation is, to me, is joint problem-solving. Let’s find a solution to a problem that we’re facing.”
Right now, the problem Neale and I face is how to get…
Jeanne Quimby
As I sat with my 7-year-old son for more than an hour in front of an abstract painting, I saw what appeared to be black paint thrown onto a white canvas.
My son loves abstract paintings. He was explaining to me how much I was missing by just looking at the paint color. I hadn’t seen the energy…
Jennifer V. Miller
Many people think they can’t say no on the job. They tell me, “It’s just not acceptable.” They say it’s because they work in a “can do” culture. Or, they work for a boss who is pure evil. They’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t try to do everything humanly possible to bring in one more…
Harish Jose
I’m looking at a topic in statistics. I’ve had a lot of feedback on one of my earlier posts on OC curves and how one can use them to generate a reliability/confidence statement based on sample size (n), and rejects (c). I provided an Excel spreadsheet that calculates the reliability/confidence…
Martin Cottam
It’s tempting to attribute the increased profile now given to occupational health and safety (OH&S) to the Covid-19 pandemic. But while in many organizations the pandemic shone a spotlight on OH&S management, there are other issues that will keep OH&S at the fore throughout the next…
Emily Newton
It’s increasingly common for today’s warehouse managers to pursue robotic material-handling solutions. That approach can boost productivity, reduce injury rates, and enable companies to adjust to changing demands. However, before company decision-makers choose what kind of robots they want, they…
Scott Knoche
A very popular version of the coordinate measuring machine (CMM) is the portable CMM “arm,” not to be confused with the “robotic arm” or simply, robot—as it is called in the factory automation world. Robots are motorized, machine-driven devices that have tube segments connected by articulating…
Tami Trout
It’s time for a digital workforce transformation. Modern manufacturers must juggle evolving expectations for workplace flexibility, pay, career paths, and benefits. They also have to take into account the changes in the ways employees learn and access information. The most obvious example of this…
Mark Hembree
Now that AI is an acronym that doesn’t really need to be spelled out (artificial intelligence, just in case you’ve been off the planet the last couple of years), we are hearing and understanding more about its various applications and capabilities.
I’m not an early adapter, but I do recall midway…
Bryan Christiansen
Benjamin Franklin said, “... in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” If you work in maintenance, you know that equipment failure is also on that list.
As inevitable as equipment failures are, by paying close attention to mean time to recovery (MTTR), you can make…
Verdi Ogewell
Which product life cycle management systems lead the market in terms of discrete manufacturing? As always, this question is as topical as it is controversial—but that doesn’t stop industry analysts from trying to position these developers against each other.
One of the more prominent and ambitious…
Adam Zewe
Mass spectrometers are extremely precise chemical analyzers that have many applications, from evaluating the safety of drinking water to detecting toxins in a patient’s blood. But building an inexpensive, portable mass spectrometer that could be deployed in remote locations remains a challenge,…
