All Features
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News.
For small healthcare groups like dentist’s offices, one sick staff member can mean a day’s worth of cancelled appointments. Such offices can either continue short-staffed, which could negatively affect patient care, or reschedule appointments,…
Bryan Christiansen
Testing is an integral part of equipment maintenance. It must be carried out to evaluate the materials, components, design, or structure of mechanical components. Based on the state of the tested component after the testing is done, the procedures used can be classified under destructive testing or…
Harry Powell
In previous posts I’ve shared resources to help you educate your leaders in data literacy, but beyond knowledge, this also requires thinking differently. We need to get thinking about our thinking.
Helping leaders get their heads around thinking styles can be a challenge. Many of us spend most of…
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
If the cascading upheavals of the past year have done nothing else, they’ve spurred widespread calls for reform and renewal in just about every institution we have.
A mishandled public-health response to the Covid-19 pandemic, an economic…
Emily Newton
Nitrogen oxides (NOx) are harmful chemical compounds produced as a byproduct of normal boiler function. The EPA regulates them due to the damage they can cause to humans and the environment.
Low-NOx boilers, outfitted with special components that reduce nitrogen oxides, are essential for…
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…
Eliot Dratch
If your manufacturing company develops a problem along the way with one of your processes, how do you resolve it? While the shortcut option is to simply patch up the symptoms of whatever that problem may be, the long-term solution is to perform a root cause and corrective action (RCCA) process.
By…
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…
Dave Pierson
I’ve heard additive manufacturing is key to driving innovation in our industry, but how does it really deliver value? We’ve looked at some additive manufacturing machines, but how can we justify the expense when we’re trying to eliminate our capital expenditures? Is additive manufacturing worth the…
Sébastien Breteau
Major global events of the past five years have sparked seismic shock waves in global supply chains, relocating where businesses manufacture and source their products. Whether facing rising labor costs in China, new tariffs in the U.S.-China trade war, or cataclysmic shutdowns amid the Covid-19…
ISO
There’s more than one path to service management. It refers to all the activities, policies, and processes that organizations use for deploying, managing, and improving IT service provision. In today’s technology-driven corporate landscape, the two leading methodologies come from the world of…
Corey Brown
Amid the Silver Tsunami, human resources departments are hustling to onboard and fill personnel gaps, but they can’t predict the evolving demands of your operations.
Manufacturing companies are failing to adapt their operational training strategy to meet the needs of a workforce in transition. Put…
Jim Benson
Value stream mapping is a team exercise, it’s collaborative, enlightening, and the foundation for professionalism.
I’m pretty well-known for saying that teams are unique and that there is no one process that satisfies every team’s needs. There is, however, one activity that I’ve seen every team we…
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.…
Gary Lyng
To uncover the value in data, analysts need powerful combinations of tools to locate data, wherever they are, and regardless if they are structured or unstructured. Most companies don’t realize that their current data-search approaches can’t access distributed information and can’t extract…
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…
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Many scientists and researchers still rely on Excel spreadsheets and lab notebooks to manage data from their experiments. That can work for single experiments, but companies tend to make decisions based on data from multiple experiments, some of…
Hari Polu
Manufacturers of high-end semiconductor electronic products used in consumer, industrial, and military applications have long relied on precise testing methodologies to identify the location of defects such as voids, cracks, and the delamination of different layers within a microelectronic device,…
Knowledge at Wharton
Considered one of the most successful organizational learning methods, the after-action review (AAR) was developed by the U.S. Army during the 1970s to help its soldiers learn from both their mistakes and achievements. Since then, many companies have used the AAR for performance assessment. And yet…
Jerry Foster
Manufacturers are acutely aware that audits and recalls are just part of business. At the same time, they all agree that the best way to deal with recalls is to prevent them in the first place. Because today’s manufacturers operate on razor-thin margins with little room for error, a reactionary…
Dylan Walsh
Supply chains are having a moment. In March 2021, one of the world’s largest container ships got wedged in the Suez Canal, blocking 10 percent of global trade for a few days and launching a flotilla of memes. Currently, home builders are waiting for more lumber, while a shortage of computer chips…
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…
Ryan E. Day
With the migration to remote and hybrid work during the last year, cyberattacks have increased at a rate of three to five times compared to pre-Covid. No big surprise that, for many businesses, virtual private newtworks (VPNs) have become standard operating procedure for security. But is VPN’s…
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…
Emily Newton
Effective equipment testing is essential for manufacturers of industrial equipment and end-users. Without testing, defects and damage can shorten the life span of equipment, cause unplanned downtime, and reduce the quality of finished goods.
This is especially true for businesses in sectors like…
