All Features
Ryan E. Day
It’s no secret that manufacturing companies operate in an inherently unstable environment. Every operational weakness poses a risk to efficiency, quality, and ultimately, to profitability. All too often, it takes a crisis—like Covid-19 shutdowns—to reveal operational weaknesses that have been…
Eric Weisbrod
For nearly a century, statistical process control (SPC) has been the cornerstone of quality management and process control. But traditional SPC can’t keep up as the pace of manufacturing accelerates. Twenty-first century manufacturing lines produce multiple products and create thousands of data…
Steve Wise
Quality data are the heart and soul of statistical process control (SPC), the industry standard methodology for measuring and controlling quality in manufacturing processes. Asking manufacturers to give up data is like asking them to give up water. It’s just something that is necessary for their…
Mary Rowzee
During the first six months after the publication of its first edition in June 2019, the AIAG & VDA FMEA Handbook gained popularity in the global automotive industry. Both U.S. and European OEMs have started to require the AIAG VDA approach to failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) in their…
M. Tina Dacin, Laura Rees
A small business has been given the green light to reopen amid the Covid-19 pandemic. What does it need to consider for employees and customers?
Small-business owners are reorganizing physical space to account for continued distancing requirements, and rethinking supply chains to deliver products…
Mariah Hauck
The latest Thomas Industrial Survey revealed the ongoing impacts of Covid-19 on North American manufacturing. Unsurprisingly, 89 percent of the 1,000+ North American manufacturers surveyed reported being affected by Covid-19. Business impacts include decreased demand, staffing issues, and…
Jim Benson
Stop asking, “Which tool should I use?” and start asking, “How can I work smarter?”
When I was a young coder, I asked my mother, “What will I be?” Will I be Jira, Will I be Asana? Here’s what she said to me....“Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. Your app is not a ticket to be free. Que…
Jessica Reiner
For more than 20 years, a class of man-made, potentially cancer-causing chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has commonly been found in humans and the environment. These chemicals are used in a variety of industries and can be found in many consumer products, such as food…
Jeff Dewar
‘We shouldn’t be calling some jobs essential.”
That line got me into a lot of trouble the other day when chatting with friends about how the term “essential worker” degrades the stature of all the “nonessentials,” when, in fact, we all play an essential role in the millions of supply chains across…
Puerto Rico Manufacturing Extension
El-Com Systems Corp. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of El-COM Systems Solutions based in California. The local company has been in Puerto Rico since 2016 operating in Caguas. The company is dedicated to manufacturing complex electromechanical subsystems and assemblies for the global aerospace and…
Dawn Bailey
In this article series, we explain some of the successful strategies and programs shared by Baldrige Award recipients to highlight categories of the Baldrige Criteria and how your organization might consider using them as inspiration.
Part of the purpose of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality…
Vandana Suresh
Plastics are a popular 3D printing material, allowing users to create a variety of objects, from simple toys to custom prosthetic parts. But these printed parts are mechanically weak—a flaw caused by the imperfect bonding between the individual printed layers that make up the 3D part.
Now,…
Davis Balestracci
What is the Vasa? It was a Swedish warship built in 1628. It was supposed to be the grandest, largest, and most powerful warship of its time. King Gustavus Adolphus himself took a keen personal interest and insisted on an entire extra deck above the waterline to add to the majesty and comfort of…
Dave Cook
We are experiencing the biggest remote-work experiment in history—but many are beginning to imagine life after lockdown. Amid unprecedented global job losses, concerns about transport infrastructure, and the continuing need for workplace social distancing, governments are launching back-to-work…
John Smits, Gary Confalone, Tom Kinnare
Confusion between the two terms “RADAR” and “LIDAR” is understandable. Their names are nearly synonymous, and the terms are often used interchangeably. The acronyms are RADAR, which stands for RAdio Detection And Ranging; and LIDAR, which stands for LIght Detection And Ranging. The major difference…
Mary Ann Pacelli
Last year’s Manufacturing Day (MFG Day) was an enormous success for U.S. manufacturers looking to engage the next generation of manufacturers. But how can you ensure the spark you kindled in the next generation finds fuel? Now more than ever, it’s critical to inform students and potential young…
Anne Trafton
When MIT announced in March 2020 that most research labs on campus would need to ramp down to help prevent the spread of Covid-19, Canan Dagdeviren’s lab was ready.
For the past two years, Dagdeviren and her lab manager, David Sadat, have run the Conformable Decoders Group using “lean lab”…
Ryan E. Day
The Covid-19 pandemic is disrupting business across the globe, and supply chains are being stressed to their limits by sudden and drastic increases in online commerce. As organizations strive to continue delivering physical product, the industrial internet of things (IIoT) is being considered as a…
Jim Benson
I hear this lament from new practitioners to seasoned veterans: Why isn’t our (insert school of workflow management here) transformation working?
Time and again I see coaches focus on the “deficiencies” of their clients or their companies. If only they would just focus! They don’t do what they say…
Hari Abburi
If there’s one thing the global business community is learning from the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s the outright imperative for companies to be agile “from top to bottom.” This lesson continues to ebb, flow, and unfold daily, wreaking having on bottom lines in every corner of the world.
In fact,…
Brian Lagas
When most people think of lean processes, they believe the goal is to optimize things in a step-by-step approach. The result that companies using lean methods can look forward to is incremental improvements brought about by the elimination of waste.
Individuals who stick with this definition often…
NIST
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a novel, accurate, easy-to-operate, time- and labor-saving way to provide calibrated scale-bar standards for testing the performance of terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) systems.
TLS technology is widely employed to…
Carrie Van Daele
Crossing the street or stepping backward when you encounter another person has already become a habit, as has a routine elbow bump, instead of a handshake.
And that is definitely what is needed during a health crisis. But when the time is right, as a society we must bounce back to social…
Corey Brown
Many industrial businesses have heard of the dangers of relying on tribal knowledge. But what exactly does tribal knowledge mean? How does tribal knowledge impact an organization? How do you capture tribal knowledge?
Organizations spend substantial time and resources developing the knowledge and…
Gleb Tsipursky
So many companies are shifting their employees to working from home to address the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Yet they’re not considering the potential quality disasters that can occur as a result of this transition.
An example of this is what one of my coaching clients experienced more than a…
