All Features
Ayush Soni
Audits and inspections are critical components of industrial safety management. These processes help organizations ensure compliance with legal requirements, identify risks, and improve workplace safety and operational efficiencies. Conducting regular audits and inspections is not just a regulatory…
NIST
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a new thermometer using atoms boosted to such high energy levels that they are 1,000 times larger than normal. By monitoring how these giant “Rydberg” atoms interact with heat in their environment, researchers can…
Steven Garner
In the ever-changing landscape of business management, the concept of quality has undergone significant transformations. What began as a focus on maintaining standards such as ISO 9001 and AS9100 is evolving into a more holistic approach encompassing organizational excellence. Tom Taormina’s book…
Theodore Kinni
There’s an old saw—cribbed from Plato and popularized by Douglas Adams—that those most interested in leading others are least suited to the task. That’s not entirely accurate, yet new research has found a grain of truth in this idea: Many leaders have plenty of ambition to lead, but that’s no…
Gleb Tsipursky
The pandemic forced leaders to reconcile with the need for effective hybrid and remote team management strategies, including performance evaluations. Research has shown the benefits of moving away from large-scale quarterly or annual performance reviews. Instead, successful organizations favor…
Cindy Mielke
Businesses today have more options than ever before regarding where and how they recruit new talent. Thanks to new technologies and a general shift in working cultures, organizations can now access a much wider talent pool when hiring full-time remote employees.
However, with this added hiring…
Sabine Terrasi
It creates a warm and inviting atmosphere. Its natural grain and color tones have a lively effect and add character to a room. We are talking about classic wood flooring—usually laminate, and optionally with a click system for easy installation.
Scheucher Holzindustrie GmbH, from Mettersdorf,…
Angie Basiouny
Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli is routinely asked to predict the future of work. His expert answer is always the same: “The future looks like the past.”
He’s not trying to be cryptic. It’s just that the big changes ushered in by the pandemic five years ago are still unfolding—remote…
Stephanie Ojeda
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s inspections and subsequent actions all come down to product quality. Quality system failures result in noncompliances that FDA inspectors target during their inspections. If there is any doubt that a manufacturer’s product is safe and effective, it is the…
Akhilesh Gulati
Paul was sitting in his office staring at production numbers from the past quarter. Despite having a great team, strong customer demand, and state-of-the-art equipment, the factory’s performance wasn’t meeting expectations. There was a bottleneck in the assembly line—a critical chokepoint that was…
Anne Trafton
For many industrial processes, the typical way to separate gases, liquids, or ions is with heat, using slight differences in boiling points to purify mixtures. These thermal processes account for roughly 10% of the energy use in the United States.
MIT chemical engineer Zachary Smith wants to…
Stephanie Ojeda
In April 2018, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first artificial intelligence-powered diagnostic system, a software program used to detect diabetes-related vision loss.
Since then, the industry has seen explosive growth of AI in medical device manufacturing, which is…
Mike Figliuolo
For me, the future is all about learning and teaching. Learning new ideas or disciplines fascinates me. Interconnecting those experiences and disciplines and creating new ideas to share with others through teaching is even more exciting. And the more I teach, the more I learn from my class…
Brian Hughes
We live in a world where problems aren’t just growing—they’re evolving into ever-more complex challenges. During the 20th century, we pushed the boundaries of innovation, creating complicated systems that demanded structured problem-solving approaches. Techniques like 5 Whys and the Ishikawa…
Ariana Tantillo
On June 18, 2023, the Titan submersible was about 90 minutes into its two-hour descent to the Titanic wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean when it lost contact with its support ship. This break in communication set off a frantic search for the tourist submersible and five passengers on…
Akhilesh Gulati
In the world of operations and quality management, the pressure to act quickly can feel overwhelming. Senior executives are constantly racing against time to meet customer demands, solve problems, and keep shareholders satisfied. In the rush to address immediate challenges, “Ready, aim, fire!” gets…
Gleb Tsipursky
In the rapidly evolving business landscape, the momentum toward policies mandating a return to the office (RTO) is gaining traction. However, this shift risks overlooking critical segments of the workforce, particularly older employees, individuals with disabilities, and women, whose participation…
William A. Levinson
Recent labor relations controversies and ongoing arguments about the minimum wage have raised questions as to how a supply chain should share the utility it produces.
If we ask the wrong question, however, we’ll get the wrong answer. “What is a fair share?” asks how a supply chain should divide a…
Malcolm Chisholm
Data are the fuel of the Information Age, and all organizations acknowledge the value of well-managed corporate data assets. The problems start when we begin to ask just exactly how the data assets are to be well managed.
In response, many organizations have put data governance departments in…
Harry Hertz
A recent Inc.com blog post by Jessica Stillman discusses Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point (Little, Brown and Co., 2024). The theme in both works is that you can’t create a high-performing team simply by bringing together individual high performers. They need to gel as a…
Jennifer Chu
The electronics industry is approaching a limit to the number of transistors that can be packed onto the surface of a computer chip. So chip manufacturers are looking to build up, rather than out.
Instead of squeezing ever-smaller transistors onto a single surface, the industry is aiming to stack…
Ben P. Stein
NIST is unique as the national measurement science institute. We are the U.S. agency responsible for maintaining measurement standards, from the second to the kilogram.
We help ensure that these units of measure are consistent across our watches and our grocery scales. But this isn’t as…
Mike Figliuolo
Every day there’s a new pile of “experts” cropping up on every subject imaginable. The key to differentiating genuine experts from frauds is to ask the right questions.
Warning: This post is a bit of a rant (but it does have a story and some practical advice). How many new experts are there today…
Gleb Tsipursky
In today’s rapidly changing business environment, a subtle yet profound shift is taking place in office dynamics, particularly as we welcome back teams that have been dispersed by the necessity of remote work.
Managers find themselves at the helm of this transformation, charged with the critical…
Prashant Kondle
Unplanned equipment downtime costs manufacturers an estimated $50 billion annually, according to a study by Deloitte. It is estimated that unplanned downtime costs more than $100,000 per hour. Traditional maintenance approaches—whether reactive or scheduled—are not sufficient to address these…
