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Quality Digest
Annalise Suzuki, director of technology and engagement at software provider Elysium Inc., spoke to Quality Digest about the importance of model-based definitions (MBD) for data quality, validation, and engineering change management. With the increase of digital 3D models in the manufacturing…
Kelsey Rzepecki
As the global economy grows, it’s more necessary than ever to stay on top of efficiency. Keep up with increasing production demands by implementing a continuous improvement method to streamline the workflow.
Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, and processes.…
Jack Dunigan
The scene is a Russian chemical weapons facility. James Bond, 007, and his partner, Alec Treveleyan, 006, are on a mission of sabotage. As they enter the warehouse armed with explosives, senses on full alert, they turn to each other and say, “For England.”
In a scene from Thunderball, Bond has…
Ryan E. Day
As of the 2010 Census, there were 27.9 million small businesses registered in the United States. That’s a lot of competition. To thrive and grow in such a competitive environment, business owners must make wise decisions, commit to high-quality results, and take care of their customers and…
Ryan Pendell
Due to a tightening labor market and a competitive global economy, highly talented individuals have a lot of freedom in where they choose to work.
Pay isn’t the sole criteria that attracts and retains the best people. Employees want jobs that fit their lifestyle, give them opportunities to grow,…
Mark Schmit, Ken Voytek
Manufacturers throughout the United States are facing a new set of challenges and exciting growth opportunities. Given the manufacturing industry’s important role in providing both direct and indirect jobs, how firms react to these changing conditions is critical not only to the companies…
Aytekin Tank
A giant engine in a factory fails. Concerned, the factory owners call in technicians, who arrive with bulging toolkits. None of them can work out what the problem is. The issue persists.
One day, an old man shows up who’s been fixing engines his whole life. After inspecting it for a minute, he…
Bruce Hamilton
Last week I joined the New England Idea Generation Consortium (NEIGC) on a tour of the Stone Zoo where we had the opportunity to see how continuous improvement is expressed in an animal-care function.
In the open area for black bears, Senior Keeper Dayle Sullivan-Taylor explained to us the…
Kevin Meyer
Iam not really sure how it started, but one day a couple months ago, I found myself diving down an internet rabbit hole in search of more information on a guy named Alfred Adler. Adler was an Austrian psychotherapist in the early 1900s who, although a good friend of Sigmund Freud, developed a…
Jody Muelaner
In this article I will show that the conventional method for calculating uncertainty is not always reliable. In fact, it is generally only exact when the measurement can be represented by a simple linear equation and the input uncertainties are all normally distributed. Whenever the measurement is…
Minitab LLC
Machine learning as a tool in your analytical toolkit can help accelerate the discovery of insights in data that can create a more efficient manufacturing process and drive innovation.
Machine learning in the spotlight
The growth in availability of technologies that give us the ability to monitor,…
Davis Balestracci
I always enjoy my fellow columnist Arun Hariharan’s musings. He has worked in the field of quality for more than 30 years and, like me, has obtained reasonable results. But he has also made his share of the inevitable growing-pain mistakes—lessons we both had to learn the hard way in an environment…
Wudan Yan, Knowable Magazine
Nearly every month, it seems, comes a new report. In March 2018, there was news of contaminated romaine lettuce, which eventually led to five deaths and sickened more than 200 people across the United States and Canada. In May 2018, about 100 people in California got sick after eating raw oysters…
U.S. Department of Education
In June 2017, President Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Expanding Apprenticeships in America.” It calls for the creation of a special task force to identify strategies and proposals to promote apprenticeships in the United States. To meet this challenge, Department of Labor Secretary Alex…
Steven Brand
Each year, billions in funding for research and development as well as workforce initiatives is available for small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) to help them get off the ground or aid in expansion efforts. Here are eight organizations that can help your business flourish in today’s…
Caroline Preston
The high school students clustered around a 4 ft-tall red robot with long arms and cartoonish eyes. A so-called collaborative robot, programmed to work with humans at Prent Corp., a packaging company, it looked cute, not intimidating.
But on this annual Manufacturing Day, which during the last few…
3D Systems
In today’s hypercompetitive environment, companies can’t afford to lag behind when it comes to the quality of their products—or the tools and technologies they use to ensure them. During the past two decades, 3D scanning has become an essential component of many companies’ quality control…
NIST
The U.S. Department of Commerce announced that the 2018 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award will be given to two educational institutions, an organ donor group, a hospital, and a project management firm. A presidential-level honor, the award recognizes exemplary U.S. organizations and…
Annette Franz
I’ve written previously about 11 myths and mistakes about journey mapping, but I should add one more myth, which is really the umbrella myth that likely encompasses all the others: Journey mapping is just a tool.
Nope, it’s not just a tool; it’s not just a workshop: It’s a process. Journey mapping…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In this episode we look at lessons learned (or not) from GE, the difference between ISO and FDA “requirements,” and this year's Baldridge recipients.
“GE’s Lessons Won’t Determine Whether You Succeed or Fail”
Does the success or failure of GE’s CEO really matter that much when it comes to how most…
Nicole Radziwill
Even though most businesses have invested in quality management and performance improvement, each organization is unique. People, processes, and machines must be coordinated to achieve desired outcomes. This is not easy.
Whether you’re in discrete manufacturing, a process industry, or a service…
Eric Stoop
The frequently referenced learning pyramid asserts than an average student retains 75 percent of information learned through practice, compared to just 5 percent of what he hears in a lecture. Although experts may dispute the relevance of these figures when applied to modern society, all of us can…
Devshree Golecha
In this era of artificial intelligence, where bots can mimic human minds and outperform humans, a new-age process automation tool called “robotic process automation” (RPA) has been creating a lot of buzz. It is highly versatile and can be used by every industry to streamline and optimize their…
Paul Foster
Next to defining a problem accurately, root cause analysis is one of the most important elements of problem-solving in quality management. That’s because if you’re not aiming at the right target, you’ll never be able to eliminate the real problem that’s hurting quality.
So which type of root cause…
Minitab LLC
Process validation is vital to the success of companies that manufacture pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, test kits, and a variety of other biological products for people and animals. According to FDA guidelines, process validation is “the collection and evaluation of data, from the process design…
