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(TÜV SÜD America: Plymouth, MI) -- TÜV SÜD Americas, a business-to-business engineering services firm providing international safety testing and certification services, has expanded its automotive electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) laboratory in Plymouth, Michigan, by opening an additional 3-m (9…
(Navitar: Rochester, New York) -- Navitar Inc., a developer and manufacturer of standard and custom-engineered optical solutions, has introduced a versatile, dual-view imaging system that allows customers to simultaneously view a single subject and capture an image at multiple fields of view.
For…
(UL: Los Angeles) -- UL Responsible Sourcing of Underwriter Laboratories (UL), a global provider of corporate responsibility auditing and ethical sourcing consulting services, has introduced its corrective and preventive action (CAPA) system to help manage and track improvements in manufacturing…
Have you noticed that sometimes it’s better to be a new customer or subscriber than a long-time devotee of a particular company? Every day you see ads and hear commercials about discounts or free memberships or extended warranties for new customers. Some gyms waive the initiation fee, magazines…
Some years back while working in an administrative department, I encountered a curious condition. Along with about a half-dozen employees, I was following the information flow from sales order to shipping. Our spaghetti diagram kept looping back to an in-box on a table just outside John’s door. It…
For Tim Gutowski, advanced manufacturing is an opportunity not just to boost employment, but also to improve the environment.
Gutowski heads MIT’s Environmentally Benign Manufacturing research group, which looks at the environmental cost and impact associated with manufacturing traditional…
(ANSI: New York) -- During the last 24 months, U.S. businesses have created more than 3.9 million jobs, indicating that the economy is continuing a steady course of recovery. And yet, growing industries are reporting difficulty in finding appropriately skilled professionals, particularly in the…
(API: Rockland, MD) -- Earlier this month, API Services announced its acquisition of R&C Service Solutions Inc., a full-service, machine-tool support service company located in Arizona. R&C is now operating as API Services: Southwest Division.
API Services President Ronald S. Hicks…
(Newport: Bozeman, MT) -- ILX Lightwave, a Newport Corp. brand, announces the addition of LDT-5940C Thermoelectric Temperature Controller to its portfolio of thermoelectric temperature controllers designed for testing of laser diodes and other optoelectronic devices. The LDT-5940C features 60 watts…
(AICON: Braunschweig, Germany) -- The newly developed software platform BendingStudio has been introduced by AICON. BendingStudio connects all data and processes around the production of bended parts, from production process planning to manufacturing to quality control. It is the only tool to meet…
(AQSENSE: Girona, Spain) -- AQSENSE, developer of 3-D machine vision technologies has a 3-D Shape Analysis Library, SAL3D, a library for cloud-points acquisition and manipulation, which now supports the SR4000, the leading line 3-D time-of-flight cameras from Mesa Imaging, the Switzerland-based…
(Mettler-Toledo: Greifensee, Switzerland) -- Mettler-Toledo has announced an upcoming free webinar with special guest presenter Dr. Roy Helmy, global lead for analytical chemistry at Merck. The webinar, titled “What’s the Matter with Sample Prep?” will highlight the issues of sample and standard…
(Productivity Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- Instead of building new hospitals that import old systems and problems, the time has come to reexamine many of our ideas about what a hospital should be. Can a building foster continuous improvement? How can we design it to be flexible and useful well into…
In work, as in life, we learn from trial and error: I was having Problem A, so I implemented Solution A, and it didn’t work. Then I tried Solution B and it did. Next time I’ll know to use Solution B first thing.
And that’s how it goes, over and over again, throughout your career. Forty years or so…
I will not be accused of burying the lead here, and say right up front: Your value stream is wrong. And it always will be. This is a good thing because as we work from day to day, the steps we take to complete our work can subtly or even violently change. When we move from home to work to a special…
Is customer service a lost art, or are today’s customers harder to please?
On the one hand, moments of tear-your-hair-out frustration are commonplace—from shopping in stores where sales associates are nowhere to be found, to dealing with salespeople unable to help locate a sought-after item, to…
Is it possible to apply the principle of first time right (FTR) in a sales context? This two-part article looks at what happens when companies do just that. Part one defined FTR in sales, and outlined some of the obvious advantages. Part two looks at FTR in sales’ effect on revenue, profits, and…
First time right (FTR), or doing things right the first time, is an important concept in quality. Some experts even consider FTR the very definition of quality. This two-part article summarizes an experiment in which FTR was applied to sales. Is it possible to sell something right the first time?…
(ThedaCare: Appleton, WI) — John S. Toussaint, M.D., and Roger A. Gerard, Ph.D., have earned the prestigious Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award for their book, On the Mend: Revolutionizing Healthcare to Save Lives and Transform the Industry (Lean Enterprise Institute Inc., 2010).…
(General Tools: New York) -- The new series of USB Humidity and Temperature Data Loggers (HT10/20/50) from General Tools & Instruments (General) makes long-term, unattended monitoring of myriad environments easier and less costly. Each unit in General’s HT Series enables users to keep an eye on…
(USON: Houston) Quality engineers can now obtain the USON Pressure Decay Leak Test Calculator—the first in a family of automated Uson NDT Test Calculators—to generate nearly instantaneous answers to “what if” modeling of pressure-decay leak testing variables and exact returns on investment from new…
(Xcentric: Chesterfield, MI) -- Xcentric Mold and Engineering Inc., a leader in custom plastic-injection molding, has launched the company’s proprietary Process Engine, which delivers quality, reliability, and repeatability for companies looking to cost-effectively manufacture products in the…
Top executives in Europe and the U.S. say global political and economic risk, and government regulation are their most pressing concerns, while Asian CEOs name innovation as their top challenge, closely followed by human capital—attracting, retaining, and rewarding talent. So finds The Conference…
(AIA: Ann Arbor, MI) -- The Vision Show, North America’s largest vision and imaging trade show and conference, will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, at the Hynes Convention Center, May 8-10, 2012. AIA, the world’s largest trade association promoting vision and imaging industries, founded The…
(Productivity Press: Boca Raton, FL) -- How do you take talented engineers and surround them with the elements needed to create brilliant designs that lead to market-changing products? A lean production preparation process (3P) is how.
Written from an operations perspective, The Lean 3P Advantage…
