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The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
I carefully filled the cake cone from the frozen custard machine, pushing it up at just the right moment to create a perfect ball. Then as I shut off the machine, I pulled the cone away with a circular motion to give it the company’s signature curl on top. It was beautiful, and I was proud of the…
Right now, scientists all over the world are trying to understand how we get injured when our bodies are subjected to strong, dynamic loads—a hard body-check on the hockey rink, a tackle on the football field, a car crash, or even a bomb blast. Fortunately, I haven’t had any experience with bomb…
Harish Jose
There is a concept in lean known as a “monument.” It refers to a large machine, piece of equipment, or something similar that can’t be changed right away, and so you have to plan your processes around it. This generally impedes the flow and frequently becomes a hindrance to lean initiatives. A…
Davis Balestracci
Today I want to concentrate on the foundation of what is most commonly taught as design of experiments (DOE)—factorial designs.
Elsewhere I’ve mentioned three of C.M. Hendrix’s “ways to mess up an experiment.” After 35 years of teaching DOE, I’ve concluded that he pretty much captures the…
Jonathan Jacobi
When I first entered the safety profession, older, more experienced professionals recommended that I consider OSHA as a potential employer. The innuendo I sensed in this advice was that if I worked for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), got to know influential people, and…
Tab Wilkins
Recently there have been several successful public launches of reusable space vehicles by SpaceX and Blue Origin. This prompted me to ask: What is the future of space activity and travel, and what opportunity, if any, does this potentially have for manufacturing in the United States?
Current…
Jarred Heigel
I research additive manufacturing, which some people call solid free-form fabrication, but most people know as 3D printing. Additive manufacturing covers a wide range of processes that we can use to build parts and whole structures by strategically adding material only where we need it.
Building…
Erika Darics
Poking fun at corporate jargon is a current trend. Newspapers and online publications get a kick out of compiling extensive lists of the most egregious examples, and the overarching narrative is that we should puncture the pomposity that this “management speak” is deemed to represent.
To its…
Day in, day out, business leaders are reminded that digital disruption is coming for their customers, for their talent, and for their bottom lines. CEOs of traditional companies consistently rate digital upstarts disrupting their business models as their No. 1 concern.
And it’s no wonder. We’re…
ISO
The global food industry has never faced more challenges. From tainted dairy products to contaminated beef, high-profile cases crop up regularly to dent consumer confidence, while leading companies work hard to reclaim lost faith. So how trustworthy is your food?
Food safety is something we tend…
Patrick Runkel
It’s been called a “demographic watershed.” During the next 15 years alone, the worldwide population of individuals aged 65 and older is projected to increase more than 60 percent, from 617 million to about 1 billion, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report.
Increasingly, countries are asking…
NIST
A high-tech version of an old-fashioned balance scale at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has just brought scientists a critical step closer toward a new and improved definition of the kilogram. The scale, called the NIST-4 watt balance, has conducted its first measurement…
Loic Sadoulet, Thomas Hinterseer
It’s a tragic irony that the day before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster, executives from BP and the rig’s operators, Transocean, visited the platform on a “management tour” that included a number of specific safety-related purposes.
During the tour, there were already signs that all…
Dan Jacob
A few years ago, I was working with a high-tech company that had built market leadership around world-class product quality, then lost it. Several years prior, the company had gone through a cost-cutting exercise. One outcome of the exercise was a decision to outsource engineering on core products…
Bruce Hamilton
I wrote a piece a little more than five years ago about a variety reduction program (VRP), an amazing but little-known product-design optimization tool. At the time I referred to VRP as an idea whose “time had not yet come.” Last week, as I gave a short presentation on VRP, I realized that five…
Donald J. Wheeler
Story update 10/9/2023: This article is a corrected version. The earlier version suffered from a programming error that affected all of the PID results.
Many articles and some textbooks describe process behavior charts as a manual technique for keeping a process on target. For example, in Norway…
Frank Townsend
World shipping changed forever when the Panama Canal opened on Aug. 15, 1914. It was an engineering marvel of its day, cutting the distance required to get from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic by as much as 8,000 nautical miles.
The shipping industry is changing once again as 70 heads of state…
Gillian Groom
You often hear the data being blamed when an analysis does not deliver the expected answers. I was recently reminded that the data chosen or collected for a specific analysis is determined by the analyst, so there is no such thing as bad data—only bad analysis.
This made me think about the steps…
Henry Zumbrun
There has been some misunderstanding about the intent of ASTM E74—“Standard practice of calibration of force-measuring instruments for verifying the force indication of testing machines.” When it was written back in 1974, the standard’s intent was to establish calibration traceability back to…
Sam Manzello
I’m a dragon wrangler. Although that might sound like something straight out of Harry Potter or Game of Thrones, this isn’t fantasy—it’s serious science.
As a fire researcher, or more colloquially, a dragon wrangler, my job is to help protect people and property from fire’s devastating effects.…
Stanford News Service
For Melissa Valentine and her colleagues at Stanford, the future of work is here: “flash teams” of skilled professionals who have probably never met before and may work on different continents, but who can turn a napkin sketch into a product within days or weeks.
Valentine, assistant professor of…
Bruno Scibilia
Businesses are getting more and more data from existing and potential customers. Whenever we click on a website, for example, it can be recorded in the vendor’s database, and whenever we use electronic ID cards to access public transportation or other services, our movements across the city may be…
Knowledge at Wharton
I t wasn’t that long ago that GM ran commercials advertising that its Oldsmobile division didn’t just produce cars for your grandfather, but also for everyone else. It was an attempt to reinvent the brand’s staid image—and it didn’t work.
Now, the Oldsmobile division and its iconic vehicles are…
AAAS
As more coal-fired power plants are retired, industry workers are left without many options. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, though.
In a new study published in Energy Economics, researchers from Michigan Technological University and Oregon State University offer hope for coal workers…
Jon Speer
Design controls and risk management processes should be tools to ensure that medical devices are designed, developed, and manufactured to be safe and effective, and to address indications for use, too.
All too often, however, design controls and risk management are viewed as a pile of “stuff”…
