All Features
Thomas R. Cutler
R ecently more than 194 manufacturing IT managers and directors were asked to identify what would facilitate collaboration and productivity improvements across their organizations. More than 150 people completed a multiple-choice email survey, which contained both open-ended and multiple-choice…
Bruce Hamilton
I’ve always felt the need to accentuate the positive, something I think I picked up from my mother. In tense situations she would always interject, “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” This usually generated laughter and reduced tensions. Although this seems like an admirable quality, I discovered one day…
Ron Hicks
As we all look forward to 2014, I ask you to keep the new CMS certification program in mind, whether you are a beginner or veteran metrologist. Our certification committee is working hard to build a program that is beneficial to our membership, as well as future members of our organization.
This…
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Although 80 percent of Accurex’s business lies in the industrial application of precision metrology and scanning, the company always enjoys the occasional cultural heritage project. When the Accurex team was called upon to scan the Sphinx of Hatshepsut, it was ready for the…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Weighted average cycle time (Tcwa), also known as “average weighted cycle time,” provides a representative average cycle time (Tc) within a mixed model environment. Varied models or services in a given cell, line, or work area often have varied work contents due to different steps, duration of…
Patrick Runkel
Nala, our 6-year-old golden retriever, loves her dogma. That’s her sitting in front of church on Sunday morning. But she’s not crazy about her catechism. For example, she doesn’t always dutifully follow the “lay down” commandment.
What factors may be influencing her response? We’re…
Christine Schaefer
S teven Pearlstein, a business columnist for The Washington Post, and others, have written about business leaders’ excessive and shortsighted focus on stock values for shareholders. What about the role of corporate governance boards? Aren’t board members obliged to view company management and…
Eston Martz
A colleague of mine at Minitab, Cheryl Pammer, was recently featured in “A Statistician’s Journey,” a monthly feature that appears in the print and online versions of the American Statistical Association’s (ASA) AMSTAT News magazine.
Each month, the magazine asks ASA members to talk about the…
Jack Dunigan
In my last column, I posted the first two motivational triggers boomers respond to. If you’re just now checking in, you can read that column here. I’m not going to continue with the next three triggers here. Instead, I want to share a story that directly relates to the theme of motivating workers…
The NOvA (NuMI off-axis νe appearance) experiment is looking to answer fundamental questions about neutrinos and the role they play in the universe. NOvA will use two detectors, a near detector located underground at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, and a far detector located 810 km from Fermilab…
Creaform Inc.
Creaform Inc., developer of the Handyscan 3D laser scanner, was recently acquired for approximately $120 million by AMETEK Inc., a global manufacturer of electronic instruments and electro-mechanical devices.
Creaform was formed in 2002 in Lévis, Québec, Canada, near Québec City. In 2005, the…
Annette Franz
In March 2013, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announced it was changing some of its carry-on restrictions; in addition to certain types of knives, TSA decided to allow passengers to bring golf clubs, hockey sticks, and plastic bats onto planes, all of which had been restricted…
Bill Kalmar
Like most of us, I like to occasionally receive a simple “thank you” for something I have done. I think during this holiday season we should turn the tables a bit and bestow a hearty thanks to a segment of our population that at times does not receive enough “thank yous.” I’m speaking of the men…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
Story update 12/06/2013: Wow did we mess up. When this story originally published we, the editors, introduced an error into the story regarding the Alaskan oil spill (which the author hadn't mentioned in his original) and didn't realize it. When readers pointed out the error we compounded the…
Dawn Bailey
In Baldrige’s 2013–2014 Criteria for Performance Excellence, innovation is defined as making meaningful, discontinuous change to products, processes, or organizational effectiveness in order to create new value for stakeholders. So you might not expect to find an example of such innovation in a…
Bayer
Editor’s note: This is a long article with lots of data… interesting data in our opinion. If the argument over the skills gap or STEM education interests you, this is worth reading.
This year’s Bayer Facts of Science Education survey, the 16th in the series, focuses on one of the major STEM (…
Umberto Tunesi
I read in September about the demise of 100-year-old Eiji Toyoda, and of his commitment to implant lean-oriented visions into his family-owned Toyota industrial enterprise. At the time I was reading Josip Krulic’s book, Histoire de la Yougoslavie: de 1945 à Nos Jours (History of Yugoslavia From…
U.S. Department of Energy
In the race to combat global climate change, energy efficiency is the low-hanging fruit for reducing our carbon footprint. Featured this month on energy.gov are the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Labs and their accomplishments in energy efficiency. The National Labs are fundamentally…
Gottfried Giritzer
Every quality manager is familiar with internal audits, a systemic check of all company departments to verify that they are following established procedures. Most department heads are also familiar with internal audits. But there is often a big difference between how quality managers and department…
MIT News
Advances in materials are driving the proliferation of new technologies, from energy to smart phones and televisions to robotic surgery, MIT faculty and industry researchers said during MIT’s recent Materials Day Symposium, hosted by the Materials Processing Center.
Here are the highlights from…
Jack Dunigan
My father’s generation came through the Great Depression and World War II. Because those times were so uncertain, security was, and remained, a critical factor for this generation. It might even have been the most relevant, predominant one for them. But companies and parents are learning that…
Tripp Babbitt
In my last column, “Deming’s Challenge to Us, Part 1,” I sounded the alert that just being improvement people is not enough, and waiting for management to do something is a poor strategy. In this column, I’m focusing on our choices and options to move forward as change agents.
For a couple of…
Akhilesh Gulati
Editor's note: This article continues the series exploring structured innovation using the TRIZ methodology, a problem-solving, analysis, and forecasting tool derived from studying patterns of invention found in global patent data.
Lessons about TRIZ learned at the monthly meetings of My Executive…
Tom Somodi
It’s astonishing how businesses and people are continually influenced by solution providers and consultants of change methodologies. These consultants somehow have the ability to convince others that if they want to obtain a desired change, then all they have to do is “execute this” or “buy into…
Thomas Abrams
You probably have seen many consumer advertisements for prescriptions drugs—on TV, in magazines, or online. Although those ads are expensive, did you know that in 2010, pharmaceutical companies actually spent more money advertising to healthcare professionals than they spent advertising to…
