All Features
Belinda Jones
Location, location, location! Last month, a diverse assortment of metrologists, scientists, engineers, quality control specialists, manufacturers, educators, and students streamed into the 2013 Coordinate Metrology Systems Conference (CMSC). This annual event was staged at the beautiful Sheraton…
Jim Benson
In the last couple of columns, I’ve been discussing work in process (WIP), the size of tasks, how we complete certain types of tasks, and who or what might interrupt us. Perhaps it’s time to understand the consumers of our tasks: our customers.
Whenever we do something, even if it’s simply…
Kevin Meyer
A few years ago when I was a young lad, a friend of mine introduced me to a newfangled gizmo called Pong. We temporarily disconnected his Betamax from his 27-in. big-screen TV (a new color model) and connected up the game. I was hooked. I couldn't get enough of moving a white rectangle up and down…
IMD
Caring bosses who help employees with their personal and work problems shouldn’t expect gratitude, loyalty, and commitment in return, new research has warned. According to a study by Switzerland-based business school, IMD, most managers believe offering emotional support will benefit their company…
Gustavo Garcia-Cota
In my line of work, I visit many wiring harness shops that produce harnesses for many different industries. One of the common issues I’ve noticed in shops that use crimp force monitors (CFMs) is that they are usually turned off, regardless of the brand, because engineers and operators aren’t using…
Daniel Crowley
This article provides a review of three proven quality assurance tips that are applicable for software, manufacturing, and service organizations. They provide guidance to senior management, as well as engineers and technical staff, for selecting and implementing quality improvement projects.
When…
MIT News
MIT professor emeritus Rodney Brooks gained fame during the 1990s for co-founding iRobot, an MIT spin-off that brought the Roomba and other innovative, helpful robots to the world. He’s since moved on to robots that are bigger, but no less revolutionary.
Brooks’ newest startup, Rethink Robotics,…
Bruce Hamilton
I opened a fortune cookie yesterday, which read “Understanding little is better than misunderstanding a lot.” Seems to me that we lean wannabes misunderstand a lot—maybe not everyone, but I regretfully include myself in that group.
There is so much to know about the Toyota Production System (TPS…
Umberto Tunesi
In a world where appetizers often are more important than the meals themselves, repeated information and news can become boring. That is, what appears to be new attracts more than what actually is new.
Effective reporting likewise suffers from this tendency.
As an obstinate ISO 9001, ISO 14001,…
Arun Hariharan
Imagine the power of your company and how much more productive each of your employees would be if every employee could leverage the collective knowledge of everybody else. This collective knowledge would stay with your company, and you’d be able to continually update it even if individuals left. I…
Tom Kadala
Without data, a company would never survive today. With a little data, it might have a fighting chance, depending on the quality and timing of the information. But what happens when a company has access to too much data?
Ironically, the company could go out of business even with the best…
Matthew Barsalou
I recently had an opportunity to learn about quality in industry in a Soviet Bloc nation, the former German Democratic Republic, better known as East Germany. I was invited to dinner with a family that included somebody who worked in a cotton mill during the final decades of East Germany.
I had…
Jack Dunigan
Editor’s note: This continues Jack Dunigan’s series about unsung heroes in the workplace, and the 16 traits they all share.
Many potential employers put this requirement directly in their help-wanted ads: “Must be a self-starter.” This is, apparently, an all-too-unusual trait.
Perhaps more than…
Jim Colton
Purchasing a used car can be stressful due to all the factors that must be considered. Websites such as www.cars.com provide a wealth of information, but how do you navigate through it all to find the best deal?
Once you narrow your choice down to a particular car model, the data from cars.com…
Neil Mason
Statistician George Box said, “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” Clarifying what he meant, Box went on to say, “Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful?” I think he had a point that’s worth thinking about a…
Gallup
Twenty-six percent of the world’s adult population was employed full time for an employer in 2012, down slightly from 27 percent a year ago. This decline reverses the upward trend in Gallup’s Payroll to Population (P2P) measure since the height of the global recession in 2009.
Gallup’s P2P metric…
Bakul Patel
For medical devices, the term “interoperability” refers to the ability of various devices to interact, and for electronic health record systems to talk to each other using a common vocabulary. It is similar to the concept of “plug and play” computer attachments such as a web cam or mouse, which…
ISO
Asset management is not a new practice. Managing assets to meet organizational or social objectives has existed since humans first began building infrastructures, whether private or public. The effort and resources involved inevitably generated the need to preserve and maintain such…
Mark Davidson
Manufacturing operations management (MOM) has evolved considerably, and now encompasses a broad collection of what were once individually targeted applications to solve very specific manufacturing problems. Today, the trend is toward larger integrated suites of application functionality.
These…
James Lamprecht
The words “risk” or “risks” have been sprinkled throughout the 2015 revision of ISO 9001, the quality management system standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Although some “requirements” will be easy to satisfy using well-established process monitoring or…
Knowledge at Wharton
3Dprinting sounds like the stuff of science fiction: A technology that potentially can create any object of one’s imagination, even human organs, with just a few computer instructions. To Star Trek fans, the technology may evoke memories of Captain Picard ordering his favorite cup of tea from the…
The QA Pharm
Editor’s note: This is the second in a five-part series exploring issues that affect management’s ability to detect the warning signals of current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) compliance problems in the pharmaceutical industry.
In part one of this series, I discussed the management…
Matthew E. May
I was on my way to the market, shopping list in hand. “Honey, can you grab some lemons?” my wife called out as the door hit me on the bum. “Yep!” I shouted through the closed door. I hopped in my car, got to the store, whipped out my list, got everything on it, and headed home, feeling pretty darn…
Christine Schaefer
As a young child, I spent most Sundays visiting my paternal grandmother in a declining inner-city neighborhood of Detroit. By then, the city had already seen large-scale losses of middle-class residents. Many had fled to suburbs that offered better public schools, more reliable services, and safer…
Shaun Wissner
In the world of metrology, there has been a longstanding confusion regarding data management vs. data collection. According to the Data Management Association (DAMA), “data management is the development, execution, and supervision of plans, policies, programs, and practices that control, protect,…
