All Features
William A. Levinson
Loss of American manufacturing capability to low-wage countries is but one part of the overall problem with the U.S. economy. The other part consists of a shortage of skilled workers, given that a high school diploma is no longer adequate for many manufacturing jobs. Brooklyn’s Pathways in…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Twelve years ago, I phoned a prospective client I’d been courting for months. The last time we’d spoken, only a few weeks earlier, she expressed interest in my conducting a seminar for her company. This time she said, “I was in the audience at the Fox theater last week; we won’t be needing your…
Arun Hariharan
Close your eyes and make a mental list of companies worldwide that use quality as their strategic weapon for achieving value for shareholders. Chances are you have some great examples, but most likely it’s a small list. Given the huge number of companies in every industry that aren’t on your list,…
The QA Pharm
The high layoff numbers in the pharmaceutical industry and poor job prospects in a weak economy have flooded the market with would-be consultants to pharma companies that need extra help. Here are my suggestions for hiring and working with an experienced good manufacturing practices (GMP)…
Georgia Institute of Technology
Taking advantage of the force generated by magnetic repulsion, researchers have developed a new technique for measuring the adhesion strength between thin films of materials used in microelectronic devices, photovoltaic cells, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).
The fixtureless and…
Knowledge at Wharton
Bucking the decades-old wave of offshoring manufacturing jobs to China, other parts of Asia, and Mexico, GE said it would move jobs back from these countries to the United States, where it will build water heaters.
Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s chairman and CEO, notes that his decision to invest $1 billion…
jeffdewar
Editor’s note: This four-part video interview with Juran Institute CEO Joseph DeFeo is hosted by Quality Digest’s CEO, Jeff Dewar. The series will run weekly beginning with today’s segment.
You can’t have a conversation about quality management without soon invoking the name “Dr. Juran.” The man…
ASQ
March 15, 2012, marked the 25th anniversary of the ISO 9000 series standards. Since the standards were released in 1987, they have gone through three revisions: 1994, 2000, and 2008. According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), as of 2009, the total number of organizations…
During the past 18 months, Seatronics, an Acteon company, along with Technip, Star Net Geomantics, and BlueView Technologies, have been developing the BlueView 3D system for underwater metrology. The system combines terrestrial laser and underwater, 3-D multibeam sonar-scanning technology to…
Jim Frost
Anyone who has performed ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis knows that you need to check the residual plots to validate your model. Have you ever wondered why? There are mathematical reasons, of course, but I’m going to focus on the conceptual ones.
The bottom line is that randomness…
NIST
Physicists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU), have demonstrated a novel “superradiant” laser design, which has the potential to be 100 to 1,000 times more stable than the best conventional visible…
Bill Kalmar
During the 1940s, it was commonplace for boys, during their formative years, to spend their days girl-free. In fact, my pals and I zealously maintained girl-free territories so that our game playing, bike rides, and hours of comic book reading were devoid of girls. We even had a clubhouse that was…
Mark R. Hamel
Problem-solving tools are powerful things. But not so powerful that they are immune to human error. Few things are.
Analogously, this is one reason why our school teachers strongly encouraged proofreading. You know—critically reading what you just wrote to ensure that it is clear, well-organized,…
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne researchers are working with two industrial partners to create nanofluids that improve the cooling of power electronics in hybrid electric vehicles.
These new coolants can lessen the need for heat exchangers, which could result in smaller cooling systems and lighter vehicles.
“Fluids…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
I am no longer surprised by the number of people who say, “I’m working on my Green Belt/Black Belt certification, but I’m not sure how to apply Six Sigma to [health care, telecom, hotels, food, transportation]—insert your service industry here. They just can’t seem to figure out how to translate…
H. James Harrington
The older I get, the more I realize that the basic things we believe in and live by do not change. The world keeps moving faster and faster. We need to run and work harder just to keep up. We get sidetracked by many new ways to use our time. Technology is moving so fast that before you can learn…
Harry Hertz
The title of this column reflects what has been my guiding philosophy ever since my first managerial position. And I truly believe that the statement is accurate. This observation led me to muse recently about what makes employees not just good, but exceptional—the types of employees we all want as…
Jim Tennermann
Everyone in the quality profession has heard the term “NIST traceable.” Having calibration traceability to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is desirable for most measurement devices. It is also enshrined as a requirement in some regulatory documents. Unfortunately, NIST…
Dawn Bailey
Some 147 years ago, Milliken & Co. was selling woolen goods manufactured in New England; it soon expanded to represent the cotton mills of the southern United States. With a passion to be not the biggest but the best, the Milliken family led the company through the turbulent 1980s when imported…
MIT News
Why don’t more women enter the male-dominated profession of engineering? Some observers have speculated it may be due to the difficulties of balancing a demanding career with family life. Others have suggested that women may not rate their own technical skills highly enough.
However, a recent…
Ryan E. Day
It’s getting to be an almost daily mantra for me to say, “We live in exciting times, and they’re getting more so every day.” Although the term “exciting” is usually associated with joy, it can be a double-edged thing. I’m aware of the benefits of manufacturing durable goods close to home, but have…
Arun Hariharan
In “Close the Loop with the Customer, Part One,” we left off with Amla, the CEO of a large company, laying down what he called “commandments” for dealing with any problem brought by customers or agents. The commandments are based on lessons learned from an agent’s complaint for not receiving her…
Arun Hariharan
Sometimes, customer issues or complaints get tagged as “resolved” without actually resolving them from the customer’s perspective. At times, the customer doesn’t even know that their complaint has been tagged as resolved because no one from the company told them. Often, this happens because someone…
Carly Barry
My husband said to me the other day, “You talk about being lean all the time, but your email in-box is definitely not lean!”
I have to admit, I tend to keep things around just in case I might need them down the road. I keep coupons I might use for months beyond expiration, every piece of high…
NIST
Memory devices based on magnetism are one of the core technologies of the computing industry, and engineers are working to develop new forms of magnetic memory that are faster, smaller, and more energy efficient than today’s flash and SDRAM memory.
According to the article, “Nanoscale spin wave…
