All Features
Bruce McDuffee
Ask any metrologist, and you’ll likely get quite a diatribe about the challenge of making a good measurement of humidity. There are, however, some specific steps or best practices you can follow that will help improve your measurement of humidity through better accuracy, better repeatability,…
Bill Kalmar
The 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners were announced last week, and for the first time, three recipients are in the health care category.
The recipients of the 2011 Baldrige Award are:
• Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis (nonprofit)
• Henry Ford Health System, Detroit (…
Knowledge at Wharton
In a world of endless information sharing, consumers have become the product. Platforms such as Google, Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter are the new factory floor, and online users who leave digital crumbs as they browse the web and tap into social networks generate data that can be bought and…
FARO
In production plants across the globe, lean manufacturing techniques are being used to meet increasing demands placed on manufacturers. Originally developed as a methodology to make production processes highly efficient, lean techniques have been adopted by more than 72 percent of machine shops…
NIST
Led by a group at the University of Maryland (UMd), a multi-institution team of researchers has combined modern materials research and an age-old metallurgy technique to produce an alloy that could be the basis for a new class of sensors and micromechanical devices controlled by magnetism.…
Michelle LaBrosse
This time of year, many of us are thinking about decorating for the holidays. Decorations lift our spirits and put us in the holiday mood. This holiday season, don't forget to decorate your name as well, with a professional certification. By adding a dash of "PMP" or a sprinkle of "CAPM" to the…
The teaching of lean concepts is typically tuned to continuous processes: Day in, day out, value flows continuously from suppliers until the final product reaches the customer. The concepts of lead time (the time it takes individual “flow-units” to travel through a process), Takt time (the…
Daniel Brown
It’s no secret that manufacturing processes have become more complex. Manufacturers have tried hard to infuse innovation into their products, usually as new features, technologies, or attributes. However, coming up with innovative product features is not enough to create a competitive…
Bill Kalmar
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Unlike other holidays, there is no pretentiousness. You can arrive at the host’s home dressed in everyday attire, unencumbered by a load of presents. That’s not to say guests can’t bring a tasty food dish or a bottle of wine for the host, or don your…
Mark R. Hamel
During the first winter storm this year in the Northeast, I found myself, along with hundreds of thousands of folks in the area, without power for the better part of a week. It was a long wait before the lights came on… and the heat.
Heck, they had to send the National Guard to my town, and…
Bruce Hamilton
A short time after I moved into operations as the vice president of manufacturing, our assembly department made an early and, dare I say, imperfect attempt to realign the factory floor for ease-of-material delivery and pick up. I would not describe this as improved flow because we were still…
ISO
In the wake of recent failures in corporate governance, two new standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will help organizations to disclose corporate information quickly and effectively. Increased pressure by industry regulators obliges companies to provide such…
William A. Levinson
The elimination of waste (muda) from all manufacturing and logistics activities is an obvious concept. Less obvious is the fact that waste often hides in plain view. “Unfortunately, real waste lurks in forms that do not look like waste,” says Shigeo Shingo in Modern Approaches to Manufacturing…
Sandia National Laboratories
The human eye is as comfortable with white light generated by diode lasers as with that produced by increasingly popular light-emitting diodes (LEDs), according to tests conceived at Sandia National Laboratories.
Both technologies pass electrical current through material to generate light, but…
Mona Pearl
One of the main challenges of the U.S. economy is mind-set. As trade borders become seamless and the world becomes more dependent on technology, U.S. companies and their executives must scramble to acquire the tools and skills necessary to survive and thrive in the increasingly competitive…
Paul Naysmith
My cell phone was vibrating like a dryer set at hyper-speed, and my wife’s name popped up on the screen. My first thought was that something had gone wrong. I did tell her to call only if there were problems with the movers. I was on the other side of town, a prisoner at the Department of Motor…
MIT News
Continual product and process innovation are crucial for commercially successful products to maintain their industry dominance, according to MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) industry co-director Vah Erdekian.
At the MIT Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity annual summit held Oct…
The RFID Network
RFID tags are not like bar codes. Just because you see a tag doesn’t mean your RFID equipment will see it. Conversely, if you can’t see a tag, that doesn’t mean your RFID equipment won’t read it. To make sense of this contradiction, it’s important to understand the basic concepts about RFID…
APQC
In 2011, the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), a proponent of knowledge management, benchmarking, and best practices business research, talked to a series of large organizations to learn how they measure quality. Every organization interviewed expressed considerable interest in…
BAIRD
During the Robert W. Baird 41st annual Industrial Conference, which was held Nov. 8–9, 2011, in Chicago, teams from Baird Equity Research put together macro-sector comments based on presentations and breakout sessions from more than 100 public companies. Here are some of the comments pulled from…
Mike Forbes
Whenever manufacturing nonconformances are discovered, immediate action is required to ensure that a flawed product is quickly identified, contained, and corrected at the suppliers’—and often the customers’—locations. Radiography can deliver a timely solution to these potential problems. In…
Joanna Leigh
Suppose you came upon a man in the woods, working to saw down a tree. He is exhausted from working for hours. You suggest he could take a break to sharpen the saw because it will help the work go faster. “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw!” he exclaims. “I’m busy sawing!”
People and…
Knowledge at Wharton
It is well-known that negative interactions have a bigger impact than positive ones, and that people tend to remember a person’s unfavorable qualities more vividly than their positive traits. These observations were included in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) titled, “How a Few…
Andy Cheshire
Bah! The NBA makes me mad. Seriously, why can’t the basketball players and the execs resolve this current lockout? I want to have something to watch after football season is over. Let’s talk about what is holding up the players and the organizations from agreeing to a decision on how money is…
Akhilesh Gulati
When you try to improve your athletic abilities (e.g., playing tennis, swimming), how do you go about it? There are quite a few options, including observing how those who are best-in-class perform. When we learn from others, we gain from their insights without having to endure the mistakes they may…
