All Features
jeffdewar
This is the final installment of a five-part series.
We’ve considered two quality organizations. The first, ASQ, has been around since 1946. Founded by none other than W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran, Walter A. Shewhart, and George D. Edwards. Titans of the quality field. Visionaries before they…
S. Heather Duncan
A new deep-learning framework developed at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is speeding up the process of inspecting additively manufactured metal parts using X-ray computed tomography, or CT, while increasing the accuracy of the results. The reduced costs for time, labor,…
William A. Levinson
‘You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1891) A Scandal in Bohemia. Taiichi Ohno, who developed Henry Ford’s lean production system into the Toyota Production System, told managers to stand in a circle on the shop floor and observe everything…
Elizabeth Benham
Calling all teachers, parents, and students. It’s easy to learn the metric system—or, as it’s more formally called, the International System of Units (SI). Explore these top 10 tips for teaching the SI. Let’s begin the countdown with....
10. Make it fun!
Integrating metric measurements into play…
Gleb Tsipursky
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink claimed in a recent interview with Fox that “we have to get our employees back in the office.” According to him, doing so would result in “rising productivity that will offset some of the inflationary pressures.”
Fink didn’t provide any data in the form of statistics,…
Kerry Stevenson
Operating a desktop FFF 3D printer can be a ton of fun, except when you make mistakes. Mistakes can cause print failures, and also embarrassment when they are so obvious you really should not have made them.
Let’s take a look at my list of the eight dumbest FFF 3D printing mistakes you can make.…
Alex Waddell, Diki Tsering, Peter Bragge, Paul Kellner
Emergency medical workers, already at increased risk for burnout compared to other professions, continue to be challenged by the fallout of Covid-19.
Stretched to the breaking point by increased workloads, highly contagious and acutely ill patients, and limited resources, workers’ risk factors for…
jeffdewar
This is the fourth installment of a five-part series.
As detailed in our third installment, ASQE is a new legal entity connected to the ASQ we all know and love. It’s a trade organization to which organizations, rather than individuals, can belong. Current membership is about 180 organizations,…
Matthew Inniger
The inability to gather good data has challenged many food manufacturers for decades. But not anymore. As sensor technology has improved, and technology platforms have become more accessible and affordable to small and medium-sized manufacturers, the food industry is poised for transformation. Food…
Donald J. Wheeler
The cumulative sum (or Cusum) technique is occasionally offered as an alternative to process behavior charts, even though they have completely different objectives. Process behavior charts characterize whether a process has been operated predictably. Cusums assume that the process is already being…
Quy Huy
In September 2022, Boeing agreed to pay $200 million for charges that it misled investors about two crashes of its 737 Max aircraft that killed 346 people. The penalty imposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is small change compared to the $2.5 billion shelled out by the plane maker…
Matt Fieldman
Customer experience, or “CX,” is all the rage in marketing circles nationally. Customer experience refers to how a customer experiences your company at every point of their buying journey—from marketing to sales to customer service, and everywhere in between. It can be tangible actions, such as…
Ula Chrobak
Thirty miles east of Reno, Nevada, past dusty hills patched with muted blue sage and the occasional injury-lawyer billboard, a large concrete structure rises prominently in the desert landscape. When fully constructed, it will be a pilot for a business that entrepreneurs envision as a major facet…
Gleb Tsipursky
Do bosses trust employees to be productive when working out of the office? Microsoft released a new study in which it found that 85 percent of leaders say the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49 percent of…
Dave Gilson
Like most of us, lawyers think they can be impartial when they rate other people’s work. “They say, ‘Who writes a brief doesn’t matter. A brief is a brief; it stands on its own merit,’” explains Lori Nishiura Mackenzie, the lead strategist for diversity, equity, and inclusion at Stanford Graduate…
James Gaines, Knowable Magazine
In 2004, the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) dangled a $1 million prize for any group that could design an autonomous car that could drive itself through 142 miles of rough terrain from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada. Thirteen years later, the U.S. Department…
Shelly Fan
I admit, if I see a beehive, I back away. But part of me is also fascinated. Beehives are a remarkable feat of engineering. Swarms of bees deposit materials ranging from tree buds to chewed-up wax into densely packed honeycombs—each a geometric masterpiece—while flying in the air.
In stark…
Tom Taormina
We live in a rural area, and many of our nonconsumables are purchased online. We’re deceivingly spoiled living near an Amazon fulfillment center because we can order an item on Saturday, and it arrives on Sunday. To me, this is a masterful logistical feat of filling an order, getting it into the…
Ben P. Stein
Right after the pandemic hit, I bought a new vacuum cleaner. I wanted to step up my housecleaning skills since I knew I’d be home a lot more. I was able to buy mine right away, but friends who wanted new appliances weren’t so lucky. My relatives had to wait months for their new refrigerator to…
Jeetu Patel
In recent years, pretty much every assumption about how, where, and when we work has been upended. But I believe we’re still at just the beginning of a revolution in hybrid work.
Today, there’s a clear opportunity for organizations to step into the next wave of working, supported by even better…
Michael Okrent
Want a new car? You may have to wait as long as six months, depending on the model you order. Looking for a spicy condiment? Supplies of sriracha hot sauce have been running dangerously low. And if you feed your cat or dog dry pet food, expect empty shelves or elevated prices.
These aren’t…
Mark Rosenthal
Once again I’m going through old files. Looking back at my notes from 2005, I believe I was thinking about nailing these points to a church door somewhere in the company. That actually isn’t a bad analogy because I was advocating a pretty dramatic shift in the role of the kaizen workshop leaders.…
Mara Strenger, Svenja Kloss, Markus Schmid
When looking in the fridge, you notice a package of minced meat sitting at the back of one of the shelves, totally forgotten. A check of the best-before date reveals it had expired two days earlier. Like so many consumers, you feel an internal struggle emerging: risk food poisoning or discard a…
Adam Grant
Even before the pandemic, burnout was labeled as an epidemic. It’s the persistent work-related stress that’s exhausting and impairing. In the U.S., more than half of employees feel burned out at least some of the time, and it can lead to what has recently been termed “quiet quitting”—reduced…
Kevin Kanimyar
Amidst the rise of conscious consumerism, corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs are fast becoming an essential part of any business. With about $20 billion spent every year by Fortune 500 companies alone, businesses around the world are working to integrate CSR programs into their business…
