All Features
Corey Brown
Amid the Silver Tsunami, human resources departments are hustling to onboard and fill personnel gaps, but they can’t predict the evolving demands of your operations.
Manufacturing companies are failing to adapt their operational training strategy to meet the needs of a workforce in transition. Put…
Jim Benson
Value stream mapping is a team exercise, it’s collaborative, enlightening, and the foundation for professionalism.
I’m pretty well-known for saying that teams are unique and that there is no one process that satisfies every team’s needs. There is, however, one activity that I’ve seen every team we…
Gleb Tsipursky
When a threat seems clear to you, it’s hard to believe others will deny it. Yet smart people deny serious risks surprisingly often.
A case-in-point example comes from my experience helping a midsize regional insurance company conduct a strategic pivot to thrive in the post-Covid world in January…
Silke von Gemmingen
Due to digitalization in Industry 4.0, internal logistics is subject to constant change. Internal traceability—i.e., tracking goods in the warehouse or production facility—increasingly plays a key role. Manufacturers and consumers are placing more emphasis on the safety and quality of products.…
Caroline Zimmerman, Theodoros Evgeniou
People often associate the term “data literacy” with mastering a litany of technical skills: SQL for data querying, Python for data analysis, and Tableau for data visualization, to name a few. However, one skill that is less discussed and has great power to scale data-guided decision making across…
David L. Chandler
This story was originally published by MIT News.
As the world continues to warm, many arid regions that already have marginal conditions for agriculture will be increasingly under stress, potentially leading to severe food shortages. Now, researchers at MIT have come up with a promising process for…
Gary Lyng
To uncover the value in data, analysts need powerful combinations of tools to locate data, wherever they are, and regardless if they are structured or unstructured. Most companies don’t realize that their current data-search approaches can’t access distributed information and can’t extract…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist and collaborators have demonstrated the first-ever “defect microscope” that can track how populations of defects deep inside macroscopic materials move collectively.
The research, which appeared last month in Science Advances, shows a…
Adrian Hernandez, C. Michael White
T
he U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regularly inspects manufacturing facilities to ensure that drugs meet rigorous quality standards. These standards are vital to protect patients from drugs that are incorrectly dosed, contaminated, or ineffective.
But over the past few years, tens of…
Raghava Kashyapa
Bearings are important components of mechanical equipment. They are specifically designed to convert the direct friction from parts in relative rotation into rolling friction or sliding friction of the bearing. As a result, bearings are extremely important in reducing the friction coefficient and…
David Cahn
Lean Six Sigma has improved manufacturing operations and processes for years now. Now the effect of the methodology is extending to supply chain and operations to help eliminate waste and reduce variation. Using lean to eradicate waste and Six Sigma to eliminate defects by reducing process…
Donald J. Wheeler
Your software routinely gives you four descriptive statistics for your data: the average, the standard deviation, the skewness, and the kurtosis. Of these only the average is easy to understand. This article and the next illustrate what these statistics are telling you about your data.
Welcome to…
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Many scientists and researchers still rely on Excel spreadsheets and lab notebooks to manage data from their experiments. That can work for single experiments, but companies tend to make decisions based on data from multiple experiments, some of…
Nate Burke
Marketplaces are now dominating the online sphere, which results in more unbranded searches being made by online shoppers who are looking for solutions to their queries, rather than a named-brand product. Nowadays, global brands can expect 58 percent of their searches to be unbranded, while…
Hari Polu
Manufacturers of high-end semiconductor electronic products used in consumer, industrial, and military applications have long relied on precise testing methodologies to identify the location of defects such as voids, cracks, and the delamination of different layers within a microelectronic device,…
Knowledge at Wharton
Considered one of the most successful organizational learning methods, the after-action review (AAR) was developed by the U.S. Army during the 1970s to help its soldiers learn from both their mistakes and achievements. Since then, many companies have used the AAR for performance assessment. And yet…
Jerry Foster
Manufacturers are acutely aware that audits and recalls are just part of business. At the same time, they all agree that the best way to deal with recalls is to prevent them in the first place. Because today’s manufacturers operate on razor-thin margins with little room for error, a reactionary…
Dylan Walsh
Supply chains are having a moment. In March 2021, one of the world’s largest container ships got wedged in the Suez Canal, blocking 10 percent of global trade for a few days and launching a flotilla of memes. Currently, home builders are waiting for more lumber, while a shortage of computer chips…
Phanish Puranam
As businesses increasingly adopt AI-driven decision making, experts agree that the most interesting questions are not about whether humans can beat machines or vice versa, but how the two forms of intelligence can most fruitfully collaborate—and how organizations can best facilitate those…
Ryan E. Day
With the migration to remote and hybrid work during the last year, cyberattacks have increased at a rate of three to five times compared to pre-Covid. No big surprise that, for many businesses, virtual private newtworks (VPNs) have become standard operating procedure for security. But is VPN’s…
Steven Severt
When it comes to ongoing certification of your quality management system (QMS), whether it’s certified to ISO 9001, ISO 13485, IATF 16949, or AS9100, how many times have you found yourself “preparing for an external audit?”
Picture the scene: You’ve got the dates set on the calendar months in…
Steven Stein
Supply chain management (SCM) has been defined as “the design, planning, execution, control, and monitoring of supply chain activities with the objective of creating net value, building a competitive infrastructure, leveraging worldwide logistics, synchronizing supply with demand, and measuring…
Nate Burke
How many of us remember walking into a holiday gift shop when younger (and before a global pandemic put a stop to the H word), and eagerly searching for a fridge magnet, mug, or pencil inscribed with our name?
Personalization is a tactic brands and businesses have been using for years to hook us…
Emily Newton
Effective equipment testing is essential for manufacturers of industrial equipment and end-users. Without testing, defects and damage can shorten the life span of equipment, cause unplanned downtime, and reduce the quality of finished goods.
This is especially true for businesses in sectors like…
Terry Onica, Cathy Fisher
With recent disruptions critically impacting the automotive supply chain and costing manufacturers millions in lost production and sales, it is clear that supply delivery issues now need the same level of attention as vehicle safety and quality. What is really at the root of ongoing delivery…
