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MIT News
First published June 29, 2021, on MIT News.
MIT and Harvard University have announced a major transition for edX, the nonprofit organization they launched in 2012 to provide an open online platform for university courses: edX’s assets are to be acquired by the publicly traded education technology…
Jason Chester
Manufacturers have seen the need to digitize operations for quite some time, but the Covid-19 pandemic has forced the issue to center stage. They’ve had to adapt to sudden, dramatic changes like more remote workers and social distancing across production lines. It didn’t take long to realize the…
Bruce Hamilton
PDCA—plan, do, check, act (or adjust)—is one of those acronymic concepts that regularly finds its way into lean discussions. Descended from Francis Bacon’s scientific method (hypothesis, experiment, confirmation), PDCA has become a ubiquitous catchword for business process improvement. From…
Christopher Allan Smith
This series is about getting you through a catastrophe. The first three articles (see “All articles in this series”) were about preparing and responding to the world around you when it’s consumed by calamity. As our world here was. In this article, we deal with how to handle all the information,…
Matt Fieldman
This article is the fourth in a monthly series brought to you by the America Works initiative. As a part of the MEP National Network’s goal of supporting the growth of small and medium-sized manufacturing companies, this series focuses on innovative approaches and uncovering the latest trends in…
Harish Jose
Recently, I came across an interesting insight at Toyota’s website. I was taken aback by the first sentence of this paragraph: “Eventually, the value added by the line’s human operators disappears.”
The complete paragraph is shown below: “Eventually, the value added by the line’s human operators…
Bryan Christiansen
Adherence to lean principles is considered a precondition for success in modern manufacturing. In a resource-intensive environment, anything that improves efficiency and productivity is a godsend. Lean maintenance has become more prominent as manufacturers grapple with sustainability challenges,…
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Whether it’s computer chips, smartphone components, or camera parts, the hardware in many products is constantly getting smaller. The trend is pushing companies to come up with new ways to make the parts that power our world.
Enter Boston Micro…
Katherine H. Freeman, Raymond Jeanloz, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
In 2020, the annual committee meeting of the journal we edit was a bit of a mess. It took place in March, just days before the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, so some attendees canceled their travel even as others…
Glenn Daehn
Failure of a machine in a factory can shut it down. Lost production can cost millions of dollars per day. Component failures can devastate factories, power plants, and battlefield equipment.
To return to operation, skilled technicians use all the tools in their kit—machining, bending, welding, and…
Corey Brown
Getting inside the mind of an ISO 9001 auditor is crucial to a successful ISO audit. Think of it like a gift: Even the best of presents can be unappealing when wrapped in crumpled, messy newspaper and duct tape.
Understanding the background and motivating factors for ISO auditors will help you…
Doug Devereaux
The premise for the NIST MEP Digital Supply-Chain Network project is familiar to MEP centers—many small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) are often not ready for Industry 4.0 and don’t know how to implement it. Manufacturers with fewer than 50 employees often lag in digital supply-chain areas…
Chuck Olinger
Most manufacturers want a quality management system (QMS) to meet strict quality values. They need one to expressly meet the needs of their specific organization yet be within the parameters of federal, state, and industry prerequisites.
For example, food, drug, and medical device companies all…
Brian C. Black
When President Joe Biden took Ford’s electric F-150 Lightning pickup for a test drive in Dearborn, Michigan, in May 2021, the event was more than a White House photo op. It marked a new phase in an accelerating shift from gas-powered cars and trucks to electric vehicles, or EVs.
In recent months,…
William A. Levinson
The first part of this series introduced measurement systems analysis for attribute data, or attribute agreement analysis. AIAG1 provides a comprehensive overview, and Jd Marhevko2 has done an outstanding job of extending it to judgment inspections as well as go/no-go gages. Part two will cover the…
Nicola Jones, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
I am sitting in a darkened room, listening to upbeat music of the type often used at tech conferences to make attendees feel they are part of something big, waiting in eager anticipation for a keynote speaker to appear.
Bang on time,…
Suneel Kumar, Sreelal Sreedhar
The word “aptitude” is sometimes misused to mean ability or achievement. There is, however, a real and meaningful difference between the three words. Understanding the relationship between aptitude and ability can be a significant factor for your inspection operators.
A basic description of the…
Knowledge at Wharton
Wharton professor G. Richard Shell’s graduate course on business responsibility is peppered with students he calls “ethics refugees.” They are young people who earned their bachelor’s degrees and landed a great job only to fall into an ethical or moral trap set by a boss, a co-worker, or the…
Christopher Allan Smith
I was a strange kid. Who knows where our fears come from? What I do know is Godzilla is somewhere near the core of one of my weirder fascinations. When I was four, I watched Godzilla vs. King Kong on TV with my father. It made a mark.
One part megalophobia, one part awesome nature, one part primal…
Paul Laughlin
Do you see the limitations and over-hyped expectations of today’s approach to artificial intelligence (AI)? Does it need a reboot, a redirection, to finally achieve its potential, one that truly understands us and we can trust?
That is the premise of a great book on the subject, Rebooting AI:…
Isaac Maw
Whether you deal with hydraulic or pneumatic seals such as wiper seals, or other types of seals and O-rings on gearboxes and other mechanical equipment, seals must be able to withstand a range of environments and duties, including extreme temperatures, high pressures, chemicals, and contamination…
Donald J. Wheeler
Measurement error is ubiquitous. As a result, over the past 250 years, different areas of science and engineering have come up with many different ways to deal with the problem of measurement error. One approach to the problem of measurement error was developed during the 1960s within General…
Chip Bell
When you played cowboys and Indians as a kid, did you want to be the cowboy or the Indian? I wanted to be the Indian. All the ones I saw in comic books had super-cool moccasins and could move around with their bow and arrows without making a sound. And there were plenty of famous Native Americans…
James Bossert
When we talk about measurement system analysis (MSA), people tend to focus on attribute agreement analysis because it is usually quicker and easier to do than a gauge repeatability and reproducibility (gauge R&R) study. This article is a review of the fundamentals for gauge R&R to remind us…
Iffet Turken
We need instant adaptability to the new skill sets in the unknown future of work. The Covid-19 pandemic is a prime example of how change is accelerating and requiring us to adapt quickly. We often hear about the skill sets we will need but not enough about how executives will adapt to them. A “…
