All Features
Austin Choi-Fitzpatrick
The civil rights movement and Moore’s Law are colliding to transform politics. On the street, smartphone technology is being used to document social life as never before, putting power into the hands of the public and making eyewitnesses of us all.
This same technology, bolted onto cheap and easy-…
Donald J. Wheeler
In my article, “Tightened 100% Inspection” (Quality Digest, March 29, 2021), we found that the excess costs associated with tightened specification limits are generally prohibitive. Here we consider the question: “Under what conditions can we use tightened specifications without incurring undue…
Emily Newton
Food manufacturers must carry out numerous specific processes to check that the foods they produce and distribute are safe for consumers. Analytical testing plays a vital role in meeting that goal. Here’s a look at how such examinations raise food quality and purchaser trust.
Checking foods for…
Henrich Greve
In March 2001, publishing executive Ann Godoff—then in her third year as president, publisher, and editor-in-chief of Random House Trade Publishing Group (RHTPG)—was the subject of a gushing profile in New York Magazine. Laced with tributes from authors and peers (“She’s the real deal,” rhapsodized…
Janet Woodcock, Judy McMeekin
During the past year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) approach to foreign and domestic inspections for food and medical products has been both risk-based and deliberate. The Covid-19 pandemic required us to rework our business operations so that we could carry out our public health…
Fred Schenkelberg
In 2019, Nicholas W. Eyrich, Robert E. Quinn, and David P. Fessell published an article in the Harvard Business Review titled, “How One Person Can Change the Conscience of an Organization.” In it, they discuss how corporate transformations, although assumed to occur from the top-down, are actually…
Chip Bell
Iam often asked by customer service leaders how to get the CEO to care about customers. They are convinced there is a missed tactic that, if implemented, would have the C-suite camping out in the contact center and inviting customers to board meetings. When I outline a number of possible approaches…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Motorized drive rollers (MDR) are an efficient and safe way to move large or heavy products down a conveyor line. They are also a key part of zero pressure accumulation, which allows conveyor systems to accumulate product without collision.
In traditional conveyor systems, products can back up…
Jim Benson
In lean there is mura, the waste of unevenness.
It’s probably the most important, but also most overlooked, in the waste theater.
For knowledge work, unevenness primarily interrupts flow. It’s when you have work that you should do easily but you don’t. There is this mura lying around that makes…
William A. Levinson
The current national controversy over the need for a mandatory high minimum wage is but a symptom of a much larger underlying problem: the offshoring of American manufacturing capability.
Offshoring ruined Spain and Portugal during the 16th century, and it is similarly a clear and present danger…
Thomas R. Cutler
The demand for quality assurance and quality control managers in the manufacturing sector has never been stronger, according to Patrick O’Rahilly, founder of FactoryFix. This online platform matches vetted manufacturing workers with companies seeking specific skill sets. They set a new quality…
Harish Jose
Today I’m looking at the ideas inspired by mirror neurons. Mirror neurons are a class of neurons that activate when someone engages in an activity, or when they observe the same activity being performed by someone else.
The phenomenon was first identified by a group of Italian neurophysiologists…
Edmund Andrews
Seems everybody has a horror story about health insurance: Kafkaesque debates with robotic agents about what is and isn’t covered. Huge bills from a doctor you didn’t know was “out of network.” Reimbursements that take months to process.
It’s no secret that healthcare in the United States is…
David Darais, Joseph Near
How many people drink pumpkin spice lattes in October, and how would you calculate this without learning specifically who is drinking them, and who is not?
Although they seem simple or trivial, counting queries are used extremely often. Counting queries such as histograms can express many useful…
Nate Burke
Unfortunately, a website is no longer enough for a significant or successful digital presence. Essentially, a presence is nonexistent without some consideration of search engine optimization (SEO).
But this, too, has become one of the basics of “going digital”—a must, rather than a “nice to have…
Quality Digest
Located in Butler, Wisconsin, Accurate Pattern has specialized in wood, metal, and plastic patterns, tools, fixtures, gauges, prototypes, and models since 1985. Technologies and services include CAD design, manual and CNC machining, wood and metalworking, painting and welding, plastic fabrication,…
Graham Freeman
Here’s an unfortunate truth: The story of the Covid-19 pandemic is one of epic quality failures in almost every area imaginable. Although there have been some admirable successes, such as the food and beverage organizations that have ensured the continued safe delivery of food supplies to most…
Judah Levine
As a physicist in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Time and Frequency Division, I have worked in the general area of operating atomic clocks and using output signals from them to distribute time and frequency information for more than 40 years. I am also a Fellow at JILA,…
Gleb Tsipursky
Have you or your employees been feeling work-from-home burnout (WFH) and Zoom fatigue these past months despite the supposed convenience of working from home and using video conferences to meet?
Due to the computer-based nature of their work, many quality professionals have been in the privileged…
Bob Holmes, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Most of us won’t soon forget that disconcerting moment last spring when grocery store shelves were suddenly bare where the flour, pasta, and other staples should have been. The news told of farmers dumping milk—nearly four million gallons a…
Rita Men
Ending the pandemic depends on achieving herd immunity, estimated at 70 percent or even 80 percent to 90 percent of a population. With some 30 percent of Americans telling pollsters they have no interest in getting vaccinated, that’s cutting it a bit close. The numbers are even worse in many other…
Jo Napolitano
Artificial intelligence, or AI, requires a huge amount of computing power and versatile hardware to support that power. But most AI-supportive hardware is built around the same decades-old technology, and still a long way from emulating the neural activity in the human brain.
In an effort to solve…
Optical Gaging Products OGP
The RGM Watch Co. was founded by American watchmaker Roland G. Murphy. His career and interest in horology (the art or science of timekeeping devices) began as a teenager while working part-time for a clock company. Later, he enrolled in the Bowman Technical School of Watchmaking, and in 1986,…
Knowledge at Wharton
The future of work is hybrid. In the post-pandemic world, many companies will embrace the lessons learned from more than a year of telecommuting and not fully return to the office. Instead, Wharton management professor Martine Haas says, they will adopt a hybrid model with some combination of…
Del Williams
On conveyor systems in the food processing industry, some powdered and bulk solid materials such as grains, sugar, and creamer are ignition-sensitive in specific concentrations, particularly when exposed to static electricity discharge. Key concerns are conveyor-system connection points such as…
