All Features
Dawn Bailey
In 2020, MESA, a small business in Oklahoma, became to date the first and only three-time Baldrige Award recipient.
From a one-person consulting firm founded in 1979, MESA has grown to support a workforce of more than 250 people. The largest privately owned company in its market, it is a…
MIT News
First published June 7, 2021, on MIT News.
It’s no secret that a manufacturer’s ability to maintain and, ideally, increase production capability is the basis for long-run competitive success. But discovering a way to significantly increase production without buying a single piece of new equipment—…
Kimberly Merriman, David Greenway, Tamara Montag-Smit
As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers about remote work.
A good example of this is a recent op-ed written by the CEO of a Washington, D.C., magazine that suggested…
Anne Trafton
First published June 7, 2021, on MIT News.
MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.
The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a…
Michael Lee Stallard
Astronaut crews living and working in space experience as a matter of course what many of us experienced unexpectedly during the coronavirus pandemic. Consider these similarities.
Astronauts are physically isolated for a long period of time from family, friends, and the majority of their work…
Carlos Valdes-Dapena
In my work in collaboration and team effectiveness, I am sometimes approached about helping with a “dysfunctional team.” People use the word “dysfunction” liberally and can mean various things by it. I’ve learned some lessons about team dysfunction, and the most important one is that it isn’t what…
Karla Raines
Total quality management (TQM) was in vogue during my undergraduate years and early career in industrial engineering. The United States was catching up to the Japanese in manufacturing production as their Toyota vehicles outperformed our Fords. A company couldn’t deliver a competitive product…
Wayland Additive
Metal additive manufacturing (AM) is a process with demanding requirements for in-process material management, specifically with regard to the use of powdered metals. The Calibur3 system from Wayland Additive, enabled by the NeuBeam process, not only redefines how the electron beam (eBeam) process…
Del Williams
To enable raw water for use as cooling water, industrial facilities such as power, processing, and manufacturing plants prefilter raw water from rivers, lakes, gulfs, and coastlines to remove organic, aquatic, and other solids. It’s not as simple as it sounds.
The cooling water is typically used…
Clare Naden
We all know that like attracts like, but when it comes to the workplace, differences can be a very good thing. Numerous studies have shown that workplace diversity and inclusion can drive innovation and lead to new markets and financial benefits.
There is also evidence that when employees feel…
Sara Harrison
If you’ve watched Grey’s Anatomy, then you’ve gotten a peek into the complex hierarchies that rule a hospital. Over 17 seasons, the show’s eponymous heroine, Meredith Grey, ascends from a lowly intern to chief of general surgery, learning from the presiding residents and older surgeons along the…
Bryan Christiansen
Many techniques can be used to find the root causes of asset failures and other important events we want to analyze. Fault tree analysis is one of those techniques, and it is being utilized by many different companies to improve system reliability.
This guide aims to give a basic to intermediate…
Harry Hertz
Each year after the Quest for Excellence Conference, I sift through my notes and try to identify themes I have heard in the presentations of the new Baldrige Award recipients. The most recent summary was after the 2019 conference (the 2021 conference included recipients from the last two years).…
Nate Burke
In recent years, the focus and surge in e-commerce has been undeniable. There has been clear evidence of how a lack of online consideration can ultimately result in a brand’s demise, with Debenhams and Topshop just two recent examples. However, the latest moves by online giants, including Amazon,…
Borka Hajdin
It is safe to say that we can drop the word “digital” from digital marketing and just call it marketing. Because we are now officially living in a digital world. In 2020, worldwide online transactions in some sectors increased by 135 percent.
B2B companies that were previously dabbling in digital…
Del Williams
To meet increasingly strict compliance standards, such as the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), food processors now regularly use adenosine triphosphate (ATP) testing to monitor equipment surfaces for microbial growth. Add to this the need to minimize…
Joseph Near, David Darais
In previous articles we have explored what differential privacy is, how it works, and how to answer questions about data in ways that protect privacy. All of the algorithms we’ve discussed have been demonstrated via mathematical proof to be effective for protecting privacy. However, when…
Gleb Tsipursky
Quality professionals are often told that “failing to plan is planning to fail.” You might be surprised to learn that this phrase is a misleading myth at best and actively dangerous at worst. Making plans is important, but our gut reaction is to plan for the best-case outcomes, ignoring the high…
Knowledge at Wharton
When Wharton management professor Adam Grant sat down to write his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (Virgin Digital, 2021), he wanted to make the case for why executives should reconsider their approaches to how to manage people in a modern workplace and embrace new…
Nate Burke
It has been more than a year since retailers were forced to temporarily shut their doors or put in place restrictions to limit the in-store experience. Now, as we return to some semblance of normality, it’s essential that trust and brand value are retained for those operating a digital-only…
Isaac Maw
In 2017, in response to a Boston Dynamics video, billionaire Elon Musk infamously tweeted, “This is nothing. In a few years, that bot will move so fast you’ll need a strobe light to see it. Sweet dreams....”
Whether or not Musk’s ominous prediction comes true for Atlas (the robot in the video), he…
NIST
Aresearch team has found that a method commonly used to skirt one of metal 3D printing’s biggest problems may be far from a silver bullet.
For manufacturers, 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, provides a means of building complex-shaped parts that are more durable, lighter and more…
Lee Seok Hwai
As a young man of 20 in his first job at a state-owned enterprise in China, Guoli Chen found senior management fascinating, but not in a good way. His boss’s boss did very little—unless one counts reading newspapers, drinking tea, and gossiping as work. “I wondered whether anyone could replace him…
Adam J. Fleisher
In an essay titled “The end of artefacts,” Nobel laureate and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) fellow William D. Phillips details how scientists came to realize the original vision of the metric system, or the International System of Units (SI)—a system of units “for all times…
Ryan E. Day
Automation in the fresh produce sector is standard fare these days. What may not be so standard are the containers that get the produce from farm to market. The quality of produce containers has a direct impact on the quality of the produce—and maximizing profit margins for produce distributors and…
