All Features
Donald J. Wheeler
Every introductory class in statistics teaches how to obtain a global standard deviation statistic. While this descriptive statistic characterizes the dispersion of the data, it is not the correct value to use when looking for unusual values within the data. Since all of statistical inference is…
Corey Brown
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, 3M has been integral in maintaining domestic and international supplies of essential personal protective equipment (PPE). These production and supply-chain challenges required innovation to train new employees faster and leverage a culture of continuous improvement.…
Talmage Wagstaff
Preventive maintenance, specifically in production and manufacturing industries, has been a fundamental part of product consistency for years. It is well known that without product consistency, customer complaints and rework will soon be the result. What does preventive maintenance do to directly…
Rich Press
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have produced synthetic gene fragments from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. This material, which is noninfectious and safe to handle, can help manufacturers produce more accurate and reliable diagnostic tests for…
Sarah Burlingame
There is more to lean manufacturing than improving a few processes. Sustainable lean success requires a companywide culture of daily continuous improvement. Companies that develop their people to think scientifically, using facts and data to drive their decisions, are often the ones that achieve…
Zane Patalive
Meet Humphrey. Humphrey is a gray squirrel that a friend of mine rescued as an abandoned baby squirrel. For weeks, my friend and his family nursed the young creature by hand. While Humphrey was growing, he became very friendly with the family members, often perching on their shoulders and snuggling…
Deborah Blumberg
In the summer of 2014, Aruna Ranganathan was doing postdoctoral research at a garment factory in Bangalore, India, when she noticed that some worker stations—but not all—were equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, a tool used to quantify workers’ output.
Ranganathan, now…
Celia Paulsen
October happens to be (among other things) Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Dental Hygiene Month, National Bullying Prevention Month, and my personal favorite, National Pizza Month. Plus, it’s Halloween! But I digress. We’re here to talk about cybersecurity.
Every manufacturer should hold…
Gleb Tsipursky
‘It’s not going away, and we have to face that reality.” That’s what the CEO and founder of a quality-centered high-tech manufacturing startup with 180 employees told the leadership team in early July 2020 to convince them of the need to do a strategic pivot to address Covid-19.
Previously, the…
Tim Mouw
To establish a successful quality control program, you need good instrumentation, robust software, and trained users. But even with everything in place, there are some common pitfalls to watch for when using a spectrophotometer to analyze color quality.
1. Bad standards and samples
Physical…
Ryan E. Day
Metrology may sound like an esoteric dark art, but it isn’t. If you’re involved in manufacturing of any stripe, you’re almost certainly a metrology practitioner. Coordinate metrology, on the other hand, is a more narrow subset of the field but still widely used in many industries for various…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Founded in 1984, the Coordinate Metrology Society (CMS) has championed portable coordinate measuring machine (CMM) technology ever since its inception. In some ways, the focus on portable CMMs overshadowed the traditional fixed CMM in much the same way any new technology garners the lion's share of…
Eric Stoop
Data can transform manufacturing. It’s also a term that continues to prompt discussions within the industry. People have been saying it for years now, and there is plenty of empirical evidence: Data are the way forward in business generally and manufacturing in particular.
But right now, when…
Chip Bell
He stood on a platform in the early afternoon of a cold November day only a few feet from the edge of Soldier’s National Cemetery. He was dizzy and feverish, suffering with the beginning of smallpox. It had been four months since the end of the bloody Battle of Gettysburg. And he delivered a two-…
Jim Benson
Last night I sat down to watch something that would help me barbecue meat better: a two hour-long movie called Barbecue. Simply that, by Australians. I figured it would be about making succulent shrimp or game meats. Something... Australian.
The work showcased people who cook with flame from…
Bruce Hamilton
Over years of listening to people describe their work, one single word has surfaced repeatedly as a barometer of what is frequently called “culture.” The use of the word “they” in conversation gives me insight into an organization’s ability to engage employees and sustain improvement.
The…
Jérôme-Alexandre Lavoie
On Sept. 24, 2020, Creaform released the latest products in its R-Series scanners and software, which can increase productivity by detecting and addressing issues using automated dimensional quality control.
The lineup includes the new MetraSCAN-R BLACK robot-mounted optical CMM scanner, four…
Harish Jose
Today I’m looking at the “house” of the Toyota Production System (TPS). The illustration below shows the two pillars of the TPS house, jidoka and just in time (JIT).
I’ve been thinking about why jidoka and JIT are the two pillars, and why they’re not kanban or kaizen.
Jidoka was developed from the…
Mark Williams
One of the favorite aspects of my career in the insurance industry is delivering a positive outcome to someone in the midst of a personally challenging situation. Whether it’s giving someone the means to provide for care when health starts to fail, or a cushion to ease financial burdens after the…
Thomas R. Cutler
More than 80 percent of U.S. food manufacturing plants operating today were built more than 20 years ago and may lack safety features. The average age of manufacturing assets and equipment currently in operation in the United States, according to IndustryWeek, is close to 20 years, and since 1990,…
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Millions of cocoa farmers live in poverty across western Africa. Over the years, these farmers have been forced to contend with geopolitical instability, predatory loan practices, and a general lack of information that hampers their ability to…
Ryan E. Day
In our ultra-connected world, user experience (UX) can be a life-or-death matter for consumer-facing businesses. User experience is so critical that savvy leaders integrate UX/UI (user interface) design with product development and even consider UX when shaping business strategy. Madeline Fraser,…
Claire Harbour, Antoine Tirard
In 2005, Fast Company published the now famous article, “Why We Hate HR.” Echoing a popular workplace belief, the authors asked why HR was broken and how it could be fixed. Human resources has evolved since then, with some corporations starting to think differently about the “people function.”
One…
NordVPN Teams
The FBI reported earlier this year that complaints of cyber attacks received by its cyber division had risen to almost 4,000 a day—a 400-percent increase over pre-coronavirus numbers. In one four-month period (January to April), 907,000 spam messages, 737 incidents related to malware, and 48,000…
Zach Murphree
The metal additive manufacturing (AM, aka 3D printing) industry is in vigorous pursuit of repeatable part quality. Its aim is to match the reliability and performance found in traditional manufacturing industries such as machining or casting. Repeatable quality opens the door to wide-scale…
