Blame it on Moore’s law. We live in a digital Pangaea, a world of borderless data driven by technology, and the speed and density with which data can be transmitted and handled.

It’s no secret that manufacturing companies operate in an inherently unstable environment. Every operational weakness poses a risk to efficiency, quality, and ultimately, to profitability.

For nearly a century, statistical process control (SPC) has been the cornerstone of quality management and process control. But traditional SPC can’t keep up as the pace of manufacturing accelerates.

El-Com Systems Corp. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of El-COM Systems Solutions based in California. The local company has been in Puerto Rico since 2016 operating in Caguas.

Setting the process aim is a key element in the short production runs that characterize the lean production of multiple products.

So many companies are shifting their employees to working from home to address the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Yet they’re not considering the potential quality disasters that can occur as a result of this transition.

Story update 5/6/2020: The charts and some data have been updated to reflect the data available on the date this article was published.

Each day we receive data that seek to quantify the Covid-19 pandemic. These daily values tell us how things have changed from yesterday, and give us the current totals, but they are difficult to understand simply because they are only a small piece of the puzzle.

The phrase “flatten the curve” means to slow the transmission of the coronavirus (Covid-19) in order to spread the total number of cases out over a longer period of time.

This article is an update to “Tracking Covid-19” that Al Pfadt, Kathryn Whyte, and I wrote last week.