All Features
Gleb Tsipursky
Stakeholder engagement is one of the more critical aspects of leadership, whether you’re a team leader or a member of a cross-functional team trying to lead team members to focus on quality. Stakeholders can be anyone from your colleagues to suppliers to business partners, and your relationship…
Tamela Serensits
Quality managers have a problem. The success of their quality program hinges on one thing. It’s not KPIs, and it’s not methodology. It isn’t even employee engagement or customer satisfaction. The one thing a quality manager needs most is leadership buy-in.
Quality programs fail because they do…
Fred Schenkelberg
There is a type of error that occurs when conducting statistical testing: to work very hard to correctly answer the wrong question. This error occurs during the formation of the experiment.
Despite creating a perfect null and alternative hypothesis, sometimes we are simply investigating the wrong…
Jose Luis Alvarez
Alexander Hamilton, one of the United States’ founding fathers, famously called energy the most important characteristic of the executive branch of government. “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” he said in the Federalist Papers. “A feeble execution is but another…
Applied Automation Technologies - AAT3D
(AAT3D: Indianapolis) -- Andretti Autosport has announced that Applied Automation Technologies (AAT3D) will serve as the team’s official metrology solution. AAT3D began in 1987 as a CAD-based dimensional measurement software and developed into a global leader of software solutions for metrology,…
Gleb Tsipursky
Negotiators, even professional ones, make surprisingly many wrong decisions that doom negotiations that should have succeeded. Many of these mistakes relate to overestimating how well they can read the feelings and thoughts of other parties in the negotiation, as well as the extent to which the…
Andrew Peterson
Manufacturing robotics is to some extent following a similar path of advances to those in machining and fixed automation systems. Though the ROI is most easily measured in efficiency and cost savings, manufacturers are looking for robotic technology to help them resolve a pain point in their…
Aarti Gumaledar, Sameer Hasija, V. Paddy Padmanabhan
Globalization of trade and decades-long innovation in supply chain networks have resulted in significant benefits for all stakeholders—greater efficiencies, lower costs, and greater access to markets, to name just a few. Yet Covid-19 has exposed vulnerabilities in global supply chains. Dispersed…
Taylor Brown
It’s easy to think of quality as a niche responsibility, requiring only the involvement of those working in quality-based roles. But involving your entire medical device organization—and even suppliers and manufacturers—in the quality process can lead to better products, greater efficiency, and…
Anne Trafton
This story was originally published by MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).
In some ways, learning to program a computer is similar to learning a new language. It requires learning new symbols and terms, which must be organized correctly to instruct the computer what to…
Ryan E. Day
‘For sale: 3 bd, 2 ba, 1,407 sq ft home in Riverhead, NY,” the groundbreaking listing on Zillow reads. “Own a piece of history! This is the world’s first 3D-printed home for sale [on the open market]. The future begins with this historic property!” Perhaps the exclamation marks are warranted.…
Ashley Y. Metcalf
Lean supply chains are designed based on several key principles. First, the general philosophy of lean is to reduce or eliminate nonvalue-added waste. The concept of reducing waste is always beneficial to organizations. We should continuously strive to reduce things like wasted time, wasted effort…
Quality Digest
(Siemens : Plano, TX) -- Siemens Digital Industries Software announces Teamcenter Quality software, a new suite of solutions that provide a closed-loop approach for quality management, from design to manufacturing on the shop floor and back again. Teamcenter Quality helps keep product development,…
Quality Digest
Eight years ago Quality Digest published the article, “Suit Up, Show Up, Give Up: Are e-marketing techniques killing trade shows?” The premise was that electronic marketing was slowly diminishing the need for in-person events. However, until recently inertia has kept these sprawling shows alive as…
Liz Uram
Have you ever dreaded having a conversation with an employee who wasn’t meeting performance expectations? Maybe you avoided it, hoping it would improve on its own? If so, you are not alone.
Most managers would agree that one of their least favorite tasks is talking to an employee about poor…
Gregg Profozich
The manufacturing world, across industry sectors, has witnessed significant improvements in productivity and competitiveness during the past couple of decades as a result of continuous improvement (CI) methodologies. Two of these methodologies that are recognized as having broad applicability are…
Henrik Bresman
Right now it seems far away, but a post-Covid world is coming. Is it closer to us than the start of the pandemic? We can’t say with any certainty, but we must think about how we will work in the future. The sudden changes of early 2020 showed us how we are capable of extraordinary transformations…
Quality Digest
(NewTek: Pennsauken, NJ) -- NewTek Sensor Solutions offers the RV series of rotary position sensors that measure and provide feedback on the rotary displacement of rotating elements in industrial benchtop and test and measurement applications. While featuring a full 360° mechanical range, these…
Adam Conner-Simons
This story was originally published by MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).
Scatterplots. You may not know them by name, but if you spend more than 10 minutes online, you’ll find them everywhere.
They’re popular in news articles, in the data science community, and…
Knowledge at Wharton
A new study finds that productivity has remained stable or even increased for many companies that shifted to remote work during the coronavirus pandemic. However, innovation has taken a hit as both leaders and employees feel more distant from each other.
Businesses tend to spend less money and…
(University of Rochester: Rochester, NY) -- Researchers in Rochester are developing an optical chip on a disposable card that can detect exposure to multiple viruses within a minute—including the coronavirus that causes Covid-19—from a single drop of blood.
Led by University of Rochester Medical…
Jill Neimark
If you’ve ever stayed in a relationship too long or stuck with a project that was going nowhere, you’re not alone. Humans are generally reluctant to give up on something they’ve already committed time and effort to. It’s called the “sunk costs” phenomenon, where the more resources we sink into an…
Gregg Profozich
In the first article of this series, we saw that Lean and Six Sigma are complementary continuous improvement methodologies that reduce the overall waste and variability in production processes, respectively. Although these two methodologies use different approaches and tools to drive improvements…
Catherine Cooksey
New employees at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are often surprised to learn that our agency is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. How could this be? On the surface it seems that the missions of the two organizations couldn’t be more different. The Department of…
Clare Naden
Never have we been more acutely aware of the importance of reliability when it comes to laboratory testing. As the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted, the development of accurate diagnostic tests plays an important role in outbreak management.
Whether a laboratory develops its own test…
