All Features
Gleb Tsipursky
Any association would love a member-retention rate of 75 percent. Unfortunately, according to a 2017 report cited in the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) publication, Associations Now, retention rates for all associations are falling. While in 2016, 73 percent of associations…
Quality Digest
Getting your product into customers’ hands is often an undervalued—and under-engineered—part of your organization’s value chain. If the pandemic’s effect on our supply chains has taught us anything, it’s this: Diligent reevaluation of our modus operandi is a must for success.
When the Covid…
(Vision Engineering: New Milford, CT) -- Vision Engineering announces the launch of VE Cam, a new, simple-to-use compact digital microscope for a wide range of applications at APEX 2022. The VE Cam digital microscope was launched at Productronica 2021 in Munich and makes its North American debut at…
Donald J. Wheeler
On the face of it, it seems to be impossible for skewed variables to add up to a normally distributed result. Yet both common experience and mathematical theory combine to show us that this does indeed happen. In fact it is a fundamental property of probability theory which, in turn, explains the…
Kate Zabriskie
They’re with me, I just know it, at least I think they’re with me... OK, maybe not. Oh no! They’re gone. Well, thank goodness that’s over!
Has that happened to you? How about the following:
• I addressed this issue 30 minutes ago. How did they forget so soon? They have minds like sieves—easy in…
Sabine Terrasi
In intralogistics, there has been a real hype about robotics for some years now, whether in trade journals or at fairs. Most of them are classic six-axis articulated robots that are looking for their way out of a production environment and into logistics. The goal: fully automated small-parts…
Mary Beth Gallagher
First published Nov. 19, 2021, on MIT News.
In the 1960s, the advent of computer-aided design (CAD) sparked a revolution in design. For his Ph.D. thesis in 1963, MIT professor Ivan Sutherland developed Sketchpad, a game-changing software program that enabled users to draw, move, and resize shapes…
(Nordlocker: Panama) -- The human element remains the weakest link in cybersecurity, as an annual report reveals that 85 percent of all data breaches are in one way or another caused by an employee. As digital technologies become essential in modern organizations, no industry is safe from…
Bryce Austin
There were seven people seated around the table: The CEO, the VP, the CFO, the special agent from the FBI, the owner, the forensics technician, and the company’s CISO (chief information security officer).
“Don’t pay,” was the CEO’s vote. Same for the VP.
“Pay it,” was the owner’s response. The CFO…
Matt Fieldman
Some are calling it, “The Great Resignation.” Others are calling it “The Great Reshuffle.” After spending the past year as executive director of America Works, I’ve talked with more than 250 manufacturing workforce development professionals throughout the MEP National Network and our partners.…
Prashant Yadav, Antoine Désir
The pandemic has seen an unprecedented global effort to accelerate the development of safe and effective vaccines as well as a rapid expansion of vaccine manufacturing capacity. However, challenges in further scaling up vaccine manufacturing capacity to meet higher-than-expected demand, and the…
(Marposs: Auburn Hills, MI) -- Marposs, a leader in measurement, inspection, and test technologies, has announced its NVH Gear Tester for identifying potential gear defects at the component level prior to gear box assembly. The NVH gear tester, which works on the single-flank testing principle of…
Lauren Hinkel
First published Dec. 6, 2021, on MIT News.
While standing in a kitchen, you push some metal bowls across the counter into the sink with a clang, and drape a towel over the back of a chair. In another room, it sounds like some precariously stacked wooden blocks fell over, and there’s an epic toy car…
Kurt Matzler
In 1938, MIT student Claude Shannon solved one of the most complex problems of circuit design. Working on an early analog computer, he realized that an idea from an undergraduate philosophy course could solve the problem. Applying Boolean algebra, Shannon laid the foundation of all electronic…
Jacob Bourne
Simulation technology is continually advancing to model increasingly real-world product behavior; however, many companies lag in its adoption.
A recent survey found that only 37 percent of respondents said they applied manufacturing simulation during the product design phase. The vast majority…
Andrea Luangrath
Consumers who see a product on sale being virtually touched are more engaged and willing to pay more than if the item is displayed on its own, according to a recent research paper I co-authored.
Behavioral economists have previously shown that people value objects more highly if they own them, a…
Quality Digest
(Silicon Designs: Kirkland, WA) -- Silicon Designs Inc. announces the global market launch of its Model 1525 Low-G Series of MEMS DC accelerometer chips, with stock quantities now available for immediate customer shipment.
The Silicon Designs Model 1525 Low-G Series is designed to offer reliable,…
Roxanne Oclarino
Artificial intelligence (AI) promises that organizations will be 40-percent more efficient by 2035, unlocking an estimated $14 trillion in new economic value to global GDP by 2030, according to PwC. This makes it the biggest commercial opportunity in today’s fast-changing business climate, all…
Adel Guitouni, Cynthia Waltho, Mohammadreza Nematollahi
In 2019, global supply chains moved more than $19 trillion in exported goods. The production and sale of many items we need and use—including toys, clothes, food, electronics, and home furniture—depend on global supply chains.
For most of us, supply chains are no longer an abstract concept. The…
(ABB: Zurich, Switzerland) -- Global technology company ABB is providing a package of metals industry-specific digital-ready solutions, including drives, controller, and converter infrastructure, to enable Global Steel Wire (GSW), part of CELSA Group, to modernize operations at its Santander steel…
(EASE: Mission Viejo, CA) -- Ease Inc., a leading provider in plant floor audits and insights software for manufacturers, has announced the 2021 Champions for Quality Award winners. In this fourth year of the awards there were a record number of nominations from across multiple countries and…
Arron Angle
I just received and read the “2021 ASQE Insights on Excellence Executive Brief.” The brief examines how quality initiatives are progressing in the digital era, based on the views and experiences of 542 executives and quality professionals from global enterprises. Here we go again, I thought.
Yes,…
Nicholas Dagalakis
The RoboCrane—now hard at work at the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear cleanup sites—is a good example of a successfully commercialized technology invented at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). I’ll try to tell that story here.
During the early 1980s, the manufacturing of…
Rick Grimaldi
Employee engagement has been a boardroom buzzword for quite some time. We’ve long known engagement matters. Still, the unspoken “but” has always been that metrics—especially those of the performance and financial ilk—matter more. Now, with the workplace talent shortage at a 10-year high, the time…
Quality Digest
(Detection Technology: Billerica, MA) -- Detection Technology, a global leader in X-ray detector solutions, unveiled the industry’s first off-the-shelf detector series optimized for value and mainstream medical CT (computed tomography) imaging needs. The plug-and-play-type series, branded as X-ACE…
