All Features
Thomas Malnight, Ivy Buche
The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted different responses from company CEOs seeking to ensure their businesses survive. Keeping their employees safe has been the first priority, but beyond that, their task has involved understanding the situation, launching countermeasures, and trying to evolve ways…
Gleb Tsipursky
Have you changed your views about Covid-19 months into this pandemic? Or are you anchoring to the same views you held last spring?
For example, many people still believe the false claim spread by many prominent leaders in March 2020 that Covid is no worse than the common flu. They protest against…
Tim Waldo
If you are like many small and medium-sized manufacturers, finding good help has been a pain point for many years, and it has become even more difficult during the Covid-19 pandemic. The market forces driving that dynamic are not likely to change soon.
Your shop has had to become more adaptive and…
Jeffrey Phillips
First, a slight diatribe. Why is it that company leaders think their people can do successful innovation when they don’t share a common language? In this article’s title I’ve used the word “disruptive,” and by this I mean innovation in the “third horizon”—incremental, breakthrough, and disruptive.…
Ryan E. Day
If you are a quality engineer or maybe even the quality manager of a manufacturing company, investing in quality improvements may be a no-brainer. Defects are inherently undesirable, right? Well, yes, but at the level of plant manager, president, or CEO, decisions about where to allocate assets…
Ken Voytek
During the past few years, I have written more than a few blogs and papers looking at manufacturing productivity across the 50 states. I wanted to update some of these analyses to reflect more recent data, see what they tell us, and examine how states were performing when looking at the change in…
Natalie Weber
Unlike Covid-19, remote audits aren’t unprecedented. Remote audits didn’t start with the pandemic, although it has forced more companies to use them than previously. At MasterControl, we’ve been doing remote audits for years for our international customers. It saves time and expense, and it’s every…
Steven Stein
Recently there have been a number of articles whose authors discuss conducting assessments remotely because of the pandemic. This article will discuss my experience with an actual assessment conducted remotely, how the plan changed in response to the pandemic, lessons learned, and some of my…
Sanjay Mishra
As the weather cools, the number of infections of the Covid-19 pandemic are rising sharply. Hamstrung by pandemic fatigue, economic constraints, and political discord, public health officials have struggled to control the surging pandemic. But now, a rush of interim analyses from pharmaceutical…
Nader Moayeri
I am part of a grassroots effort at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that is developing an exposure notification system for pandemics in general, though we hope it could be used in at least a limited fashion during the current Covid-19 pandemic. We are fortunate at NIST to…
Alper Kerman
Huh? What? At least that was my response the first time I heard the words "zero trust" when I started working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) in the fall of 2018. Mind you, I was also making a fresh start with an…
Gleb Tsipursky
Does the phrase “garbage in—garbage out” (GIGO) ring a bell? That’s the idea that if you use flawed, low-quality information to inform your decisions and actions, you’ll end up with a rubbish outcome. Yet despite the popularity of the phrase, we see such bad outcomes informed by poor data all the…
Hamza Mudassir
Disney has announced a significant restructuring of its media and entertainment business, boldly placing most of its growth ambitions and investments into its recently launched streaming service, Disney+. The 97-year-old media conglomerate is now more like Netflix than ever before.
What this means…
Victor Piedrafita
During the last decade, we’ve witnessed the emergence of sustainability issues among the most important business concerns in a firm’s supply chain. An increasing number of firms have reexamined their relations with suppliers and moved forward to build a more sustainable supply network, by not only…
Erik Fogelman, Jeff Orszak
With the increasing power of digital technology, the idea of a connected manufacturing system that can sense, analyze, and respond will soon be a reality. This idea—called “intelligent edge”—combines computing power, data analytics, and advanced connectivity to allow responses to be made much…
John Keogh
Almost all businesses involved in the food supply chain have experienced effects ranging from a mild shock to severe disruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic, and further disruptions may be ahead this winter.
Yet not all organizations have learned critical lessons, and history shows us some…
Grant Ramaley
IEC 60601-1: “Medical electrical equipment,” edition 3.1, is the base medical-device standard to ensure “basic safety and essential performance” of medical electrical equipment. It is used by medical device regulators but also recognized by some other regulatory authorities as a regulatory…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Merilee Kern
As Covid-19 rages on, warning sirens have sounded of late amid a flurry of headlines surrounding ultraviolet C (UVC) light device-safety issues. Rightfully so, as the current pandemic has ushered in a veritable wild west of UVC gadget deployments with subpar consumer safeguards, instructions, or…
Tinglong Dai, Guihua Wang, Ronghuo Zheng
The Covid-19 pandemic has crippled the airline industry. Passenger numbers are down more than two-thirds from last year, and airlines have been canceling flights and shutting down routes.
It’s frustrating for travelers, but for patients on organ transplant waiting lists, the loss of flights can…