All Features
Dick Wooden
First of all, what does it mean to be orphaned by your customer relationship management (CRM) vendor? In short, it means that your CRM vendor sold you on a CRM product and for one reason or another forgot about you. Are you feeling left behind?
Of course, it’s no secret that choosing the right…
Jennifer Lynch
The process of alloy grade verification has advanced significantly with the development of portable and handheld devices that bring analytical capabilities traditionally found in the laboratory to anywhere rapid metals identification is needed. For years, handheld analysis technology has provided…
Fred Schenkelberg
If you have been a reliability engineer for a week or more, or worked with a reliability engineer for a day or more, someone has asked about testing planning. The questions often include, “How many samples?” and, “How long will the test take?” No doubt you’ve heard the sample-size question.
What…
Tannaz Mirchi
With airfares at their lowest point in seven years and airlines adding capacity, this year’s holiday air travel is slated to be 2.5 percent busier than last year. The system we use to coordinate all those flights, however, is decades old, and mostly depends on highly trained air traffic…
Dick Wooden
There are various phases to consider when focusing on a business strategy for customer relationship management (CRM). An initial phase is creating a vision of a better future with a customer-centric strategy fully implemented and supported by CRM technology.
This phase establishes a shared vision…
With more than 70,000 chemicals currently in common use—and 1,000 new chemicals coming into use every year—maintaining and managing their effective, appropriate, and responsible use is a challenging task. Cost, process, regulatory, and safety issues converge to make chemical management a critical…
Michael A. Witt
Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.
While globalization has benefited humanity in many ways, its continued progress is in serious doubt. As I wrote previously, the two leading political science theories, liberalism and realism, both predict that globalization…
Bruce Hamilton
While holiday shopping at one of my favorite food places, Johnson’s Popcorn, I came upon a scene reminiscent of our lean training video, Toast Kaizen. After I placed my order for 18 one-gallon buckets of caramel corn for friends and family, the Johnson’s kitchen shifted gears from mail-order sales…
Mark Rosenthal
One of my readers, Darren, commented with some great questions about the “Takt Time-Cycle Time” post on my blog. He wondered which system is more efficient, a fixed, rigid takt-based production line or a flexible one-piece flow?
In terms of designing a manual-based production line to meet a…
Joe Schlecht
According to the ISO/IEC Guide 99—“International vocabulary of metrology—Basic and general concepts and associated terms (VIM),” the traceability of a measurement result is demonstrated through a documented unbroken chain of calibrations, each contributing to the measurement uncertainty. This…
Harish Jose
The Forth Bridge is a famous railroad bridge in Scotland and is more than 125 years old. It needs painting to fend off rust. Albert Cherns, the late famous social scientist who founded the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University, identified the Forth Bridge principle as part of…
Chip Bell
It started out as a lackluster taxi ride from the airport to the hotel. But it turned regal and elegant the second I hailed the next taxi as I exited Charlotte Douglas Airport. The Crown Cab that pulled up was shiny and spotless. When the taxi driver raised the trunk to deposit my roller bag, I…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Leadership is not necessarily about getting people to follow you. In fact, the test of leadership effectiveness is what happens when you’re not there. If everything depends on you and falls apart when you’re not there, obviously the effectiveness of your team is limited. You can’t be there all the…
The common and recurring view of the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) research is that sentient and intelligent machines are just on the horizon. Machines understand verbal commands, distinguish pictures, drive cars, and play games better than we do. How much longer can it be…
Vijay Iyer
As the director of the structural heart team at Kaleida Health’s Gates Vascular Institute in Buffalo, New York, I perform minimally invasive, endovascular surgeries to repair structural defects of the heart. I specialize in valve replacements, clip procedures, and other structural heart treatments…
From aerospace applications to simple one-off projects built at home, additive manufacturing (AM) has gained incredible interest in all industry facets. Its rapid expansion into production manufacturing is due to the technology's immense versatility and use.
With additive manufacturing, objects…
Jeffrey Phillips
I love innovation. I love all facets of it: the discovery of needs, creativity, unique solutions, and the realization of ideas as new products and services. But what concerns me sometimes is the way in which we attempt to implement innovation, because we are likely to constrain it at the time we…
Kara Baskin
Care.com co-founder Donna Levin played a key part in that company’s growth, and the passion was personal. Levin’s work plans were curtailed when her son was 11 weeks old and had a seizure following a difficult pregnancy. Tests were inconclusive. Her daycare situation evaporated; she and her…
Dan Jacob
Disruption is a funny thing. You see it coming—kind of—but it’s hard to tell what it means. Back in the day, would you have foreseen the shift from taxis to Uber? Would you have predicted that HVAC units would be offered as a service rather than purchased as a product? These disruptive changes and…
Craig Schlenoff
Whether they’re behind the scenes assembling products or helping you parallel-park your car, robots are already playing a big role in our day-to-day lives, and their presence will only become more pervasive in the coming decades. But they aren’t good at everything—yet. For instance, robots in…
Welding is said to be more art than science. In part, this is a nod to the vital, skilled work that welders perform. It’s also recognition of the fact that the physics of the process is really, really difficult to understand.
I joined a NIST project on laser welding about two years ago. Before…
Donald J. Wheeler
Who can be against apple pie, motherhood, or good measurements? This is why everyone stands up and salutes when we are told to maintain our measurement systems in good calibration. But what is good calibration? By what method will we achieve it? And how will we know when we have it?
One day I…
Sponsored Content
Manufacturers often hold suppliers to a rigid quality process that dictates tight controls on all raw materials. Nonconforming material can potentially halt the production line, wasting time and money. Unfortunately, material mix-ups are a reality in critical manufacturing…
Mika Javanainen
Are your back office systems talking to your front office systems? Back office systems manage manufacturing functions as well as administrative functions such as quality management, accounts payable, and contract management. Examples of front office systems include customer relationship management…
Mike Richman
In the quality profession today, the term “guru” tends to be thrown around with reckless abandon, more often than not self-referentially by the “guru” him- or herself. Don’t get me wrong; there are many outstanding people now working in our field, with interesting and perhaps even revolutionary…
