All Features
Katherine H. Freeman, Raymond Jeanloz, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
In 2020, the annual committee meeting of the journal we edit was a bit of a mess. It took place in March, just days before the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic, so some attendees canceled their travel even as others…
Glenn Daehn
Failure of a machine in a factory can shut it down. Lost production can cost millions of dollars per day. Component failures can devastate factories, power plants, and battlefield equipment.
To return to operation, skilled technicians use all the tools in their kit—machining, bending, welding, and…
Doug Devereaux
The premise for the NIST MEP Digital Supply-Chain Network project is familiar to MEP centers—many small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) are often not ready for Industry 4.0 and don’t know how to implement it. Manufacturers with fewer than 50 employees often lag in digital supply-chain areas…
Chuck Olinger
Most manufacturers want a quality management system (QMS) to meet strict quality values. They need one to expressly meet the needs of their specific organization yet be within the parameters of federal, state, and industry prerequisites.
For example, food, drug, and medical device companies all…
Nicola Jones, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
I am sitting in a darkened room, listening to upbeat music of the type often used at tech conferences to make attendees feel they are part of something big, waiting in eager anticipation for a keynote speaker to appear.
Bang on time,…
Knowledge at Wharton
Wharton professor G. Richard Shell’s graduate course on business responsibility is peppered with students he calls “ethics refugees.” They are young people who earned their bachelor’s degrees and landed a great job only to fall into an ethical or moral trap set by a boss, a co-worker, or the…
Paul Laughlin
Do you see the limitations and over-hyped expectations of today’s approach to artificial intelligence (AI)? Does it need a reboot, a redirection, to finally achieve its potential, one that truly understands us and we can trust?
That is the premise of a great book on the subject, Rebooting AI:…
Isaac Maw
Whether you deal with hydraulic or pneumatic seals such as wiper seals, or other types of seals and O-rings on gearboxes and other mechanical equipment, seals must be able to withstand a range of environments and duties, including extreme temperatures, high pressures, chemicals, and contamination…
Chip Bell
When you played cowboys and Indians as a kid, did you want to be the cowboy or the Indian? I wanted to be the Indian. All the ones I saw in comic books had super-cool moccasins and could move around with their bow and arrows without making a sound. And there were plenty of famous Native Americans…
Iffet Turken
We need instant adaptability to the new skill sets in the unknown future of work. The Covid-19 pandemic is a prime example of how change is accelerating and requiring us to adapt quickly. We often hear about the skill sets we will need but not enough about how executives will adapt to them. A “…
Peter Dizikes
When bringing technologies into the workplace, it pays to be realistic. Often, for instance, bringing new digital technology into an organization does not radically improve a firm’s operations. Despite high-level planning, a more frequent result is the messy process of frontline employees figuring…
Duke University
Price discounts and other promotions on consumer goods can boost a product’s sales in the short term, but that same strategy may destroy a brand’s equity, according to research from Carl Mela, a marketing professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
Brands often focus on the short-term…
Jim Hardeman
Customer complaints about service or food safety, and general quality incidents for delivered products, are bound to happen. It’s how brands use these incidents to further enhance product quality and the customer experience that matters.
Restaurant and grocery customers will—and should—report…
Eliot Dratch
Owning and operating a top-quality manufacturing business comes with a multitude of challenges. To help outline points of improvement and give your business a road map to success, California Manufacturing Technology Consulting (CMTC) offers these quality strategies to help you achieve premium…
Dawn Bailey
In 2020, MESA, a small business in Oklahoma, became to date the first and only three-time Baldrige Award recipient.
From a one-person consulting firm founded in 1979, MESA has grown to support a workforce of more than 250 people. The largest privately owned company in its market, it is a…
MIT News
First published June 7, 2021, on MIT News.
It’s no secret that a manufacturer’s ability to maintain and, ideally, increase production capability is the basis for long-run competitive success. But discovering a way to significantly increase production without buying a single piece of new equipment—…
Kimberly Merriman, David Greenway, Tamara Montag-Smit
As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers about remote work.
A good example of this is a recent op-ed written by the CEO of a Washington, D.C., magazine that suggested…
Michael Lee Stallard
Astronaut crews living and working in space experience as a matter of course what many of us experienced unexpectedly during the coronavirus pandemic. Consider these similarities.
Astronauts are physically isolated for a long period of time from family, friends, and the majority of their work…
Carlos Valdes-Dapena
In my work in collaboration and team effectiveness, I am sometimes approached about helping with a “dysfunctional team.” People use the word “dysfunction” liberally and can mean various things by it. I’ve learned some lessons about team dysfunction, and the most important one is that it isn’t what…
Del Williams
To enable raw water for use as cooling water, industrial facilities such as power, processing, and manufacturing plants prefilter raw water from rivers, lakes, gulfs, and coastlines to remove organic, aquatic, and other solids. It’s not as simple as it sounds.
The cooling water is typically used…
Sara Harrison
If you’ve watched Grey’s Anatomy, then you’ve gotten a peek into the complex hierarchies that rule a hospital. Over 17 seasons, the show’s eponymous heroine, Meredith Grey, ascends from a lowly intern to chief of general surgery, learning from the presiding residents and older surgeons along the…
Bryan Christiansen
Many techniques can be used to find the root causes of asset failures and other important events we want to analyze. Fault tree analysis is one of those techniques, and it is being utilized by many different companies to improve system reliability.
This guide aims to give a basic to intermediate…
Harry Hertz
Each year after the Quest for Excellence Conference, I sift through my notes and try to identify themes I have heard in the presentations of the new Baldrige Award recipients. The most recent summary was after the 2019 conference (the 2021 conference included recipients from the last two years).…
Nate Burke
In recent years, the focus and surge in e-commerce has been undeniable. There has been clear evidence of how a lack of online consideration can ultimately result in a brand’s demise, with Debenhams and Topshop just two recent examples. However, the latest moves by online giants, including Amazon,…
Del Williams
To meet increasingly strict compliance standards, such as the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), food processors now regularly use adenosine triphosphate (ATP) testing to monitor equipment surfaces for microbial growth. Add to this the need to minimize…