All Features
David Chandler
Advanced metal alloys are essential in key parts of modern life, from cars to satellites, from construction materials to electronics. But creating new alloys for specific uses, with optimized strength, hardness, corrosion resistance, conductivity, and so on, has been limited by researchers’ fuzzy…
Corey Brown
The ongoing global Covid-19 pandemic has forced companies of all types to rapidly update policies and procedures governing how they share information in response to a world that is constantly changing around them. For the manufacturing sector in particular, their workforce is more spread out than…
Sky Cassidy
Whether you subscribe to the scientific definition of data (information on which operations are performed by a computer and transmitted in the form of electrical signals) or the philosophical definition (that which is known and used as the basis of reasoning or calculation), I think most people use…
Michael Taylor
Digital applications in manufacturing are not only becoming increasingly accepted; they are expected. However, for smaller manufacturers, the process of making this switch can be daunting. Initial expenses, as well as the cost of training employees, is enough to stop the process altogether.
But…
Jane Bianchi
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you’re a primary care physician and you refer one of your patients to another doctor for a colonoscopy. Will the patient follow through? If not, how will your team know to remind him or her? If the patient does receive a colonoscopy, will your team be alerted so…
Jim Benson
The strength of lean thinking and an agile mindset is that, at heart, they are both about continuous improvement. People want to, need to, improve. We need to get better at what we do, see increasing impact, and know we are making a difference.
If this is a core human need, why do most agile and…
Bruce Hamilton
Norman Bodek, who sadly left us on Dec. 10, 2020, at the age of 88, will no doubt best be remembered for the amazing library he brought us more than 30 years ago from Japan: primary sources like Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo, as well as brilliant consultants like Yashuhiro Monden and Shigihero…
Bahar Aliakbarian
The two major U.S. developers of the early Covid-19 vaccines are Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. They both developed mRNA vaccines, a relatively new type of vaccine. A major supply-chain issue is the temperature requirement for these vaccines.
The Pfizer vaccine needs to be stored at between –112° F…
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…
Craig Tomita
Industrial robots have been in existence and commercially available for more than 65 years. Factory automation, a more all-encompassing term, has been in existence in one form or another for considerably longer than that. Humans have continually come up with solutions to solve a wide variety of…
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…
Phanish Puranam, Julien Clément
Covid-19 has dealt most businesses a heavy blow, but the pandemic has at least one under-acknowledged upside. By moving organizations from the office into the virtual space, the pandemic has cracked open a treasure trove of data that can be used to streamline and optimize how organizations operate…
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Knowable Magazine
If you were to contact a group of recycling professionals, as one recent survey did, and ask them to list all the ways that consumer product manufacturers drive them crazy, you’d probably hear a lot about “shrink sleeves”—those full-body, shrink-to-fit plastic labels found on beer cans, yogurt…
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…
Joerg Niessing, Fred Geyer
A new digital era of business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing is upon us. It’s driven by corporate customer demand for online access to their suppliers’ offerings and expertise. Taking advantage of this shift is challenging because it requires moving from deeply embedded B2B sales and…
Matt Martin
Morale has dipped during Covid-19. We’re separated from our friends, families, and colleagues but busier than ever. The majority of workers are reporting higher stress, greater anxiety, and emotional exhaustion. Employers have a responsibility to help workers get through this. Here are five ways to…
Knowledge at Wharton
Real-world, face-to-face communication—complete with eye contact, body language, and other important sources of information—is a rarity in business today, and the potential for failing to convey an intended message or giving the wrong impression has grown. Neuroscience research has uncovered…
Craig Tomita
Are the days of standard industrial robots numbered? Absolutely not. In part one of this series, we looked at the unique attribute of cobots. In this article, we’ll see how industrial robots do what they’re designed to do extremely well—high speed, high repeatability, heavy payloads, and more.…
Bryan Christiansen
Safety managers have a multitude of safety strategies to protect the health and safety of their workforce. Guidelines for personal protective equipment (PPE), lockout/tagout (LOTO) programs, fire exit signage—the list is endless. However, to get the most out of your employees and resources,…
Sébastien Breteau
As commercialization strategies evolve amid Covid-19, and supply chains continue to trend toward diversification, the only way for businesses to control their destiny is to double down on quality standards. If cash is king, then quality is the king’s closest confidant since high quality protects…
Robert Sanders
The U.S. Department of Defense and more than 80 companies, universities, states, and research institutes will invest at least $275 million during the next seven years to scale up the microbial production of biomolecules. The effort will enable a growing biomanufacturing industry to supply a broad…
Amitava Chattopadhyay
For conventional, profit-seeking companies, moving into social impact carries huge contradictions. An ad hoc, small-scale initiative is an inexpensive way to do a bit of good and receive a nice warm glow in the process. But any attempt to achieve more serious impact through scaling the initiative…
Eric Whitley
Any company that decides to enter the mattress business is no doubt entranced by one undeniable fact: Everybody needs one.
Those companies that start producing and selling mattresses also quickly run into a harsh fact: Everybody already has one.
Purple saw opportunity. It looked at the positives…
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…