All Features
Lawrence Bernard
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have determined how to avoid costly and potentially irreparable damage to large metallic parts fabricated through additive manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, caused by residual stress in the material.…
Douglas C. Fair, Scott A. Hindle
In less than two months we will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the control chart, a tool most often associated with statistical process control (SPC). Considering SPC from our modern perspective made us ask, “Is SPC still relevant?”
It’s a question asked within the purview of…
Mark Hembree
Everyone knows customer service is increasingly automated and impersonal—that’s a “dog bites man” story. It’s not news because it happens all the time. When a man bites a dog, that’s news.
But what if you’re bitten by a chatbot or AI? Aside from newsworthiness, is the owner responsible? Where does…
Donald J. Wheeler
When presented with a collection of data from operations or production, many will start their analysis by computing descriptive statistics and fitting a probability model to the data. But before you do this, there’s an easy test that you need to perform.
This test will quantify the chances that…
Adam Zewe
If a robot traveling to a destination has just two possible paths, it only needs to compare the routes’ travel time and probability of success. But if the robot is traversing a complex environment with many possible paths, choosing the best route amid so much uncertainty can quickly become an…
Mike Figliuolo
If you have kids, you know the nauseating feeling of one of them going down for the count and having to rush them to the emergency room. I had that grim experience recently. What I learned from that ER visit is businesses can make very strong statements about how little they care about their…
Jennifer King
The cost of poor quality can be devastating to business: Failed quality control costs manufacturers anywhere between 15–20% of their total profits on average, and as much as 40% for some, the ASQ reveals. Businesses with successful quality programs, on the other hand, can benefit from increased…
Alonso Diaz, Maria DiBari
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) emphasizes the importance of being prepared for device recalls.
FDA product recalls are on the rise in the post-pandemic era. There has been a clear upward trend from 2021 through 2023, and medical devices ranked the highest of all product types. (See…
Mike Figliuolo
Organizations that use “stay bonuses” as a retention tool could be making a huge mistake. Instead of letting poor performers go, they pay tons of money to keep them.
It’s been a rough year in the market. Let’s hit rewind and explore some underlying axioms about business. Sure, many of these are…
Alissa Greenberg
Calls for cultural transformation have become ubiquitous in the past few years, encompassing everything from advancing racial justice and questioning gender roles to rethinking the American workplace. Hazel Rose Markus recalls the summer of 2020 as a watershed for those conversations. “Everybody…
Stephanie Ojeda
Implementing an automated compliance management solution is a mammoth undertaking with high stakes and potentially high returns for those who navigate the process successfully.
Get it right and you could save thousands of labor hours, avoid millions of dollars in compliance issues, and free up…
Mike Figliuolo
It’s important to have customer-friendly policies if you want to have a great customer service culture. Your policies drive team behaviors, so be sure they’re consistent with the brand you want to put forward.
I’m going to hark back to my recent post, “$325 Equals $210? The Math of Customer-…
William A. Levinson
In his Quality Digest article published in February 2023, Michael Mills1 reported that the next version of ISO 9001 will add to clause 4.1, “Understanding the organization and its context” the words, “the organization shall determine whether climate change is a relevant issue.”
Although nothing in…
James Chan
Tracking work orders is an essential aspect of work order management, and it becomes immensely more efficient with the help of tracking software.
Work orders are the centerpiece of an effective maintenance program. Once a work order request is initiated, it triggers a set of tasks and workflows…
Roman Davydov
In 2024, operating in the automotive market has become increasingly difficult. Global and local supply chain disruptions, product quality issues, and ongoing talent shortages are some of the greatest challenges automotive businesses face globally.
The majority of automotive companies already…
Adam Sutter
In the dynamic and ever-evolving landscape of business, the concept of transformation often conjures images of monumental overhauls and radical shifts. However, for some enterprises, effective transformation takes a different, more nuanced form—one that involves strategic adjustments rather than…
Maggie Overfelt
Michele Gelfand finds inspiration for new projects all around her: taking in the banter in a boardroom, speaking with taxi drivers when traveling, observing the interactions between physicians and nurses during an unexpected trip to the doctor. The idea for one of her most recent papers was sparked…
Angie Basiouny
New research from Wharton shows that technology firms pull a more diverse pool of job applicants when they offer remote work, a finding that could help shape how jobs are designed in the future.
In their paper, accepted for publication in Management Science, Wharton professors David Hsu and …
NIST
Stain-resistant clothing, fast-food wrappers, and extreme weather gear such as certain jackets and pants—these products get many of their desirable features from a class of manufactured chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). But there’s a major downside: Researchers have found…
Audrey Kim
Emails that drone on and on. Meetings that could have been Slack messages. Memos loaded with empty jargon. We’re all familiar with friction, or what Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao describe as “forces that make it harder, slower, more complicated, or downright impossible to get things done.”
In…
Stephanie Ojeda
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously wrote, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.”
In the field of quality, internal audits are the equivalent of sunlight. Like spring cleaning, internal audits provide the opportunity to bring process issues into the open before…
Donald J. Wheeler
Over the past two months we’ve considered the properties of lognormal and gamma probability models. Both of these families contain the normal distribution as a limit. To complete our survey of widely used probability models, this column will look at Weibull distributions, a family that doesn’t…
Jamie Bihary
An internal audit can be an overwhelming prospect, especially if you’re new to a company or internal auditing in general.
The MedTech space is huge, and even the standards that are meant to help, like ISO 13485:2016, cover a lot of ground.
So, if you’re part of the audit team in your company, and…
Mike Figliuolo
Many people proclaim they are gurus, ninjas, and other silly titles. Giving yourself such a title can cause people to lose respect for you, and it can cost you credibility.
Titles matter. A lot. So do email addresses and signature blocks. As unfortunate and as shallow as it is, people make a first…
Matthew Greenwood
The next frontier for industrial digitization and automation is the convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision.
AI-powered machine vision promises to transform the way industrial manufacturers conduct their business, according to experts at a recent webinar hosted by the…
