All Features
Eric Gasper
Measurement devices in manufacturing facilities are as ubiquitous as Skittles in trick-or-treat bags. Some companies have thousands of devices in their inventories and depend on them to provide accurate information. This is why timely calibration of all measurement devices is critical to…
Mike Richman
For manufacturers in diverse sectors such as automotive, aerospace, electronics, and medical device, there’s little question that ensuring great quality would be impossible without the proper testing of materials. And proper material testing applications begin with reliable and repeatable…
M. Mitchell Waldrop, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Back in the 1990s, when U.S. banks started installing automated teller machines in a big way, the human tellers who worked in those banks seemed to be facing rapid obsolescence. If machines could hand out cash and accept deposits on their…
Kevin Meyer
During the late 1990s, I was working in the Silicon Valley for a medical device company, responsible for a drug-infusion pump manufacturing operation. I had just completed a crazy period where I had also “temporarily” (months and months...) led the advanced engineering department after that manager…
Jason Furness
All organizations are looking to increase the competency of their employees and, hopefully, of themselves. Looking at this from the base level up, in a practical sense our competency evolves with experience, expertise, and possibly, time.
1. Unknowing
We begin by not knowing about a skill, issue,…
P. Richard Hahn
Data science is hot right now. The number of undergraduate degrees in statistics has tripled in the past decade, and as a statistics professor, I can tell you that it isn’t because freshmen love statistics.
Way back in 2009, economist Hal Varian of Google dubbed statistician the “next sexy job.”…
Aytekin Tank
In his book, The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results (Bard Press, 2013), author Gary Keller reminds us that everyone has 24 hours in a day. So, why do some people earn more, achieve more, and get more done? They “go small.”
“When you want the absolute best chance…
Harish Jose
I am writing today about “bootstrap kaizen.” This is something I have been thinking about for a while. Wikipedia describes bootstrapping as “a self-starting process that is supposed to proceed without external input.” The term was developed from a 19th-century figure of speech—“pull oneself over a…
Brian Maskell
If you are a CEO of a manufacturing company with many value streams, it’s impractical to think that you have the time to review all the performance measures of every value stream in your company. Yet you need to know the operational impact of lean on your entire organization.
The traditional…
Mike Richman
Leaders lead. Those two simple words conceal the complicated fact that being a change agent means confronting the failures of the past and confidently facing the promise of the future. Stories addressing these facts, along with hot takes on current news and a preview of an exciting upcoming webinar…
Roopinder Tara
It takes guts to come to the heart of high tech, in San Francisco, and preach a message that is about putting people—women, no less—onto the assembly lines of America’s factories. Danielle Applestone, of Daughters of Rosie, tells the hipsters gathered at Autodesk’s Design Night that, yes, there are…
Annette Franz
Traditionally, managers have relied on the annual performance review to provide employees with feedback. However, surveys indicate employees don’t find the process valuable. Simply meeting once a year to discuss their progress doesn’t give employees a thorough sense of their own performance. It…
Jeffrey Phillips
It finally came to me last week. For more than a decade I’ve been working with corporations, trying to help them accelerate their ability to generate new, interesting ideas to market as viable products and services. In some instances we’ve been successful, and in other instances there were…
Lolly Daskal
Every company I speak at, every leader I coach, I see a constant pattern: Virtually everyone sees struggle as something negative.
At the heart of this perception, people get too caught up in the idea of struggle to consider what struggle at its core is all about. Most people cannot see themselves…
Gary Bell
It is all too common in the industry: A part design is created and sent out for production only to hit repeated snags as questions arise about datums, locators, symbols, and values. Even simple misunderstandings, such as where the geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) lines terminate,…
Mike Richman
This is the second half of our two-part interview with Doug Fair, who is the chief operating officer of InfinityQS. In part 1, we chatted with Fair about data gluttony, the process for uncovering actionable information, and the power of sampling. The conversation continues here as we dive into a…
Naphtali Hoff
In an earlier article, I shared some reasons that so many leaders do not delegate more often and presented arguments why they should. I also spelled out seven steps to more effective delegation. Here, I will delve into whom to consider when seeking to delegate tasks and projects.
Though the term “…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Have you heard this? “Just because this department is a bit dingy—and it’s sometimes harder than heck to get the scoop on things—doesn’t mean it’s a bad place. Good work happens here. In fact, we’ve been doing darn good work in this area long before you showed up with a bucket of hope called…
Andreas Engelhardt
An international standard that specifies requirements for an occupational health and safety (OH&S) management system, ISO 45001:2018—“Occupational health and safety management systems–requirements” replaces OHSAS 18001 as the primary OH&S standard used internationally. It follows other…
Sylvie Couture
In 2012, CMP Advanced Mechanical Solutions, a leader in the design and manufacture of sheet metal enclosures, mechanical assemblies, and machined systems, burst onto the Industry 4.0 scene with its avant-garde use of the visual work instruction software VKS. This software allowed the company to…
Laura Smith
Propelled by 30 years of audit experience, Craig Cochran channels his vast knowledge to author quality publications and teach others the fundamentals of auditing excellence. In his current role as project manager with Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership at Georgia Tech, Cochran spends his…
Nicole Radziwill
Data science and machine learning have surged in prominence during the past few years, and digital transformation seems to be on everyone’s agenda. Have you ever wondered why? Even though quality engineering has long been a data-driven pursuit, we now have the potential to get even deeper insights…
Dan Jacob
LNS Research published its research, “Driving Operational Performance With Digital Innovation: Connecting Risk, Quality, and Safety for Superior Results” to address fundamental challenges quality and safety leaders face today.
If quality and safety are separate functions in your organization (…
Harish Jose
I am a quality manager by profession. Thus, I think about quality a lot. How would one define “quality?” A simple view of quality is “conformance to requirements.” This simplistic view of quality lacks the complexity that it should have. It assumes that everything is static, the customer will…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In this all-manufacturing episode, we look at the STEM pipeline into manufacturing, supplier development, how to make sense of manufacturing data and, no, manufacturing is not dead.
“Strengthening the STEM Workforce Pipeline Through Outreach”
NIST does more than just research and come up with…
