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Quality Digest
One question led the founders of Nemo’s Garden, a subsea farming platform, to embark on its mission to take agriculture beneath the waves and bring better harvests to market: “Seventy percent of the planet is covered by water. Why don't we try to use part of the ocean to make more food, in a better…
Otto de Graaf
Despite the urgency of the climate crisis, and smart tech that enables the transition toward the factory of the future, for many manufacturers sustainability still feels like an afterthought rather than a priority. Certainly, sustainability may require big changes in strategy, processes, technology…
Jorge Gonzalez Henrichsen
In April 2022, China's manufacturing output fell to its lowest level in two years, according to official data. The figures were the latest sign of economic pain as Beijing maintains its uncompromising zero-Covid response.
Dozens of cities, including Shenzhen and Shanghai, have been partially or…
Hayder Radha
It’s hard to miss the flashing lights of fire engines, ambulances, and police cars ahead of you when you’re driving down the road. But in at least 11 cases from January 2018 to July 2021, Tesla’s Autopilot advanced driver-assistance system did just that. This led to 11 accidents in which Teslas…
Prashant Yadav
During the past two and a half years, we’ve seen unparalleled innovation and private-public collaboration in the global fight against Covid-19. The rapid development and rollout of new vaccines, diagnostic tests, and therapeutics have saved millions of lives.
However, these developments haven’t…
Anisur Rahman, Arif Arifuzzaman, Edgar Lara-Curzio, Tomonori Saito, Sungjin Kim
Researchers at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ONRL) have developed an upcycling approach that adds value to discarded plastics for reuse in additive manufacturing, or 3D printing. The readily adoptable, scalable method introduces a closed-loop strategy that could globally…
Richard Harpster
On Dec. 7, 2021, Ford Motor Co. updated its IATF 16949—“Customer specific requirements” (CSR), which require the use of reverse FMEAs (RFMEA) on new equipment (“tooling”). The first sentence of the reverse FMEA requirement reads: “Organizations are required to have a process in place that ensures…
Naresh Pandit
Rather than rebounding in 2022, economic conditions in the United Kingdom have deteriorated. Forecasts for growth in 2022 and the year after have been cut dramatically.
The reasons for this are well documented. Take your pick from soaring energy costs, supply chain disruptions, the effect of Covid…
Kari Miller
Quality management is essential to the growth and performance of any organization. It’s a valuable resource in the effort to ensure that products and services satisfy the highest quality requirements and deliver positive customer results.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers must ensure that the…
Kevin Ketels
The conditions that led to a shortage of baby formula were set in motion long before the February 2022 closure of the Similac factory tipped the U.S. into a crisis.
Retailers nationwide reported supplies of baby formula were out of stock at a rate of 43 percent during the week ended May 8, 2022,…
Albert Rees, Joe Vernon
The pandemic had many consequences for manufacturing companies, the most prevalent being supply chain disruption. In light of these disruptions, it is paramount that organizations establish robust and reliable operations to ensure productivity targets are met—especially as consumer demands continue…
NIST
A vulnerable spot in global commerce is the supply chain: It enables technology developers and vendors to create and deliver innovative products but can leave businesses, their finished wares, and ultimately their consumers open to cyberattacks. A new update to the National Institute of Standards…
Brandon Cornuke
Manufacturers work hard to minimize disruptions to their operations and invest significant resources to minimize production risk. They also are under constant pressure to find new ways to deliver more value to their customers. Sustainable business growth is critical to delivering this value. Many…
Rick Gould
As the world enters the third year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the climate crisis remains the biggest long-term threat facing humanity, according to the Global Risks Report 2022. Extreme weather due to climate change is seen as the second most serious short-term risk, with biodiversity loss coming in…
Luk Van Wassenhove
Labels such as “sustainable,” “eco-friendly,” and “green” have long been an easy sell. “Circular economy” joined their ranks when it debuted on the world stage at the World Economic Forum 2012. Even though related concepts have been discussed as early as in the 1970s, claims by the consulting world…
Emily Newton
There’s no better time than now. As a species, we need to mitigate the effect we have on our planet. There are many ways to do this—namely, through green and eco-friendly initiatives—but one sector is having the biggest impact of all: the industrial and manufacturing sector. In the 2010s, the…
Nicholas P. Sullivan
People in the world’s developed nations live in a post-industrial era, working mainly in service or knowledge industries. Manufacturers increasingly rely on sensors, robots, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to replace human labor or make it more efficient. Farmers can monitor crop…
Eric Pauley
Organizations’ failure to properly manage the servers they lease from cloud service providers can allow attackers to receive private data, as research my colleagues and I conducted has shown.
Cloud computing allows businesses to lease servers the same way they lease office space. It’s easier for…
Jonathan Gilpin
Regardless of how much we, as a society, are able to implement and use technologies in business, global supply chains will always be dependent on the ways in which people interact with one another.
Even local supply chains can be problematic, but it’s predominantly global ones that can pose…
Marc Lepere
As the war in Ukraine rages, finance professionals on Wall Street and in Europe recently attracted outrage by suggesting that investing in arms manufacturers should be treated as ethical investing. In the fight against tyranny, they argued that such an investment “preserves peace and global…
David Chandler
Industrial processes for chemical separations, including natural gas purification and the production of oxygen and nitrogen for medical or industrial uses, are collectively responsible for about 15 percent of the world’s energy use. They also contribute a corresponding amount to the world’s…
William A. Levinson
Ryan Day1 describes how the rise of independent auto dealers is a “gray swan” event for the automobile industry. This was not only bound to happen, as observed by the author, but also long overdue. The article states, “...current state laws prohibit OEMs from selling new vehicles directly to…
ISO
After lengthy wrangling, the 2021 COP26 climate summit ended with 197 parties agreeing to the new Glasgow Climate Pact. It will get countries to strengthen their CO2 emissions-cutting targets for 2030 by the end of next year, and formally recognize the need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions…
Jessica Hilton
As more people become environmentally conscious, manufacturers need to keep ahead of growing concerns about carbon emissions and potentially harmful waste products. Thin-film deposition plays a critical role in many sustainable technologies, including solar power and energy storage.
Unfortunately…
Jonathan Gilpin
The world of procurement is often tricky. It involves choosing one appropriate candidate, ultimately benefiting them while rejecting and disadvantaging others.
That said, it isn’t just the businesses picked that will profit from winning the contracts; it’s also their supply chain, their local…