All Features
Howard Sklamberg
To keep the food supply safe, have safe, effective, and high quality medical products, and decrease the harms of tobacco product use, we have to work with the rest of the world.
As the Food and Drug Administration’s Deputy Commissioner for Global Regulatory Operations and Policy (GO), I oversee…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
This month’s column is about a recent trip to New York and what I learned along the way. About a month ago, we attended the National Band and Orchestra festival at Carnegie Hall. The high school orchestra our granddaughter, Claire, plays in was invited to participate, and we were not about to miss…
Umberto Tunesi
Let’s consider for a moment the discipline we need to be quality professionals. It might take years to master our profession, but even when we have, we must not stop practicing and exercising it. Rather like being linguists or musicians, we must keep performing quality to keep ourselves fit for it…
Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech
Two major noncommercial health information technology organizations are working together in a new vendor-neutral health IT innovation network designed to stimulate development of new ideas and shorten the time required to bring new solutions into practice.
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)…
Jim Clifton
Companies seem to try everything imaginable to fix their workplaces, except the only thing that matters: Naming the right person manager.
Leaders go to seminars, hire consultants, and employ a long list of interventions—competencies, 360s, and so forth. I don’t think any of them work. What’s…
Michelle LaBrosse, Kristen Medina
“We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face... we must do that which we think we cannot.” —Eleanor Roosevelt
When I think back to the moments that have shaped me to be who I am today, I don’t credit the times of relaxation and…
MIT Management Executive Education
One famous scene from the movie Five Easy Pieces shows Jack Nicholson ordering a side of whole-wheat toast with his omelet at a diner. He’s then informed that the system doesn’t allow sides of toast. So he orders a chicken salad sandwich on whole-wheat toast—without butter, lettuce, mayonnaise,…
Davis Balestracci
My recent columns have emphasized the need for critical thinking to understand the process that produces any data. By just plotting data in their naturally occurring time order, many important questions arise about the data’s “pedigree” (a term coined by my respected colleagues Roger Hoerl and Ron…
Kevin Meyer
The other day, while skimming LinkedIn, I came across yet another one of those cheesy quotes that, unfortunately, have become all too common on the site: “Surround yourself with people on the same mission.” I proceeded to get into an online discussion with several people who have probably never…
William A. Levinson
The Golden Rule “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” may have applied in biblical times when the “others” lived in your village and shared your values and attitudes. Someone halfway around the world might not, on the other hand, want you to do unto him as you would have him do unto…
Brian Maskell
I’m starting a new series (thought provoking or maybe just provoking…) about some of the oxymorons we find in the “traditional” manufacturing world.
An oxymoron is a figure of speech that combines contradictory terms. We hear these all the time in common speech, things like “open secret” or “…
MIT Management Executive Education
The big data gold rush has become a stampede. Technology vendors are racing to bring big data solutions to the market, and companies with a never-ending flow of data are looking to big data to make better sense of their business—and to generate better value as a result.
The challenge is that…
New River Kinematics
The Oasis of the Seas is the largest passenger ship in the world with a gross tonnage of 225,282 and room for more than 5,400 passengers. Not surprising, it creates a huge bow wave when sailing the seas and encounters waves of more than 60 ft when crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
When wave action…
Belinda Jones
The Certification Committee of the Coordinate Metrology Society (CMS) has been laser-locked on its target to deliver its first Level Two Certification, a device-specific performance assessment for users of portable coordinate measuring machines (CMMs). Those efforts will come to fruition at this…
Ron Hicks
With the 30th anniversary of the Coordinate Metrology Systems Conference (CMSC) around the corner, I am happy to celebrate World Metrology Week with you. This year’s conference will be held in North Charleston, South Carolina, from July 21–25, 2014. Charleston is the oldest and second-largest city…
Laser trackers and the software that controls them have revolutionized the way metrology data have been taken. With software and hardware advances have come new and better ways to take measurements. One of these advances in metrology software is the ability to measure the angle normal to a mirrored…
NIST
Microscopes don’t exactly lie, but their limitations affect the truths they can tell. For example, scanning electron microscopes simply can’t see materials that don’t conduct electricity very well, and their high energies can actually damage some types of samples.
In an effort to extract a little…
Kelly Kuchinski
Editor’s note: A webinar on this topic will held on May 29, 2014, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific. Register here.
Food and beverage manufacturers have seen a considerable number of changes over the last decade. Mergers and acquisitions have expanded the footprint of many food and beverage…
In 1927, my grandfather, A. N. Brunson, was 22 years old and repairing surveying instruments. That was the year he established Brunson Instrument Company in the back room of a map business in downtown Kansas City. When the Great Depression came along, he was fortunate to keep very busy. Because no…
Belinda Jones
M
etrologists employ numerous portable 3D metrology devices and techniques to acquire coordinate data to measure a manufactured article or assembly. There are many variables induced by an operator that can dramatically influence data collection. Although measurement equipment is calibrated to…
U.S. Air Force
The 2nd Maintenance Squadron’s Precision Measurement Equipment Laboratory (PMEL) at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier, Louisiana, calibrates and maintains an inventory of more than 6,700 pieces of equipment for Team Barksdale. With countless tools and test equipment used by ground crews every…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.”—Galileo Galilei
It’s all well and good to say that metrology “includes all theoretical and practical aspects of measurement,” but that doesn’t adequately express its gestalt, which I think even metrologists would agree is hard to…
Brian Maskell
Many companies calculate product profitability by subtracting a standard cost from the price and calling it a margin. But this calculated margin does not tell you how much money you are making. It tells you almost nothing about profit because the standard cost is made up from a lot of tenuous…
Donald J. Wheeler
Who could ever be against having good measurements? Good measurements are like apple pie and motherhood. Since we all want good measurements, it sounds reasonable when people are told to check out the quality of their measurement system before doing an experiment or putting their data on a process…
Cathy Hayat
Air travel has long been considered the safest form of transportation. Statistically speaking, the average American is safer in an airplane than an automobile. Though this is reassuring, the industry is relentlessly pursuing ways to improve air travel safety. One such improvement is the continued…
