All Features
Lucien G. Canton
W
hy do so many businesses fail after surviving a disaster? Because the true costs of the disaster are misunderstood.
After the 1994 earthquake in the Northridge neighborhood of Los Angeles, many businesses that had survived relatively unscathed found their revenues declining. Prior to the quake…
Phys.org
A bright future beckons for a University of Huddersfield metrology instrumentation designer who has recently completed his doctorate, won a national award, and will now embark on a project to bring a patented product to the market.
It was a master of science in control systems and instrumentation…
Gallup
Only 30 percent of U.S. employees are engaged in their jobs—a figure that hasn’t moved much in more than a decade. Given the proven links between employee engagement and financial outcomes, this low level of engagement is a drag on an already sluggish U.S. economy. Imagine the positive, even…
Mike Roberts
Gone are the days of carts carrying reams of paper documentation and checklists from station to station on the shop floor. Fortunately, with enterprise content management, document management, collaboration tools, and other digital services, paper is on its way out of the office. But that doesn’t…
Michelle LaBrosse
The fifth edition of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (Project Management Institute, 2013) is out, and I’m here to welcome it with a huge bear hug. Call me nerdy, but I think this is the best edition yet. Why? Because stakeholder management has been put in a corner for far too…
Brookhaven National Laboratory
The U.S. LHC Accelerator Program (LARP) has successfully tested a powerful superconducting quadrupole magnet that will play a key role in developing a new beam focusing system for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This advanced system, together with other major upgrades to be implemented during…
David S. Buckles, Lawrence Romanell
Disagreements are inevitable in science, medicine—and even life. As part of a regulatory agency committed to public health, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) medical devices center occasionally confronts scientific and policy disagreements among its staff and with the various stakeholders…
Jim Benson
When we think about limiting work in process (WIP), we have to realize that there are many types of work. Simply limiting work is not enough; we must know what we are limiting. We have to see what we’re really completing.
A real danger is that we tend to limit our WIP and then say, “What’s the…
Argonne National Laboratory
Doctors have a new way of thinking about how to treat heart and skeletal muscle diseases. Body builders have a new way of thinking about how they maximize their power. Both owe their new insight to high-energy X-rays, cloud computing, and a moth.
The understanding of how muscles get their power…
AJ Sweatt
Familiarity breeds contempt. Or neglect. We see this all the time. We grow tired of things often in our lives. In relationships. In politics. With music. With food. With jobs. It’s important that we mix things up from time to time. Or in many cases, to reenergize or recommit.
Maybe—just maybe—we…
Matthew E. May
We’ve all heard the clichés: “If you’re going to do something, do it right,” and “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Change one word—“right” to “artfully”—and the view of work as art is not the far reach it may appear to be. But allow me to state my case more, er, artfully.
Like…
Patrick Runkel
Boxers or briefs. Republican or Democrat. Yin or yang. Why is it that life often seems to boil down to two choices?
Heck, it even happens when you open the Basic Stats menu in Minitab. You’ll see a choice between a two-sample t-test and a paired t-test:
Which test should you choose? And what’s…
Stacey Jarrett Wagner
Approximately half of the 704 employers participating in a survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace said they have trouble finding qualified college graduates to fill their companies’ positions. Yet, 68 percent of the survey’s manufacturers said colleges…
Jack Dunigan
Editor’s note: This continues Jack Dunigan’s series about unsung heroes in the workplace, and the 16 traits they all share.
One stormy night many years ago, a man and his wife entered the lobby of a small hotel in Philadelphia. Trying to get out of the rain, the couple approached the front desk…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Pitch is a representation of takt image—a visual and often audible management time frame that lean practitioners use to pace and monitor value stream performance. It’s typically driven by, and linked to, a value stream or line’s pacemaker process.
Pitch performance is routinely tracked and…
William A. Levinson
Few quality professionals would want to hear somebody call their quality policies propaganda, but they are exactly that by definition. “Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of communication designed to affect the minds, emotions, and action of a given group for a specific purpose,”…
Matthew Barsalou
I live and work in Germany, and I recently learned a useful German phrase: “Service Wüste.” Well, half-German; the service part is actually English. Translated into English it would mean “service wasteland” or “service desert.” That’s how many Germans describe Germany.
In general, I’ve found the…
Jon Miller
My latest recommended reading for people who care about getting things done is Craig Weber’s Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is On (McGraw-Hill, 2013). The awareness and ability to improve our conversational capacity is essential,…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
With the publication of my humorous children’s novel, The Annoying Ghost Kid (Robert Evans Wilson, Jr., 2011), I have had the opportunity to go into elementary schools and teach kids a game that shows them how the creative process works. It’s a great way to come up with story ideas for books and…
Matthew E. May
Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of Matthew May’s “Elegant Solutions.” Read Part 1 here.
I’ve written before about traditional “specs.” How they’re old school. How they rarely help define and describe what we judge our satisfaction by: the experience.
Now comes routehappy.com, which is an intuitive…
NIST
Even though modern industrial robots are becoming more nimble and capable, they still need to get a good grip on things, literally, with the equivalent of hands that are as agile and dexterous as the human variety.
How to tackle this thorny challenge, known in robotics speak as dexterous…
I believe that 5S is one of the most effective tools within the realm of workplace organization. Since its inception, 5S has gained a loyal following in many different types of work environments. Companies that have truly embraced 5S enjoy high levels of organization and efficiency.
For those of…
Ryan E. Day
I can’t believe he said that. Well, wrote that. I’m reading another reader’s comment to an article about quality in manufacturing. The reader says, “We shouldn’t drag politics into this!” Really?
First of all, how can you drag something into where it already is? Somebody tell me one facet of…
MIT News
In 2006, when Tomás Palacios completed his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he was torn between taking a job in academia or in industry.
“I wanted to make sure that the new ideas that we were generating could find a path toward society…
Michael Causey
In a new 47-page guidance the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) appears to be doing its best to cover the waterfront for medical device manufacturers who need to better understand the complex medical device reporting (MDR) requirements. Topics range from the big picture (who is subject to this…
