All News
A steam train not seen since the 1960s is being rebuilt by a group of engineering enthusiasts, assisted by the metrology experts at the University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC). With a little extra help from Hexagon’s advanced industrial laser tracker technology, the…
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you’re a primary care physician and you refer one of your patients to another doctor for a colonoscopy. Will the patient follow through? If not, how will your team know to remind him or her? If the patient does receive a colonoscopy, will your team be alerted so…
The benefits of simulation-based training are indisputable and innumerable. Given its power and efficacy, this methodology is used in sectors beyond aerospace and military, where it gained its initial foothold. These include everything from manufacturing and retail to healthcare, fitness, fashion,…
The strength of lean thinking and an agile mindset is that, at heart, they are both about continuous improvement. People want to, need to, improve. We need to get better at what we do, see increasing impact, and know we are making a difference.
If this is a core human need, why do most agile and…
Norman Bodek, who sadly left us on Dec. 10, 2020, at the age of 88, will no doubt best be remembered for the amazing library he brought us more than 30 years ago from Japan: primary sources like Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo, as well as brilliant consultants like Yashuhiro Monden and Shigihero…
When the words “artificial intelligence” (AI) come to mind, your first thoughts may be of super-smart computers, or robots that perform tasks without needing any help from humans. Now, a multi-institutional team including researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)…
Augmented reality (AR) means adding objects, animations, or information, that don’t really exist, to the real world. The idea is that the real world is augmented (or overlaid) with computer-generated material—ideally for some useful purpose.
Augmented reality has been around for about 30 years.…
The two major U.S. developers of the early Covid-19 vaccines are Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. They both developed mRNA vaccines, a relatively new type of vaccine. A major supply-chain issue is the temperature requirement for these vaccines.
The Pfizer vaccine needs to be stored at between –112° F…
T his year is clearly one that no one planned for. The ink was barely dry on annual goals, objectives, and expectations for 2020 when many organizations were upended by Covid-19.
Many leaders already don’t relish the year-end tradition of evaluating performance and development, and they are…
The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted different responses from company CEOs seeking to ensure their businesses survive. Keeping their employees safe has been the first priority, but beyond that, their task has involved understanding the situation, launching countermeasures, and trying to evolve ways…
The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted different responses from company CEOs seeking to ensure their businesses survive. Keeping their employees safe has been the first priority, but beyond that, their task has involved understanding the situation, launching countermeasures, and trying to evolve ways…
(LMA Consulting Group: Claremont, CA) -- Manufacturing and supply chain expert, Lisa Anderson, president of LMA Consulting Group Inc., is seeing manufacturers embrace smart manufacturing with a sustainable approach. Not only are manufacturers embracing the use of AI and other technologies, but…
Have you changed your views about Covid-19 months into this pandemic? Or are you anchoring to the same views you held last spring?
For example, many people still believe the false claim spread by many prominent leaders in March 2020 that Covid is no worse than the common flu. They protest against…
Industrial robots have been in existence and commercially available for more than 65 years. Factory automation, a more all-encompassing term, has been in existence in one form or another for considerably longer than that. Humans have continually come up with solutions to solve a wide variety of…
Ever notice how some people always get the best table, the upgraded room, or the best cut of meat at the market? Great customer service is not an accident. Those who are served well follow a recipe that turns even a cold initial encounter into a warm one. Here are five tips for almost always…
If you are like many small and medium-sized manufacturers, finding good help has been a pain point for many years, and it has become even more difficult during the Covid-19 pandemic. The market forces driving that dynamic are not likely to change soon.
Your shop has had to become more adaptive and…
Covid-19 has dealt most businesses a heavy blow, but the pandemic has at least one under-acknowledged upside. By moving organizations from the office into the virtual space, the pandemic has cracked open a treasure trove of data that can be used to streamline and optimize how organizations operate…
Covid-19 has dealt most businesses a heavy blow, but the pandemic has at least one under-acknowledged upside. By moving organizations from the office into the virtual space, the pandemic has cracked open a treasure trove of data that can be used to streamline and optimize how organizations operate…
First, a slight diatribe. Why is it that company leaders think their people can do successful innovation when they don’t share a common language? In this article’s title I’ve used the word “disruptive,” and by this I mean innovation in the “third horizon”—incremental, breakthrough, and disruptive.…
If you were to contact a group of recycling professionals, as one recent survey did, and ask them to list all the ways that consumer product manufacturers drive them crazy, you’d probably hear a lot about “shrink sleeves”—those full-body, shrink-to-fit plastic labels found on beer cans, yogurt…
If you were to contact a group of recycling professionals, as one recent survey did, and ask them to list all the ways that consumer product manufacturers drive them crazy, you’d probably hear a lot about “shrink sleeves”—those full-body, shrink-to-fit plastic labels found on beer cans, yogurt…
If you are a quality engineer or maybe even the quality manager of a manufacturing company, investing in quality improvements may be a no-brainer. Defects are inherently undesirable, right? Well, yes, but at the level of plant manager, president, or CEO, decisions about where to allocate assets…
During the past few years, I have written more than a few blogs and papers looking at manufacturing productivity across the 50 states. I wanted to update some of these analyses to reflect more recent data, see what they tell us, and examine how states were performing when looking at the change in…
The American workforce is at a crossroads. Digitization and automation have replaced millions of middle-class jobs, while wages have stagnated for many who remain employed. A lot of labor has become insecure, low-income freelance work.
Yet there is reason for optimism on behalf of workers, as…
As a kid I used to be confused by the so-called curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Wouldn’t interesting times be... good? Why would I not want to be interested? Then I got a little older, experienced a little more life, and I started to understand why “interesting times” could be a…