All Features
Peter Rose
On May 26, 2020, the new European Union Medical Device Regulation (MDR) will finally take effect. By that date, all Class I manufacturers wishing to continue their trading activities within the EU market must have effectively completed the transition from the previous medical device directive and…
Davis Balestracci
As statistical methods become more embedded in everyday organizational quality improvement efforts, I find that a key concept is often woefully misunderstood, if it is even taught at all. W. Edwards Deming distinguished between two types of statistical study, which he called “enumerative” and “…
Simon Côté
The aerospace industry is known for manufacturing parts with critical dimensions and tight tolerances, all of which must undergo demanding inspections. Given the scale of the controls to be carried out on these parts, it is hardly surprising that quality people in the industry prefer to turn to…
Fringe projection techniques offer fast, noncontact measurements of the surface form of manufactured parts. Fringe projection has seen successful implementation in the automotive, aerospace, and medical industries. Recently, advances in fringe projection have reduced the sensitivity of the…
Mike Richman
For any of you who missed it, CMSC 2019 was, as always, a first-class conference with loads of great content, exciting new product and service offerings, and numerous unique opportunities for knowledge transfer with the leading metrologists in industry and academia.
Taking place July 22–26 at the…
Matthew Ilardo
I am looking forward to another year serving the community of the Coordinate Metrology Society. I would like to encourage our metrology membership to revel in your accomplishments, and expand your horizons in 2020 by taking on something new. Every year the CMS strives to expand its content,…
Belinda Jones
Women who crashed the glass ceiling in male-dominated fields have compelling stories about the trajectory of their careers. These days, I think a lot about those inadvertent role models, thankful for their determination to pursue big dreams so I could pursue mine. Trailblazers like Dr. Bonnie…
Belinda Jones
Change is the only constant in life.” This quote is attributed to Heraclitus, a very influential Greek philosopher from the late sixth century BCE. His time-honored words still hold true in 2019, and change indeed continues to shape the metrology industry. The dynamics of the marketplace are…
Knowledge at Wharton
From a lone statistician toiling over narrowly defined problems for the marketing department, to a C-level executive overseeing a mission-critical area impacting every function of the company, the meaning of “data and analytics professional” has changed a lot in recent years. A. Charles Thomas’s…
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News.
Manufacturers are constantly tweaking their processes to get rid of waste and improve productivity. As such, the software they use should be as nimble and responsive as the operations on their factory floors.
Instead, much of the software in today’s…
Natasha Gilbert, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Alfalfa, oats, and red clover are soaking up the sunlight in long narrow plots, breaking up the sea of maize and soybeans that dominates this landscape in the heart of the U.S. farm belt. The 18 by 85 meter sections are part of an…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
When I was 7 years old, I went into the woods behind my house, built a fire, then fried an egg over it in an old pie tin. When the egg was done, I ate it. I didn’t even like eggs, but because I had cooked it on my own, it was delicious.
I was so proud of my achievement that I ran inside and told…
Aliyah Kovner
It’s 1 p.m. on a sunny afternoon in July—smack dab in the middle of summer break—and a perfect 75° outside, but Jonathan Park is laser-focused. Though he could be strolling down a beach, or at home browsing social media, this 16-year-old is bent over a lab bench, intently pipetting reagents to run…
Eric Weisbrod
In manufacturing, standardization in production and process control leads to increased profitability and cuts down on many siloed problems that can plague even the most quality-focused organization. But when you have multiple, disparate plants around the country or the globe, standardization can…
David Blustein
On the surface, the well-being of the American worker seems rosy. Unemployment in the United States hovers near a 50-year low, and employers describe growing shortages of workers in a wide array of fields. But looking beyond the numbers tells a different story.
My new book, The Importance of Work…
Laurel Thomas
Soldiers develop attachments to the robots that help them diffuse bombs in the field. Despite numerous warnings about privacy, millions of us trust smart speakers like Alexa to listen into our daily lives. Some of us name our cars and even shed tears when we trade them in for shiny new vehicles.…
Andrei Vakulenko
Taylor Attachments, based in the United Kingdom, custom designs and produces tractor headstock conversion brackets. These are attachments for farm handlers and loaders, for mounting everything from buckets to forks, grapples, saws, carriers, bale stabbers, grabbers, hitches, backhoes, tillers, yard…
Ryan E. Day
Although certification to major standards is often the threshold to winning next-level contracts, it is when your organization synthesizes the standard’s values that real payoff is realized. Chief among those values is customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction is paramount to attracting new…
Annette Franz
Being a customer experience (CX) professional is hard enough; misinformation just makes our work more challenging. Misinformation or confusing information by a person with a ton of followers and a ton of influence makes our work even more challenging.
Recently, Seth Godin published a post on his…
Vibhas Rattanjee
Leadership development might be one of the most significant loss-making ventures in modern business. Companies spend big money on developing leaders—about $3.4 billion annually by some estimates—yet research shows that 50 to 60 percent of executives fail to achieve the strategy they were hired to…
Susan Whitehead
It’s a Catch-22 for a manufacturing supervisor: You need to train new hires properly to master the skills for the job, but your own daily job duties can’t wait. Putting time aside to train workers is especially challenging if you’re a small to medium-sized manufacturer (SMM) with tight, daily…
DP Technology
Founded in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2001, Green Tools is a leading manufacturer of cutting tools, providing circular saws and other woodcutting machines for the sawmill, furniture, and woodworking industries throughout Russia.
Green Tools began as a small reseller of woodworking tools produced…
Isaac Maw
Machine learning can be used for more than violating your privacy for a social media challenge. For example, one fascinating application has been developed by Instrumental AI, which uses machine learning to detect defects and anomalies in photographs of parts during various stages of assembly,…
Ziv Carmon
Counterfeiting is widespread and rapidly expanding. In 2015, the value of fake and pirated products globally was estimated at $1.7 trillion, equivalent to the GDP of Canada. The scope of this phenomenon is vast. In both developing and developed countries, counterfeiting affects many sectors,…
Stephen McCarthy
In our constantly evolving, data-rich universe, collecting, interpreting, and understanding process data can be tricky. But it is increasingly important if we want to maintain sustainable quality across product development and manufacturing processes. This challenge is particularly evident in the…