All Features
Ramūnas Berkmanas
Imagine a manufacturing world where machines seamlessly collaborate with artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure flawless quality inspection. It’s a future that holds immense potential for revolutionizing the industry.
Major manufacturers like FANUC, ABB, and KUKA AG, alongside specialized cobot…
Kate Zabriskie
“I don’t understand. This hotel has no restaurant, no concierge, and no valet. It’s not at all what I expected. The place had no standards.”—Guest at a roadside motel
“I showed her the picture of Jennifer Aniston and asked for the same haircut. She cut my hair, but I still don’t look a thing like…
Harish Jose
Today I’m looking at some practical suggestions for reducing sample sizes for attribute testing. A sample is chosen to represent a population. The sample size should be sufficient to represent the population parameters such as mean and standard deviation. Here we’re looking at attribute testing,…
Guillaume Roels
In January 2023, Shopify deleted 12,000 recurring meetings from its staff’s calendars. The e-commerce firm also reinstated a no-meeting Wednesday policy. The idea wasn’t to prevent meetings from happening, but for staff to be intentional about them. In addition, it sent a clear message that it was…
William A. Levinson
Valuable American manufacturing jobs were sent offshore under the dysfunctional belief that low-wage labor would result in lower product costs and higher profits. Although it may seem counterintuitive, manufacturers do better with high-wage workers who will acquire skills, follow work standards,…
Chandrakant Isi, Francesco Rivalta
You’re in an early-stage hardware startup or a tinkerer in a toolshed with a product design set to shake up the market. Not sure how to turn your idea into a product? Here’s a step-by-step guide to the product development journey. From the initial design sketched out on paper to the final product…
Mike Figliuolo
Some people advocate giving good feedback before and after bad feedback. Doing so is actually harmful. Instead, good leaders deliver tough feedback directly.
Every once in a while history repeats itself—and those who fail to learn from it are doomed to repeat it. This post is in the spirit of that…
James Chan
Implementing a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) isn’t just a monetary investment. If you want to see real results, you’ll need to put in the effort to make sure the system is properly implemented and adopted. It isn’t as simple as flipping a switch.
It takes planning, time, and…
Kristopher Lee
A leader in asset integrity management and inspection services, Kakivik Asset Management recently held an intro to phased-array class at its Anchorage, Alaska, office. The training was attended by nearly two dozen ultrasound specialists and was conducted by Shane Walton from the University of…
Stephanie Hinton
If you’re conducting a clinical investigation of a medical device in a European Union member state, you will be required to submit a clinical investigation report (CIR) along with a summary of the CIR to that member state.
The European Union Medical Device Regulation (EU MDR) lists this as one of…
Renay San Miguel
Active matter is any collection of materials or systems composed of individual units that can move on their own, thanks to self-propulsion or autonomous motion. They can be of any size—think clouds of bacteria in a petri dish, or schools of fish.
Roman Grigoriev is mostly interested in the…
Andrey Solin
Luxury products are strange beasts. They are a source of confusion to a scholar of economics (my first education is in economics, so I know a little bit about which I am talking).
Luxury goods, let alone Veblen goods (products that increase in demand as the price rises), cause peculiar patterns in…
Tobias Dennerlein
A majority of American workers right now aren’t feeling very motivated on the job, a new survey suggests. Management experts often encourage business leaders to motivate employees by empowering them. The idea is that when workers are free to make decisions and manage their workday, they become more…
Bruce Hamilton
I’ll admit it: After five decades watching U.S. companies turning to simplistic accounting tricks to remain profitable, I’m discouraged.
I was a kid when I first discovered the Toyota Production System (TPS). My eyes were opened to the immense amount of waste in our production and business…
Ekin Ilseven
An organization’s resilience can’t be measured in advance. Crises, by definition, emerge not only from unfamiliar, disruptive, and unexpected events, but also when the immediate consequences of such events get entangled and intertwined with the complex dynamics of the organization.
Organizations…
Stephanie Ojeda
The number of ISO 45001 certificates is growing fast, jumping 54% from 2020 to 2021, according to the ISO Survey.
This occupational health and safety standard is especially prevalent in manufacturing, where managing safety incidents is a core concern from the perspective of protecting workers,…
Kelley Jacobsen
In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, medical device supply chains are one of the top priorities for health system leaders. Amid supply chain disruptions during the pandemic, hospitals scrambled to find enough devices to keep up with unprecedented demand. The global crisis revealed gaps in standard…
Emily Newton
Pumping systems are critical to many manufacturing operations. Consequently, any errors with this equipment can be costly. So, it’s important to catch oddities as soon as they occur. The internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) enable that kind of pump anomaly detection.…
Mike Figliuolo
Stupid stuff is going to happen. Expect it. It’s part of our complex and highly interdependent world. People will make mistakes. A lot of them. Layer on top of that some incredibly politically charged cultures (for more on that subject see “Hot Heads and Karma”), and there’s an abundance of…
Jones Loflin
I’ve been dabbling in AI (or ChatGPT as some of you may call it) for about eight months. I’ve used it to strengthen blog titles, make content “punchier,” and help me get some creative juices flowing.
However, by far my favorite thing to do with it is to ask it to explain a complex topic to a 5-…
Donald J. Wheeler
Many articles and some textbooks describe process behavior charts as a manual technique for keeping a process on target. For example, in Norway the words used for SPC (statistical process control) translate as “statistical process steering.” Here, we’ll look at using a process behavior chart to…
Elizabeth Z. Johnson, Michael Platt, Vartika Parasramka, Victoria Villacorta, Emily Foy, Natalie Richardson
Countless management and HR blogs, articles, and books are packed with advice about best practices for improving workplace culture, making teamwork more effective, ways to stay on task, and methods to get the most out of meetings. In parallel, organizations often query employees with self- and peer…
NIST
Manufacturing Day, or MFG Day, has grown to mean many things since it was officially proclaimed in 2012. Some celebrate on the first Friday in October with an event at a manufacturing facility or a school. Others participate in a regional celebration at an events center. Some areas have a…
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
A team of scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has investigated the behavior of hafnium oxide, or hafnia, and its potential for use in novel semiconductor applications.
Materials such as hafnia exhibit ferroelectricity, which means that they are…
William A. Levinson
The difference between common (or random) cause and special (or assignable) cause variation is the foundation of statistical process control (SPC). An SPC chart prevents tampering or overadjustment by assuming that the process is in control, i.e., special or assignable causes are absent unless a…
