All Features
Rick Gould
The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting last month saw the launch of new guidance to support the logistics industry on its journey to net-zero emissions. Davos attendees got a first glimpse into how companies can better understand and track their logistics emissions. Released by the Smart Freight…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
One of the biggest problems when reading about any kind of innovation in the press is the prevalent assumption that everyone understands the topic and how it works. Whether it’s cloud computing, edge computing, cold fusion, controlled fusion, or recently, artificial intelligence (AI), experts and…
Alonso Diaz, Maria DiBari
A company’s quality management system should have a formal, effective, and efficient corrective action and preventive action (CAPA) program so management can stay informed and correct existing business problems. The data output and corrective actions from a CAPA program can help prevent recurring…
Liza Dzhezhora
Having appeared in the early 2000s, connected health technologies have gradually become a game changer in the healthcare industry. Healthcare providers that have embraced smart medical IoT solutions reduce costs, improve patient experience, and ensure preventive care.
The trend is not fading away…
Jennifer Lauren Lee
In a brightly lit subterranean lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) sits a room-sized electromechanical machine called the NIST-4 Kibble balance.
The instrument can already measure the mass of objects of roughly 1 kilogram, about as heavy as a quart of milk, as…
Gleb Tsipursky
Disney’s CEO Bob Iger demanded on Jan. 9, 2023, that all employees return to the office for at least four days a week because “in a creative business like ours, nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe, and create with peers that comes from being physically together.” That’s similar to…
Rupa Mahanti
Data are an organization’s most valuable asset. However, too much data are inaccurate, incomplete, irrelevant, obsolete, not well defined, or otherwise not fit for use. Bad quality data can lead to operational inefficiencies, poor decision making, non-compliance issues, and lost revenue.
According…
Gorur N. Sridhar
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is an anxiety condition characterized by intrusive thoughts that produce uneasiness, apprehension, fear, or worry (collectively termed obsessions), along with repetitive behaviors (or compulsions) aimed at reducing the associated anxiety.
For team members in…
Jake Mazulewicz
Do you lead your team to learn primarily from successes, or from failures? Many leaders argue that their teams are just too busy to spend time discussing why a successful project went well. They just wrap up fast, then dive into the next project. So, the unspoken insights and unwritten lessons…
Association of Equipment Manufacturers
With 2022 firmly in the rearview mirror and the new year now underway, it’s clear many of the opportunities and challenges affecting equipment manufacturers today will remain as relevant as ever in the weeks and months ahead. And while it’s a fool’s errand to try to predict exactly how 2023 will…
Donald J. Wheeler
The shape parameters for a probability model are called skewness and kurtosis. While skewness at least sounds like something we might understand, kurtosis simply sounds like jargon. Here we’ll use some examples to visualize just what happens to a probability model as kurtosis increases. Then we’ll…
Zeeshan Hussain
Every engineer dreams of having a virtual personal assistant like Jarvis, the disembodied voice that carries out Iron Man’s orders. Smart assistants like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa are a step in the right direction, but they can’t help an engineer design a new car. Or can they? Recent progress…
Lisa Apolinski
A not-so-surprising fact, according to HubSpot: 65 percent of consumers state that the experience they encounter on a website is a “very important” factor in recommending a brand. If that statistic’s not enough, HubSpot also reported that 75 percent of consumers expect new technologies to be used…
Adam Zewe
When deep-learning models are deployed in the real world—perhaps to detect financial fraud from credit card activity or identify cancer in medical images—they are often able to outperform humans.
But what exactly are these deep-learning models learning? Does a model trained to spot skin cancer in…
Megan Wallin-Kerth
Quality and IT are usually kept separate in the corporate world—or considered two different beasts. But in his interview with Shelly LaPointe, senior manager of IT, Quality, Regulatory and Clinical Affairs, at Thermo Fisher Scientific, Quality Digest CEO, Jeff Dewar, discovers a different…
Tony Schmitz
The U.S. Navy is beginning to build 12 top-of-the-line nuclear submarines, with the first one scheduled to be completed by 2027. But it is missing a critical ingredient: many of an estimated 50,000 skilled workers needed to get the job done. It also lacks a reliable supply chain and the…
Shabnam Azimi
Consumers who have a personality that scores high in terms of openness—such as being open to new adventures and intellectually curious—have better success at spotting fake reviews than other personality types, according to our recently published research. Extroverted people, on the other hand, tend…
Sarah Burlingame
There is more to lean manufacturing than improving a few processes. Sustainable lean success requires a companywide culture of continuous daily improvement. Companies that develop their people to think scientifically, using facts and data to drive their decisions, are often the ones that most…
Michaël Bikard, Keyvan Vakili, Florenta Teodoridis
Collaboration has become an important feature of various industries, particularly when it comes to creative work. This comes amid growing interest in nonhierarchical structures with autonomous teams and the increasing prevalence of open innovation.
The benefits of collaboration—be it leveraging…
Gleb Tsipursky
As increasing numbers of companies are requiring employees to return to the office for 3–5 days per week this fall, they’re running into the buzzsaw of what one of my clients calls the “Four Horsemen of the Required Return to Office”—challenges with resistance, attrition, quiet quitting, and…
Peter Bilello
In our ongoing series of CIMdata articles on engineering.com, we’ve focused primarily on the digital (aka “virtual”) and physical aspects of digital transformation. Our discussion of these digital and physical elements has centered on what needs to be done with (and to) information as competitive…
David Isaacson
It’s not news that data have become the lifeblood to successful businesses. Their accumulation within and outside of companies has been growing at unprecedented rates. According to IDC, they will continue to double from 2022 to 2026.
Yet a challenge that has plagued many manufacturers is how to…
Del Williams
For owners and operators in the agricultural and food-processing industries, Jan. 1, 2022, was the deadline for completing a dust hazard analysis (DHA) for existing facilities in accordance with Chapter 7 of the National Fire Protection Association’s Standard 61 (2020) for the Prevention of Fires…
Gleb Tsipursky
The term “quiet quitting” emerged in March 2022, and refers to doing the bare minimal tasks of your job description well enough that you don’t get fired. The concept quickly went viral on TikTok.
Yet it only started to gain traction as an issue of concern among business leaders when government…
Tess Malone
Imagine messaging an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot about a missing package and getting the response that it would be “delighted” to help. Once the bot creates the new order, it says it’s “happy” to resolve the issue. Afterward, you receive a survey about your interaction. But would you be…
