All Features
Rob Lowe
Much like many industries, the manufacturing sector has been completely upended by the Covid-19 pandemic. However, unlike many sectors, manufacturing was already in the midst of a consistent cycle of up and downs by the time the Covid-19 pandemic struck.
From sourcing challenges to fighting off…
Sabine Terrasi
Boosting efficiency through digitalization—almost no branch of industry can evade it. Also, operators of press shops are increasingly networking their production. But regardless of whether it’s a single press or press lines, it’s not always necessary to replace the entire plant in order to stay up…
Jon Picoult
In 1978, inventor Thomas Jake Lunsford patented a new form of plastic packaging and unknowingly triggered the ire of hundreds of millions of consumers.
His invention was the “clamshell”—a type of packaging that envelops a product in two form-fitting, sealed plastic shells. The public frustration…
Zach Winn
More and more people are doing their shopping from home these days, and whether they’re ordering groceries, home office equipment, or Covid-19 tests, they increasingly expect their deliveries to be fast and on time.
Companies have struggled to keep up with the rise in orders and expectations. One…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
For most of 2021, roughly 4 percent of the retail workforce has quit every month; in June alone 632,000 workers quit their retail job. Even though retail workers are quitting at a record pace, more new stores are opening than expected and looking to hire new employees. So how can retail chains…
Knowledge at Wharton
Food Co., a pseudonym for a large food processing plant in the U.S. Northeast, had been operating successfully for several years when the plant manager realized he had a problem he couldn’t solve alone.
The employees did their jobs well, but they didn’t seem to care much about taking care of each…
Lisa Apolinski
According to Harvard Business Review and the post-Covid CMO survey, social media marketing spending saw a 74-percent lift in 2020. In addition, traditional marketing activity was projected to decline during the same time period. Digital marketing is becoming more of a budget focus for companies,…
Karla Jo Helms
Disruptors are defined by several characteristics. They see beyond the existing status quo and challenge it by visualizing improvement and the outcome of that solution. Innovators do not provoke anger for its own sake, but they are not afraid to upset the competition or even potential allies. They…
Sachin Waikar
Know who invented the first digital camera? It was Kodak—or more accurately, an engineer at the historic camera company who conceived the technology and built a prototype in 1975. But corporate leadership had no interest in pursuing the idea, given the company’s dominant position in the market for…
Adam Zewe
MIT researchers have developed a new method to 3D print mechanisms that detect how force is being applied to an object. The structures are made from a single piece of material, so they can be rapidly prototyped. A designer could use this method to 3D print “interactive input devices,” like a…
Gleb Tsipursky
Fear of losing their innovative edge pushes many leaders to reject hybrid and virtual work arrangements. Yet extensive research shows that hybrid and remote teams can gain an innovation advantage and out-compete in-person teams by adopting best practices for innovation, such as virtual…
Kylie Foy
First published Oct. 4, 2021, on MIT News.
When it comes to games such as chess or Go, artificial intelligence (AI) programs have far surpassed the best players in the world. These “superhuman” AIs are unmatched competitors, but perhaps harder than competing against humans is collaborating with…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
The pressure for industry to reduce harmful emissions and greenhouse gas emissions in particular has increased significantly in the past few years. Recently, President Joe Biden set an aggressive new target for the United States to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent from 2005…
Gregg Profozich
Apprenticeships have a proven track record of producing strong results for both employers and workers. Apprenticeship programs offer access to hundreds of occupations in high-growth and emerging industries, with an average annual starting salary of $72,000 for employees who complete a program and a…
William A. Levinson
Luddism is, as depicted by Henry Ford, “...the theory that there is only so much work in the world to do and it must be strung out.”1 This dysfunctional paradigm is shared today by otherwise highly capable people such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg, while former New York Mayor Bill…
Anna Akins
More than 130 million pounds of peaches are produced in Georgia per year, and the Southern staple has a total farm gate value of more than $71 million, according to recent estimates.
But cultivating peaches is a complex and manually intensive process that has put a strain on many farms stretched…
Bryan Christiansen
Learning from past failures is the best way to understand and prevent future equipment breakdowns. In practice, that learning process falls under the umbrella of failure analysis.
These days, there are plenty of failure analysis techniques to choose from. They all come with a specific set of…
Rebecca Jacobson
To many people, a measurement sounds mundane, like marking ticks on a ruler or reading the line on a thermometer. It’s a piece of data. And they tend to think that improved measurements look like finer and finer ticks on a ruler—which doesn’t seem very exciting.
But making new measurements is more…
Jason Maderer
New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology finds that elephants dilate their nostrils in order to create more space in their trunks, allowing them to store up to 5.5 liters of water. They can also suck up three liters per second—a speed 50 times faster than a human sneeze (150 meters per…
Dawn Bailey
‘We didn’t get here on our own,” said Brian Dieter, president and CEO of Baldrige Award-recipient Mary Greeley Medical Center (MGMC), speaking at the 32nd Baldrige Quest for Excellence Conference. “We think we are very much better as a result of having learned from [other Baldrige Award recipients…
Chuck Werner
Manufacturers should routinely ask themselves: “How do I know what my problems are?” The old-school way to answer this question was based on having the resources to produce spreadsheets of operational data and the expertise to analyze the data and understand how to respond.
This does not describe…
Felipe Monteiro
Bringing innovation inside an established firm, even one that has created novel ideas in the past, is not as simple as just purchasing bundled external knowledge and expecting it to work wonders at headquarters right away.
Enel CEO Francesco Starace’s mandate was to create long-term sustainable…
Kiley Becker
I was recently on a trip to visit a manufacturing facility for one of our clients. My connecting flight didn’t arrive on time, which delayed my arrival and put me on a tight schedule.
When I got to the rental car agency, I saw more than 20 people waiting in line, and my heart sunk. “Should I call…
Gleb Tsipursky
How should organizations—including their quality departments—reshape office space to maximize productivity in the future of work? What will the new workspace—from the office to homes—look like in the future? We know it will be different. But to survive and thrive in the post-Covid world, you need…
Matt Fieldman
This article is the sixth in a monthly series by the the America Works initiative. As a part of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) National Network’s goal of supporting the growth of small and medium-sized manufacturing companies, this series focuses on innovative approaches, and…