All Features
Anil Ananthaswamy, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
The unlikely marriage of two major artificial intelligence approaches has given rise to a new hybrid called neurosymbolic AI. It’s taking baby steps toward reasoning like humans and might one day take the wheel in self-driving cars.
A few…
Elizabeth Benham
This year will be the 45th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, which was signed on Dec. 23, 1975, by President Gerald R. Ford. Normally, we celebrate by sharing metric education resources, but this year I want to use the occasion to dispel some common misconceptions about the U.S.…
George Schuetz
Before a fixture gauge is designed, the engineer must understand what specifications must be inspected. In many respects, the gauge’s design reflects not only the design of the part but also the manufacturing processes that produced it.
Machinists must establish datums in order to machine a part…
John Keogh
Almost all businesses involved in the food supply chain have experienced effects ranging from a mild shock to severe disruptions during the Covid-19 pandemic, and further disruptions may be ahead this winter.
Yet not all organizations have learned critical lessons, and history shows us some…
Del Williams
For companies that process high-value products such as nuts, cereal, coffee, snacks, and dry pet food, material breakage and loss is a costly problem that can harm the bottom line. Even the variation between 1-percent waste and 5 percent can mean the difference between profit or loss.
To convey…
Nancy Westcott
October 2020 was manufacturing month in the United States, an event that is normally a cause for celebration. Even more so, with the news that U.S. manufacturing accelerated to a near two-year high in August. At a time when good news is in short supply, it’s been four consecutive months of growth…
Ryan E. Day
Few phrases have more power to stir excited conversation than “American-made quality.” It’s been touted and trashed. It’s been a major cause for concern with offshoring and reshoring. Global conglomerate and startup incubator ROKiT Group has come down squarely in the camp that believes American-…
Jason Davis, Thomas Mannarelli
In 2017, Indonesian state-owned giant Pertamina had two ambitious strategic objectives: Transition from oil and gas to a more diverse portfolio, including renewables; and entrench itself deeper in the global market.
But there was a problem. Thanks to a remarkably low retirement age of 56 for…
Suneel Kumar
Remote auditing (RA) has become a norm during the Covid-19 pandemic. Remote auditing is one of the audit methods prescribed in ISO 19011:2018—“Guidelines for Auditing Management Systems.” Although RA has surged due to pandemic constraints, this method of operation will surely gain ground as a…
K. C. Morris
The Covid pandemic has highlighted the role that manufacturing plays in our society. Manufacturing is important not only for improving our quality of life but also for the necessities of life, from food to toilet paper to transportation and safe and secure housing. As our society has evolved, we…
Grant Ramaley
IEC 60601-1: “Medical electrical equipment,” edition 3.1, is the base medical-device standard to ensure “basic safety and essential performance” of medical electrical equipment. It is used by medical device regulators but also recognized by some other regulatory authorities as a regulatory…
NVision Inc.
A popular high-tech retailer recently used NVision Inc.'s long-range scanning and measurement services to reduce by one full month the time and cost of expanding its business into a newly vacated space. The system is designed to scan large structures where precise manual measurements are difficult…
Donald J. Wheeler
Every introductory class in statistics teaches how to obtain a global standard deviation statistic. While this descriptive statistic characterizes the dispersion of the data, it is not the correct value to use when looking for unusual values within the data. Since all of statistical inference is…
Corey Brown
Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, 3M has been integral in maintaining domestic and international supplies of essential personal protective equipment (PPE). These production and supply-chain challenges required innovation to train new employees faster and leverage a culture of continuous improvement.…
Talmage Wagstaff
Preventive maintenance, specifically in production and manufacturing industries, has been a fundamental part of product consistency for years. It is well known that without product consistency, customer complaints and rework will soon be the result. What does preventive maintenance do to directly…
Rich Press
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have produced synthetic gene fragments from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. This material, which is noninfectious and safe to handle, can help manufacturers produce more accurate and reliable diagnostic tests for…
Sarah Burlingame
There is more to lean manufacturing than improving a few processes. Sustainable lean success requires a companywide culture of daily continuous improvement. Companies that develop their people to think scientifically, using facts and data to drive their decisions, are often the ones that achieve…
Zane Patalive
Meet Humphrey. Humphrey is a gray squirrel that a friend of mine rescued as an abandoned baby squirrel. For weeks, my friend and his family nursed the young creature by hand. While Humphrey was growing, he became very friendly with the family members, often perching on their shoulders and snuggling…
Deborah Blumberg
In the summer of 2014, Aruna Ranganathan was doing postdoctoral research at a garment factory in Bangalore, India, when she noticed that some worker stations—but not all—were equipped with radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, a tool used to quantify workers’ output.
Ranganathan, now…
Celia Paulsen
October happens to be (among other things) Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Dental Hygiene Month, National Bullying Prevention Month, and my personal favorite, National Pizza Month. Plus, it’s Halloween! But I digress. We’re here to talk about cybersecurity.
Every manufacturer should hold…
Gleb Tsipursky
‘It’s not going away, and we have to face that reality.” That’s what the CEO and founder of a quality-centered high-tech manufacturing startup with 180 employees told the leadership team in early July 2020 to convince them of the need to do a strategic pivot to address Covid-19.
Previously, the…
Tim Mouw
To establish a successful quality control program, you need good instrumentation, robust software, and trained users. But even with everything in place, there are some common pitfalls to watch for when using a spectrophotometer to analyze color quality.
1. Bad standards and samples
Physical…
Ryan E. Day
Metrology may sound like an esoteric dark art, but it isn’t. If you’re involved in manufacturing of any stripe, you’re almost certainly a metrology practitioner. Coordinate metrology, on the other hand, is a more narrow subset of the field but still widely used in many industries for various…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Founded in 1984, the Coordinate Metrology Society (CMS) has championed portable coordinate measuring machine (CMM) technology ever since its inception. In some ways, the focus on portable CMMs overshadowed the traditional fixed CMM in much the same way any new technology garners the lion's share of…
Eric Stoop
Data can transform manufacturing. It’s also a term that continues to prompt discussions within the industry. People have been saying it for years now, and there is plenty of empirical evidence: Data are the way forward in business generally and manufacturing in particular.
But right now, when…
