Content By Ryan E. Day

By: Ryan E. Day 04/11/2019

Traditionally, technical jobs have been underrepresented by women. But that's changing, says Emily O'Dea, commercial services process manager at Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence.

“Without a doubt we're definitely outnumbered,” says O’Dea. “I started [my career] in a smaller company. It was unusual because we were four application engineers, and three of us were women.”

Technical jobs can become great careers for both men and women. In today’s social and professional climate, we see efforts to encourage young women to study science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) topics. We’ve even seen Hollywood reflect the changing mood in movies such as Hidden Figures, a film heralding the accomplishments of three black female mathematicians at NASA.

“Gender really shouldn't matter,” states O’Dea. “It’s a matter of what you enjoy and what you can teach others. It’s being able to be involved in this wonderful industry.”

By: Ryan E. Day 03/12/2019

I love standards, and whether you know it, you love standards, too. For example, let’s say a bulb in your lamp goes bad. You drive down to the local hardware store, buy a bulb, come back home, change out the bulb, plug the lamp back in, and... it lights up. You just benefited from at least seven U.S. and international standards. How does that work, and what does American National Standards Institute (ANSI) have to do with it?

By: Ryan E. Day 02/20/2019

In the manufacturing universe, metal tube fabrication is a world of its own. That being said, the requirements for developing a new world-standard solution for tube bending are common to all manufacturing—be faster, more accurate, and more economical.

With customers like Delta Air Lines, British Airways, United Airlines, and the U.S. military, Advanced Tubular Technologies has been working to deliver on that goal. Its systems are used across many industries, including air compressor and hydraulic parts manufacturing, shipbuilding, railroad and exercise equipment, and the race car circuit in Nürburgring, Germany.

Advanced laser scanning technology and the software required to leverage it to the fullest are having a tremendous impact on the tube fabrication industry, and this synergy is the foundation for Advanced Tubular’s VTube-LASER solution.

By: Ryan E. Day 01/16/2019

Machine-tool manufacturer Cincinnati Inc. has a heritage of building quality products and surviving great challenges. Founded in 1898, and based in the United States, Cincinnati has survived both the Great Depression and Great Recession. Cincinnati’s forward-looking attitude has been a key factor for thriving in challenging times, and the manufacturing legend has now begun to incorporate high-tech metrology into its arsenal.

“Cincinnati is a family-owned company that has been around since 1898,” says Doug Dragoo, manager of manufacturing engineering at Cincinnati. “This past year we had our 120th year anniversary. We’ve done a lot of interesting things as a company, but around the 1920s, we really got into fabrication equipment [press brakes and shears], at which time we also changed our name from Cincinnati Shaper to Cincinnati Incorporated. Now we’ve branched into powder metal compacts, lasers, and most recently, 3D printing.”

To help keep pace with the changing face of manufacturing, Cincinnati invested in a FARO Vantage^E Laser Tracker system, which helps its team to improve quality control, reduce waste in production processes, and facilitate their continuous improvement efforts.

By: Ryan E. Day 12/18/2018

Psychology is an important element in organizational excellence for managers. In particular, the ability to face one’s fears, develop resilience, and adapt to change fosters success for a manager as well as for the company and all its employees.

Developing your people really is where the rubber meets the road, but all too often the time and money spent on developing managers is not transferring to employees. Managers may read books, go to workshops, and attend a convention, and they understand the theory and concepts, but they’re not actually developing related behaviors in their employees.

In this interview, Kelly Graves, CEO of Internal Business Solutions, reveals how effective managers involve their employees to maximize employee engagement and achieve company goals.

[Read More]

Creating Value for Organic Growth

By: Ryan E. Day 12/11/2018

As of the 2010 Census, there were 27.9 million small businesses registered in the United States. That’s a lot of competition. To thrive and grow in such a competitive environment, business owners must make wise decisions, commit to high-quality results, and take care of their customers and employees. Those organizations that do are rewarded with organic growth. Those that don’t suffer perpetual stagnation.

After a decade as a manufacturing engineer with the Saturn car corporation, Jeff Mass worked for an office furniture manufacturer in West Michigan. And then, like so many other entrepreneurs, Mass decided to strike out on his own, founding Diverse Dimensions, a full-service dimensional measurement and reverse-engineering lab in Zeeland, MI. Another small business flag planted in the ground.

“2003 is when I formally opened up and put the shingle out for dimensional inspection services,” says Mass, president of Diverse Dimensions. “I started out solo and anticipated just doing it by myself until retirement, but it organically grew quite quickly. So now there are nine of us.”

By: Ryan E. Day 11/14/2018

BioBridge Global (BBG) is a parent organization for four subsidiary organizations, three of which are involved in production activities, and they’re all around regenerative medicine, including blood components, clinical laboratory testing, and cell and tissue therapies. Organizations in the life science industry, like BBG, operate in a heavily regulated environment. This is the story of how one company delivers world-class products and stays on the right side of compliance while doing it.

BBG’s subsidiaries are:
• Qualtex Laboratories, which provides state-of-the-art patient, donor, and biological testing services. Qualtex has locations in both Texas and Georgia.
• GenCure, which is a human-tissue and cell-therapy organization, collecting and processing human tissues, umbilical cord blood and tissues, as well as providing cell therapy apheresis services, and contract manufacturing services.
• South Texas Blood and Tissue Centers, which provide blood, plasma, platelets, and other blood components to 67 hospitals in 43 South Texas counties.

The fourth arm of BBG is the Blood & Tissue Foundation, which raises awareness and funds to support the many life-saving activities of BioBridge Global.

By: Ryan E. Day 11/13/2018

One of the unique aspects of Finch Therapeutics is that although its product does not fall easily into any regulated category and thus is not FDA-approved, the company has been working closely with the agency for at least five years. The FDA has broad jurisdiction to regulate all health products, and it also has the freedom to not exercise that authority (enforcement discretion) as it sees fit. This puts Finch in the delicate position of providing a product that is regulated by the FDA, yet isn’t actually bound by any existing regulatory statutes, such as 21 CFR.

Finch is a clinical-stage microbiome therapeutics company dedicated to developing novel microbial therapies to serve patients with serious unmet medical needs. Built on 30 years of translational research at OpenBiome, MIT, the University of Minnesota, the Center for Digestive Diseases, and Crestovo, Finch uses its unique Human-First Discovery approach to develop therapies from microbes that have demonstrated clinically significant impacts on patient outcomes.

[Read More]

A Human Touch in Smart Manufacturing

By: Ryan E. Day 10/01/2018

The fourth industrial revolution is upon us. Collecting real-time production data is becoming more common as enterprise-wide software develops into a tool that enables transformative gains in productivity. Although not common, there are “lights-out” factories, such as the fully automated FANUC manufacturing facilities, in operation today. And AI has become a ubiquitous plug-in for nearly every sector imaginable. “Industry 4.0” and “smart manufacturing” are now familiar terms in the manufacturing lexicon. The caveat to the fanfare is the same as with the first industrial revolution: “What is the future of humans in all this?”

Man vs. robot misconception

Although automation is only one aspect of Industry 4.0, it seems to receive an inordinate share of digital ink, second only to AI. The nugget of concern seems to be fear of robots and full automation replacing human employees in manufacturing. Considering that the debate over the effect of current levels of automation on levels of unemployment still rages, perhaps it’s a concern worth examining.

By: Ryan E. Day 08/09/2018

As manufacturing finds its way through the 21st century, there’s a groundswell change emerging. Organizations are jockeying for competitive position as they endeavor to describe this phenomenon. Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution, and the industrial internet of things (IIoT) are a few terms being tried on for size. Although the current transition is enabled by technology, there is a timeless underlying impetus: productivity.

The first industrial revolution involved physically mechanized production—machines powered by water, steam, or internal combustion engines. The second used electric power to create mass production. The third used electronics and information technology to automate production. Now a fourth industrial revolution is building, characterized by a fusion of technologies enabling real-time data to be collated, analyzed, and actionized right in the production environment.

Early industrial revolution mainly focused on increased output. For a while, those brute-force methods were advantages, and productivity flourished. But as improved transportation and communication shrunk our world, global competition revealed the bloated underbelly of inefficient mass-production methods.

[Read More]

Search

Quality Digest

Content By Ryan E. Day

Man vs. robot misconception