Quality Digest

The old picking methods of paper, pick-to-light, and voice-picking are almost impossible when employees must practice social distancing, use PPE (personal protective equipment), and avoid contact that could potentially exacerbate the spread of Covid-19. One viable solution is pick-by-vision, which both reduces potential contamination and dramatically increases productivity.

Even during the pandemic, the issues of product-picking accuracy and productivity does not magically evaporate. A pick-by-vision system simplifies the workflow and makes it more efficient. Benefits include saving time, reducing the error rate, creating a low-fatigue operation, and strict process control to optimize the picking processes.

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.

Imagine a science textbook without images. No charts, no graphs, no illustrations or diagrams with arrows and labels. The science would be a lot harder to understand.

That's because humans are visual creatures by nature. People absorb information in graphic form that would elude them in words. Images are effective for all kinds of storytelling, especially when the story is complicated, as it so often is with science. Scientific visuals can be essential for analyzing data, communicating experimental results and even for making surprising discoveries.

Visualizations can reveal patterns, trends and connections in data that are difficult or impossible to find any other way, says Bang Wong, creative director of MIT's Broad Institute. "Plotting the data allows us to see the underlying structure of the data that you wouldn't otherwise see if you're looking at a table."

And yet few scientists take the same amount of care with visuals as they do with generating data or writing about it. The graphs and diagrams that accompany most scientific publications tend to be the last things researchers do, says data visualization scientist Seán O'Donoghue. "Visualization is seen as really just kind of an icing on the cake."

Approximately 48 million people in the United States (one in six) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year from foodborne diseases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Consequently, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) is transforming the nation’s food safety system by shifting the focus from responding to foodborne illness to preventing it.

As part of the focus on preventing foodborne illness, 3-A Sanitary Standards, an independent, not-for-profit corporation for advancing hygienic equipment design for the food, beverage, and pharmaceutical industries, has recently updated its standards. The company, which maintains a large inventory of design criteria for equipment and processing systems developed to promote acceptance by USDA, FDA, and state regulatory authorities, no longer accepts “3-A compliant” as a legitimate claim.

According to the late quality guru Armand V. Feigenbaum, the hidden factory accounts for anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent of an organization’s total capacity. Feigenbaum called the hidden factory, “that part of your organization that exists to do bad work—not because you want to do bad work, but because the whole process is such that you are driven into it.”

In essence, the hidden factory are those undocumented processes that work against quality and efficiency, creating invisible roadblocks to strategic goals while driving up costs.

Most troubling is the fact that the problems associated with the hidden factory go far beyond traditional quality costs.

In this article, we look at how these hidden processes affect manufacturing organizations, and how they can shine a light on unseen sources of variation and inefficiency.

For manufacturers—as for all of us—the past few months have been a blur of fast adaptations and long periods of waiting. At the start of the pandemic, many manufacturers did what they have always done in the face of disruption: adapt and find the fastest workaround for the challenge at hand.

Manufacturers already know that rapid adaptation is an accepted cost of doing business. Uncertainty, risk, and volatility are not new for these seasoned organizations. However, the universal nature of this crisis, and the fact that it’s far from over, have highlighted areas in which complex quality management systems and procedures stand in the way of agile responses and effective operational optimization.

Many manufacturers have taken advantage of the opportunity to examine their operations with a fresh perspective, seeking proactive changes that will pave the way forward in a post-Covid-19 world.