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Naresh Pandit
Rather than rebounding in 2022, economic conditions in the United Kingdom have deteriorated. Forecasts for growth in 2022 and the year after have been cut dramatically.
The reasons for this are well documented. Take your pick from soaring energy costs, supply chain disruptions, the effect of Covid…
Kari Miller
Quality management is essential to the growth and performance of any organization. It’s a valuable resource in the effort to ensure that products and services satisfy the highest quality requirements and deliver positive customer results.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers must ensure that the…
William A. Levinson
Quality-related data collection is useful, but statistics can also deliver misleading and even dysfunctional results when incomplete. This is often the case when information is collected only from surviving people or products, extremely satisfied or dissatisfied customers, or propagators of bad…
Nathan Parde
For years, organizations have taken a defensive “castle-and-moat” approach to cybersecurity, seeking to secure the perimeters of their networks to block out any malicious actors. Individuals with the right credentials were assumed to be trustworthy and allowed access to a network’s systems and data…
Kevin Ketels
The conditions that led to a shortage of baby formula were set in motion long before the February 2022 closure of the Similac factory tipped the U.S. into a crisis.
Retailers nationwide reported supplies of baby formula were out of stock at a rate of 43 percent during the week ended May 8, 2022,…
Greg Fiumura
After wading through airport security and a turbulent trans-Atlantic flight, the last thing I wanted was more friction arriving back in the USA. However, I was looking forward to using Global Entry, a voluntary Department of Homeland Security program that, after a thorough background check, allows…
In an open letter, Bob Fangmeyer, director of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, wrote that the Baldridge Award process would be suspended this year. The reasons and future plans are outlined in the letter shown below.
Dear Friend of Baldrige,
I am writing today to provide an important…
Albert Rees, Joe Vernon
The pandemic had many consequences for manufacturing companies, the most prevalent being supply chain disruption. In light of these disruptions, it is paramount that organizations establish robust and reliable operations to ensure productivity targets are met—especially as consumer demands continue…
Pat Toth
This morning my favorite local morning news program had an interesting segment on new slang words and what they mean. While the definitions were probably not necessary for millennials or generation Z, but for baby boomers like me, it was an eye-opening vocabulary lesson. I must admit I didn’t know…
Donald J. Wheeler
Many different approaches to process improvement are on offer today. An appreciation of the way each approach works is crucial to selecting an approach that will be effective. Here we look at the problem of production and consider how the different improvement approaches deal with this problem.…
NIST
A vulnerable spot in global commerce is the supply chain: It enables technology developers and vendors to create and deliver innovative products but can leave businesses, their finished wares, and ultimately their consumers open to cyberattacks. A new update to the National Institute of Standards…
Gleb Tsipursky
Covid-19 has disrupted many areas of our lives, including our careers. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to strengthen and secure your career during these uncertain times.
Due to the devastating effect of the pandemic on the restaurant industry, one of my coaching clients, Alex, who served…
James J. Kline
Big data is a relatively new phenomenon. Its use is increasing in many organizations. But, as with many new processes, its use cuts both ways. It has positive benefits to both the organization and customers. It also has its potential downside. This piece looks at both with respect to the quality…
Brandon Cornuke
Manufacturers work hard to minimize disruptions to their operations and invest significant resources to minimize production risk. They also are under constant pressure to find new ways to deliver more value to their customers. Sustainable business growth is critical to delivering this value. Many…
Cybercrime is on the rise. And as we move deeper into the digital age, the era of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s also growing more sophisticated and severe, with serious consequences. As cyber criminals become more adroit, cybercrime has touched all our lives in one way or another…
Oliver Binz, Elia Ferracuti, Peter Joos
In early 2021, people had already started commenting that inflation might be coming back. But few people could predict just how high it would go. In January 2022, year-on-year inflation in the OECD area rose to 7.2 percent. Consumer price inflation in the United States hit a 40-year high of 7.5…
Emily Newton
There’s no better time than now. As a species, we need to mitigate the effect we have on our planet. There are many ways to do this—namely, through green and eco-friendly initiatives—but one sector is having the biggest impact of all: the industrial and manufacturing sector. In the 2010s, the…
Steven I. Azizi
It has been more than five decades since Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted to outlaw harassment and discrimination against workers in American workplaces. Unfortunately, workplace harassment is still a serious problem for millions of workers in the country.
Different forms of…
NIST
Smart sensors play a critical role in smart grids, supporting bidirectional flows of energy. Such sensors are needed for real-time monitoring of energy flow; controlling power generation, transmission, and distribution to customers; and protecting the overall power systems.
However, the…
Harish Jose
T he dictum, “purpose of a system is what it does” (POSWID) is famous in cybernetics, attributed to the management cybernetician Stafford Beer.
Beer notes: “A good observer will impute the purpose of the system from its actions and thus from the resultant state.”
Hence the key aphorism and acronym…
Oliver Laasch
It’s been a tough few years for people who own or manage a business. Lockdowns shut down whole industrial sectors worldwide, turning profitable businesses into loss-making ones, while a lot of smaller businesses went under.
Many companies will now be hoping for a return to some type of normality…
Donald J. Wheeler
Students are told that they need to check their data for normality before doing virtually any data analysis. And today’s software encourages this by automatically providing normal probability plots and lack-of-fit statistics as part of the output. So it’s not surprising that many think this is the…
Bruce Hamilton
In 1985, about the time I was discovering there was a better way to produce products, The Natural, a film about an aging baseball player with extraordinary talent, was garnering multiple Academy Awards. This archetype concerning natural “God-given” abilities is common in Western culture—in sports…
Gleb Tsipursky
The biggest falsehood in business leadership and career advice may also be the most repeated: “Go with your gut.” Surely you’ve heard this advice often as a decision-maker, as well as some variations of that phrase, such as, “Trust your instincts,” “Be authentic,” “Listen to your heart,” or “Follow…
NIST
To combat Covid-19 amid supply shortages in 2020, healthcare facilities across the United States resorted to disinfecting personal protective equipment (PPE), such as N95 masks, for reuse with methods such as ultraviolet (UV) light. But questions lingered about the safety and efficacy of these…