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Grant Ramaley
As the 2020 pandemic threatened world health, a large number of unscrupulous companies began generating fake International Organization for Standardization (ISO) quality management system (QMS) certificates in an attempt to fool governments into buying personal protective equipment (PPE),…
MIT News
Buildings account for about 40 percent of U.S. energy consumption, and are responsible for one-third of global carbon dioxide emissions. Making buildings more energy-efficient is not only a cost-saving measure, but also a crucial climate-change mitigation strategy. Hence the rise of “smart”…
Matthew Bundy
Untitled Document
Burning plastic cart carrying a fax machine, a laptop computer, and a three-ring binder. Click here for larger image. Credit: FCD/NIST
Several centuries ago, scientists discovered oxygen while experimenting with combustion and flames. One scientist called it “fire air.” Today,…
Zach Winn
This story was originally published by MIT News.
These days businesses have enough to worry about without thinking about their insurance. Unfortunately, tasks like managing insurance claims and completing annual renewals require a lot of thinking.
The startup Newfront Insurance is seeking to…
Gleb Tsipursky
Should quality professionals be worried about the new Covid strains originating in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and elsewhere, and recently identified in the United States?
Authorities have focused on downplaying concerns about vaccine effectiveness against these new variants. While some…
James J. Kline
Ever since the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) included risk-based thinking in ISO 9001:2015, an idea has arisen among some in the quality profession that quality managers can move into the risk management arena without any competition from other professions. This article looks…
NordVPN Teams
According to Gartner, 99 percent of the vulnerabilities exploited in 2020 have been ones known about by security and IT professionals at the time of the incident. However, taking care of them is tiresome, as it takes 38 days to implement a patch and in the past year alone 12,174 new common…
Bryan Christiansen
A manufacturing facility can’t operate without a maintenance team. Frankly, most businesses can’t. In one way or another, we all rely on different machines and infrastructure to deliver our products and services.
To avoid expensive, unexpected breakdowns and keep assets in good operating condition…
Richard Harpster
As someone who has helped companies in a wide variety of industries for the last 30 years solve many problems using risk-based thinking, I cannot think of an issue that I have worked on that is more important than preventing the spread of Covid-19. With three high-risk people in my home, I have…
Annette Franz
Over the years, I’ve written a lot of posts about change and change management. In an article I wrote earlier this year about change and some of the learnings and takeaways from the pandemic and the business crisis that it created, I noted that we had (and still have) a lot to learn. Here’s one of…
Jane Bianchi
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you’re a primary care physician and you refer one of your patients to another doctor for a colonoscopy. Will the patient follow through? If not, how will your team know to remind him or her? If the patient does receive a colonoscopy, will your team be alerted so…
Jim Benson
The strength of lean thinking and an agile mindset is that, at heart, they are both about continuous improvement. People want to, need to, improve. We need to get better at what we do, see increasing impact, and know we are making a difference.
If this is a core human need, why do most agile and…
Bruce Hamilton
Norman Bodek, who sadly left us on Dec. 10, 2020, at the age of 88, will no doubt best be remembered for the amazing library he brought us more than 30 years ago from Japan: primary sources like Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo, as well as brilliant consultants like Yashuhiro Monden and Shigihero…
Dr T Burns
Augmented reality (AR) means adding objects, animations, or information, that don’t really exist, to the real world. The idea is that the real world is augmented (or overlaid) with computer-generated material—ideally for some useful purpose.
Augmented reality has been around for about 30 years.…
Bahar Aliakbarian
The two major U.S. developers of the early Covid-19 vaccines are Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. They both developed mRNA vaccines, a relatively new type of vaccine. A major supply-chain issue is the temperature requirement for these vaccines.
The Pfizer vaccine needs to be stored at between –112° F…
Thomas Malnight, Ivy Buche
The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted different responses from company CEOs seeking to ensure their businesses survive. Keeping their employees safe has been the first priority, but beyond that, their task has involved understanding the situation, launching countermeasures, and trying to evolve ways…
Gleb Tsipursky
Have you changed your views about Covid-19 months into this pandemic? Or are you anchoring to the same views you held last spring?
For example, many people still believe the false claim spread by many prominent leaders in March 2020 that Covid is no worse than the common flu. They protest against…
Tim Waldo
If you are like many small and medium-sized manufacturers, finding good help has been a pain point for many years, and it has become even more difficult during the Covid-19 pandemic. The market forces driving that dynamic are not likely to change soon.
Your shop has had to become more adaptive and…
Jeffrey Phillips
First, a slight diatribe. Why is it that company leaders think their people can do successful innovation when they don’t share a common language? In this article’s title I’ve used the word “disruptive,” and by this I mean innovation in the “third horizon”—incremental, breakthrough, and disruptive.…
Ryan E. Day
If you are a quality engineer or maybe even the quality manager of a manufacturing company, investing in quality improvements may be a no-brainer. Defects are inherently undesirable, right? Well, yes, but at the level of plant manager, president, or CEO, decisions about where to allocate assets…
Ken Voytek
During the past few years, I have written more than a few blogs and papers looking at manufacturing productivity across the 50 states. I wanted to update some of these analyses to reflect more recent data, see what they tell us, and examine how states were performing when looking at the change in…
Natalie Weber
Unlike Covid-19, remote audits aren’t unprecedented. Remote audits didn’t start with the pandemic, although it has forced more companies to use them than previously. At MasterControl, we’ve been doing remote audits for years for our international customers. It saves time and expense, and it’s every…
Steven Stein
Recently there have been a number of articles whose authors discuss conducting assessments remotely because of the pandemic. This article will discuss my experience with an actual assessment conducted remotely, how the plan changed in response to the pandemic, lessons learned, and some of my…
Sanjay Mishra
As the weather cools, the number of infections of the Covid-19 pandemic are rising sharply. Hamstrung by pandemic fatigue, economic constraints, and political discord, public health officials have struggled to control the surging pandemic. But now, a rush of interim analyses from pharmaceutical…
Liz Uram
If you work remotely either part-time or full-time, temporarily or permanently, you have probably discovered that you are a lot more productive when you are not in the office. The main reason for the increase in productivity is that people aren’t inviting you to “got a minute” meetings. These…