Brian C. Black
When President Joe Biden took Ford’s electric F-150 Lightning pickup for a test drive in Dearborn, Michigan, in May 2021, the event was more than a White House photo op. It marked a new phase in an...
Ryan E. Day
Automation in the fresh produce sector is standard fare these days. What may not be so standard are the containers that get the produce from farm to market. The quality of produce containers has a...
Benjamin Kessler
Suddenly, supply chains are in the spotlight. The practical details of how products arrive on supermarket shelves, for example, gained unwelcome relevance amid last year’s wave of panic buying caused...
Barbara Cuthill
The internet of things (IoT) offers many attractions for small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) that may want to integrate IoT into their facilities and operations, or who seek to enter the IoT...
Knowledge at Wharton
Technology firms are the drivers of disruption across industries, but things will play out differently for automobiles, according to John Paul MacDuffie, Wharton management professor and director of...
Emily Newton
Food manufacturers must carry out numerous specific processes to check that the foods they produce and distribute are safe for consumers. Analytical testing plays a vital role in meeting that goal....
William A. Levinson
The current national controversy over the need for a mandatory high minimum wage is but a symptom of a much larger underlying problem: the offshoring of American manufacturing capability.
Offshoring...
Bob Holmes
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
Most of us won’t soon forget that disconcerting moment last spring when grocery store shelves were suddenly bare where the flour, pasta, and...
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Quality professionals no longer focus solely on product or service quality. Today, the quality function is involved in almost every aspect of a company, from customer interactions and compliance...
John Toon
Using X-ray tomography, a research team has observed the internal evolution of the materials inside solid-state lithium batteries as they were charged and discharged. Detailed 3D information from the...
Scott Heide
During the last several decades, the ability to manufacture customized products for customers has become increasingly attractive to a growing number of companies. However, customization has led to...
Tinglong Dai
More than 50 million Americans have received at least one dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. So far, Americans have been largely brand-agnostic, but that’s about to change as the...
Mark Schmit
The Covid-19 pandemic has asked much of manufacturing executives. They’ve had to make decisions about staffing and operations in the face of tremendous health and economic uncertainty—and then adjust...
Silke von Gemmingen
The global pandemic has radically impacted the supply chain and logistics industry, making the need for robotic automation more urgent than ever. With more than 70 percent of labor in warehousing now...
Esteve Garriga
There are many important issues to be considered in the food industry, such as consumer tastes, environmental impact, and economic aspects, but the most important is food safety.
Although current...
Lucca Henrion
One of the big contributors to climate change is right beneath your feet, and transforming it could be a powerful solution for keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
The production of...
Andrew Schutte
Industrial engineers design, develop, test, and evaluate integrated systems for managing industrial production processes. Functions include quality control, human work factors, inventory control,...
Yoav Kutner
Like business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce allows customers to purchase parts and supplies via an online portal. The difference is that in B2B e-commerce, both...
Gleb Tsipursky
Stakeholder engagement is one of the more critical aspects of leadership, whether you’re a team leader or a member of a cross-functional team trying to lead team members to focus on quality....
Aarti Gumaledar
Globalization of trade and decades-long innovation in supply chain networks have resulted in significant benefits for all stakeholders—greater efficiencies, lower costs, and greater access to markets...
