In today's competitive industrial landscape, adhering to quality management certification and audit standards is vital for consistency and excellence, especially in sectors like aviation and defense. These standards drive improvement and build customer trust. Understanding the audit process is crucial, as preparation varies by audit type, enabling organizations to effectively meet auditors' expectations.

Reed Switch Developments Corp. (RSD), a woman-owned manufacturer in Racine, WI, specializes in magnetic reed switches and sensors. Recognized as last year’s Quality Plant of the Year, RSD has achieved a 25% increase in sales year-to-date, leveraging in-house technical expertise and automation to manage growth amid rising costs and economic uncertainty.

In our ever-changing world of global business, quality is a cornerstone of success. Organizations striving for excellence cannot afford to overlook Total Quality Management (TQM), a management philosophy centered on the continuous improvement of processes, products, and services through the involvement of all employees. 

A bad boss creates more bad bosses.

Getting authority is easier than keeping it.

Manufacturers are prioritizing low-code AI tools to simplify application development, enabling non-experts to create and customize AI workflows.

We explore two critical applications of AI and ML in quality management: predictive quality analytics and automated quality inspections.

Manufacturers thrive in a competitive market by prioritizing customer needs: price, quality, and delivery. However, long-term success hinges on quality, which ensures products perform as expected from manufacturing through to post-sale. While price is influenced by costs and market dynamics, and delivery by productivity, quality is key to building trust and customer loyalty.

The automotive industry is innovating to produce safer and more efficient vehicles. Quality standards are vital, as small defects can lead to serious safety issues. Digital twins and augmented reality (AR) are transforming quality management. This article explores their impact and associated challenges.

Automation requires precise data and careful attention to uncertainty, especially in longer processes with less human involvement, according to Chris Gordon from Optronic Laboratories.

Cooper Oates Air Conditioning (COAC), a mechanical contractor serving northern California, has announced the appointment of James Biagioni as general manager, Service Division. Biagioni will be responsible for all operational aspects of the Service Division.

Mauzy Heating, Air & Solar, a provider of heating and cooling as well as solar energy services in Southern California, has announced the appointment of Jim Richardson as the company’s new general manager.

Eric Ruggles comes to Ritchie with experience in commercial HVAC as well as in vehicle and engine heating, cooling, and electrification products. Matt Ingold joined Ritchie in 2018 as regional sales manager for the eastern region.

With the ongoing HFC phasedown, strong refrigerant management strategies are crucial to ensuring compliance, environmental responsibility, and business growth.

Leverage the business resources available to you as a contractor, and one of those resources is your distributor’s territory manager.

James Bowman, a 20-year industry veteran, has joined NAVAC North America as regional sales manager of HVAC tools. Bowman will oversee the company’s central sales region.

Wendy Abbagliato of Chester, New York, was promoted to office manager at Nebrasky Plumbing, Heating & Cooling, an award-winning Hudson Valley business. Abbagliato will be responsible for planning, directing, and overseeing the office operations for the company.

This article lists four ways contractors can stock their trucks to guarantee they keep rollin’ in the dough (pun intended).

This service reduces fleet downtime due to roadside emergencies or inconveniences like dead batteries, empty fuel tanks, flat tires, etc.

This product provides central management on one platform for both employees and owners.

GPS Insight, a provider of fleet software for organizations, announced the acquisition of ServiceBridge.

Here are managerial strategies that contractors can incorporate to improve driver safety and management during the winter season.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic struck nearly three years ago, automobile manufacturers have had trouble getting many of the parts — computer chips especially — required to assemble the vans and trucks that field-service businesses use daily.

Having the right fleet management solution can increase employee accountability, efficiency, safety, and grow an HVAC company.

Daniel Truxillo, the general manager of the Dayton, Ohio, branch of Thomas & Galbraith Heating, Cooling & Plumbing, has a long history of success in the home-services industry and got his start as an HVACR technician nearly two decades ago.

Heat-only, direct-fired, and indirect-fired makeup air units have been added to the company’s product line. 

In comments to EPA’s proposed rule regarding HFC management, many HVACR stakeholders expressed concern over issues including tracking cylinders, training technicians, and reclaiming refrigerant.

Contractors need to implement a refrigerant management strategy that accommodates both legacy and A2L systems, as well as emphasizes recovery and reclamation.

Amy Harlan, who has an extensive background in electronics and device connectivity, is the new business development manager for device connection technology at the global electronics technology firm.

Panasonic Corp. of North America is honing in on its focus to make it easier for both residential and commercial building owners to control the temperature and comfort level within the space. The company hit its targets with the introduction of two new products — the ECONAVI air conditioner and the Variable Refrigerant Flow (VRF) Smart Connectivity Controller.

Here are two examples of the difference that high-performance building features and high-efficiency HVAC technology can make.

Johnson Controls announced that it closed an agreement to purchase the EasyIO Building and Energy Management System (BEMS) product line.

Aircuity has been named a New York State Energy Research and Development Authority Qualified Vendor for the RTEM program.

BrainBox AI intends to integrate ABB’s MSR business and its installed base of 12,000-plus retail locations in its current operations.

HiberSense Inc. appointed Chris Lawson as channel sales manager for the U.S. market.

Posted by CISA on Mar 21

In this episode Michael and our guest Prashant Jain talk about patterns for resource management. Efficient management of resources is critical in the execution of any kind of software. Ranging from embedded software in a mobile device to software in a large enterprise server, it is important that the resources, such as memory, threads, file handles, or network connections, are managed efficiently to allow the systems to function properly and effectively. Michael and Prashant discuss various patterns, such as Lazy Acquisition, Caching, Leasing and Evictor and explain when, why, and how to apply them for effective resource management.

In this episode Michael interviews one of our regular listeners: Petri Ahonen. Petri introduces Software Configuration Management by defining key terms and describing relevant concepts.

Michael and Markus discuss what makes a good R&D manager and how to potentially become an R&D manager. You will learn what some of the essential skills are, what the challenges are, and what the 'mission/vision/strategy thing' is actually good for.

In this episode, we discuss with Roman Pichler how Scrum impacts product management and how agile product management differs from traditional approaches. The topics covered include product owners on large projects and product owner teams, facilitating customer feedback through early and frequent releases, envisioning the product, and creating products with the minimum functionality. Enjoy!

Recording Venue: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich Guest: Georg von Krogh Open source development has had a major impact on both private and public development and use of software. This is an interview with one of the key researchers on open source development, Professor Georg von Krogh of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in […]

Recording Venue: WebEx Guest: Wil van der Aalst Robert Blumen interviews Professor Wil van der Aalst of the Technical University of Eindhoven, one of the world’s leading researchers in business process management and workflow systems. Professor van der Aalst leads off with an overview of the main concepts in the field business processes, business process […]

Josh Long talks to Activiti cofounder Joram Barrez about the wide world of (open source) workflow engines, the Activiti BPMN2 engine, and what workflow implies when you’re building process-driven applications and services. Joram was originally a contributor to the jBPM project with jBPM founder Tom Baeyens at Red Hat. He cofounded Activiti in 2010 at […]

Bryan Reinero talks with Harsh Sinha, VP of  Engineering at TransferWise, about Product Management. Mr. Sinha details how requirements are derived from user needs, how to measure product success, and how successful product management is done.

Armon Dadgar speaks to Matthew Farwell about Secrets Management.

Bernd Rücker, who has contributed to multiple open source workflow management projects, discusses orchestrating microservices with workflow management.  As distributed systems evolve into a family of microservices that must handle long-running stateful processes with time-dependent actions, events, multiple paths through the system, and complex rollbacks, the workflow management model provides a way to ensure clear modeling, correctness, and separation of concerns.   Rücker recommends a federated model in which each microservice is paired with its own workflow to handle retries and other policies and failure modes around that service.  Robert Blumen spoke with Rücker about microservice architecture, event-driven systems, long-running stateful processes versus synchronous request/response, event handling, time-outs, and handling exceptional conditions with compensating transactions. Rücker compares the choreography versus orchestration models for collaboration and discusses why orchestration provides a better separation of concerns.  The discussion delves into the implementation of workflow management systems including persistence, scaling, event handling, timers and scheduling, and similarities to CQRS.  The discussion wraps up with monitoring and visualization.

Travis Kimmel talks with Johnathan Nightingale about scaling engineering management. Their discuss when to hire additional engineering managers and how to set them up for success, how leaders can prepare for “growing pains” as an organization scales,

Bob Kepford discusses Decoupled CMS. Many CMS practitioners are adopting a decoupled approach to improve scale, allow for more specialized roles, and to separate data collection from delivery. Host Jeff Doolittle spoke with Kepford about what makes a Decoupled CMS different.

Pat Helland talks to host Akshay Manchale about Data Management at scale in a Microservices world. Pat talks about trends in managaging data in a distributed microservices world, immutability, idempotence, inside and outside data, descriptive...

Berkay Mollamustafaoglu, founder of Ops Genie, discusses the keys to an effective incident management process. Many aspects of incident management are counter intuitive. Why does increasing the rate of change increase uptime? Why is culture the most...