Ten years ago, Stanford University opened the doors of a new interdisciplinary research facility, the Clark Center. This research lab was intended to break down barriers between various academic disciplines, encouraging investigational cross-pollination. Has the university’s effort paid off? Tully Shelley and Seth Meisler analyzed the results for American Laboratory, and reported their findings here.
Sitting in a healthcare waiting room usually rates quite low on the good-times scale, and quite high on the stress scale. With today’s trend toward “patient as consumer,” designers are looking at ways to make waiting rooms more user-friendly. A recent study at a major healthcare facility defined the shortcomings in waiting room designs, including:
RFID technology has brought new levels of efficiency and accuracy to a host of industries. Manufacturing, logistics, retail, health care, museum curation — all kinds of businesses have benefited. While some have voiced concerns about privacy, their concerns have actually improved the quality of RFID tech, as developers address security issues. But no previous privacy
Concerns about safety and legalities are restricting the use of drones everywhere, except in one rather surprising place: the great indoors of mega-warehouses. It’s completely legal to fly drones inside a private space, and logistics experts are putting drones to use inside large warehouses to automate certain tasks. Warehouses are finite spaces, and they can
The Supreme Court recently upheld a federal law requiring the confiscation of guns in cases of domestic violence. This ruling created a perplexing question for police departments across the country: Where to store all the confiscated guns? In some states – California, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, for example – guns are confiscated at the time of
Economists and logistics pundits are hailing the advent of the “always-on” supply chain – one in which information is as valuable as goods. From drones to the Internet of Things, smart technology is changing the supply chain landscape. A recent report from MHI, the materials handling and logistics trade organization, listed eight technologies that are
It’s time for facilities management professionals to take center stage. Your work is vital to the smooth functioning of office buildings, hospitals, government facilities, military installations, retail operations, colleges and universities, and countless other public and private buildings and campuses. The general public rarely thinks about what it really takes to keep these facilities up
When the new mega-size container ship “Benjamin Franklin” docked in the Ports of Los Angeles in late 2015, it marked the beginning of a new shipping era. The ship can carry 18,000 containers. Placed end to end, the containers would reach from Boston to Hartford, a distance of nearly 100 miles. That’s a lot of
Moving is listed among the top 5 most stressful events in life. It’s hard enough moving from one home to another, but when you’re managing an office move involving hundreds of employees and thousands of equipment items, furnishings, and documents, it can be worse than herding cats. British business management blogger Morris Barris recommends this
New York’s hotels became the target of negative press and unwanted legislative attention after the notorious 2011 assault on a hotel employee by Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then head of the International Monetary Fund. Despite the questionable outcome of that case, hotels in the Big Apple, Toronto, and other major cities wised up to the fact that