An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories Fiscal Year 2002 (2002) / Chapter Skim
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3 Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory
3 Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory
Pages 57-84
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Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory 57
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DeVries, and its Vice Chair, Richard A Curless, this assessment of the fiscal year 2002 activities of the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory is based on site visits by individual panel members, a formal meeting of the panel on March 19-20, 2002, in Gaithersburg, Md., and the documents provided by the laboratory.
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The Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory is organized in five divisions: Precision Engineering, Manufacturing Metrology, Intelligent Systems, Manufacturing Systems Integration, and Fabrication Technology (see Figure 3.1~. The first four divisions are reviewed in turn under "Divisional Reviews" below in this chapter; the Fabrication Technology Division, which houses the NIST machine shop, is not reviewed separately, but its "Shop Floor as National Measurement Institute" program is discussed in the reviews of its collaborating divisions.
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Also, it needs to focus on the needs ot users in addition to those of vendors of advanced manufacturing technology. Customer contact should be sought at all levels of an organization, from bench-level scientists through top management.
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The panel has the following reaction to these presentations. Homeland Security In the area of homeland security, critical infrastructure protection must include the U.S.
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The panel looks forward to more information and evidence of progress in this area in the FY 2003 assessment. Laboratory Resources Funding sources for the Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory are shown in Table 3.1.
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As administrative positions open up, the panel believes that managers should consider carefully whether those positions' duties can be effectively reassigned to remaining administrative staff and the resources used to broaden or deepen the technical skill base. The panel also noted a large ratio of manager to bench-level staff with the laboratory's current matrix management approach.
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Such recognition by top MEL management helps build staff morale and can give greater emphasis to laboratory priorities. The panel encourages increased use of internal awards and staff recognition.
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· The panel agrees with MEL's matrix management approach as a means to best utilize staff skills to accomplish laboratory objectives. Changes in the employee evaluation process may be necessary to better align evaluation with the program management structure.
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industrial and scientific communities by conducting research in dimensional measurements, developing measurement methods, providing measurement services, and disseminating the resulting technology and length-based standards. Within the division is a diverse set of programs, organized in four groups: Nanoscale Metrology, Surface and Microform Metrology, Engineering Metrology, and Large-Scale Coordinate Metrology.
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As a result, the group is sometimes forced to choose projects primarily because of the instrumentation available rather than for strategic reasons. Engineering Metrology Group.
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The Engineering Metrology Group also is continuing to support the research and standardization of uncertainty management. It supports the Shop Floor as NMI Program, which seeks to provide documentary standards and to educate industrial users about how to manage measurement uncertainty.
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Program Relevance and Effectiveness Technical professionals and lower-level managers in the Precision Engineering Division have good contacts in industry and academia. At the project level, strong interactions with customers and contributing professionals outside of NIST contribute to the relevance and effectiveness of the individual projects.
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Division Resources Funding sources for the Precision Engineering Division are shown in Table 3.2. As of January 2002, staffing for the division included 35 full-time permanent positions, of which 32 were for technical professionals.
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. Technical Merit Manufacturing Metrology Division According to division documentation, the mission of the Manufacturing Metrology Division is to fulfill the measurements and standards needs of the United States in mechanical metrology and advanced manufacturing technology by the following: 3National Research Council, An Assessment of the National Institute of Standards and Technology Measurement and Standards Laboratories: Fiscal Year 2000, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., 2000, p.
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The mission also can be interpreted as being quite expansive. Recognizing the limitations of budget and number of personnel, the division's management has made a strategic decision to limit its scope to four major programs: Advanced Optics Metrology, Mechanical Metrology, Smart Machine Tools, and Predictive Process Engineering.
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Though matrix management has been very successful in large organizations with several distinct cross-functional responsibilities, the 5International Bureau of Weights and Measures, Mutual Recognition of National Measurement Standards and of Calibration and Measurement Certificates Issued by National Metrology Institutes, International Bureau of Weights and Measures, Paris, France, 1999.
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As of January 2002, staffing for the division included 40 full-time permanent positions, of which 36 were for technical professionals. There were also 5 nonpermanent or supplemental personnel, such as postdoctoral research associates and temporary or part-time workers.
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It also supports ~recllctlve ~rocess Engineering, Shop Floor as NMI, and Nanomanufacturing Programs. The division manages a Competence Development project, which extends basic research that was formerly part of the Research and Engineering of Intelligent Systems Program.
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The goal of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Program is to increase the security of computer systems that control production and distribution in critical infrastructure industries including utilities, processing industries such as oil and gas, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, metals and mining, and pulp and paper, as well as consumer products and discrete-parts manufacturing industries. The program has the objectives of defining and applying standard information-security requirements, developing best practices for information security, and developing laboratory and field-test methods for information-security products applied to the process control sector.
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The panel agrees with the approach utilized to support the Critical Infrastructure Protection Program. NIST, through the Intelligent Systems Division, is a natural lead entity for such a critical program.
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However, the division's key industrial partners or customers are currently industry groups such as Open Modular Architecture Control, the Robotics Industry Association, the Automotive Industry Action Group, the Metrology Automation Association, the American Welding Society, and the Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing International. These may not be the best sources of information, as they often lack a strategic cross-industry view of the problem.
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The panel recognizes the division's effort to transfer the UGV technology for military applications to manufacturing problems, though industrial customers are yet to be identified. The Critical Infrastructure Protection Program is a timely and critical assignment for the Intelligent Systems Division.
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rive programs: in, ~ an, · Product Engineering, which includes projects in parametrics exchange, design-analysis integration, assembly and tolerance representation, heterogeneous material representation, and knowledge representation for next generation CAD; · Predictive Process Engineering, which includes projects in process metrology, representation, modeling, and application; · Manufacturing Simulation and Visualization, which includes projects on distributed manufacturing simulation environments, and manufacturing simulation transactions and simulation templates and model formats; · Nanomanufacturing, which includes projects in atomic-scale measurement, manipulation, and manufacturing, and molecular-scale measurement, manipulation and assembly; and · Manufacturing Enterprise Integration, which includes projects on a B2B testbed, and self-integrating system.
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It seems unreasonable to expect that a staff of relatively constant size can be expected to cover an exponentially increasing domain of needs without loss of quality. The panel found work on evaluating and certifying software manufacturing coordinate metrology to be an extremely interesting and novel approach to the problems associated with metrology and software certification.
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As of January 2002, staffing for the division included 30 full-time permanent positions, of which 23 were for technical professionals. There were also 5 nonpermanent or supplemental personnel, such as postdoctoral research associates and temporary or part-time workers.
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aThe number of full-time permanent staff is as of January of that fiscal year. division, they unfortunately are not treated as first-class citizens.
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