Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/924542
98 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2018 My closing advice would be to do some- thing now! Waiting for a plan to be perfect will only ensure that it never begins; doing some- thing now is always better than doing some- thing later. I will close with a quote from Kar- en Lamb, courtesy of my friend Tom Peters: "A year from now you may wish you had started today." And remember, it's always about the dollars. PCB007 Steve Williams is the president of The Right Approach Consulting LLC. To read past columns, or to contact Williams, click here. can't realistically expect to significantly im- prove performance without investing in train- ing, organizational infrastructure and cultural evolution. Sure, it costs money to implement any training program, but the initial training is only the tip of the iceberg. The major expense in a Lean program is the ongoing cost of hu- man resources. If management is not willing to allocate the appropriate time for their employees to work on Lean projects, the program is sure to fail, and fail spectacularly. The good news is that the hard dollar payback of a solid program can be equally spectacular. Fortune 500 companies have saved billions of dollars through Lean, but even the mom-and-pop small business that make up most America's jobs can see tre- mendous benefit through Lean practices. Use your smartphone to check how clean the air is, whether food is fresh or a lump is malignant. This has all come a step closer thanks to a new spectrometer so small it can be incorporated easily and cheaply into a Micro-Spectrometer Opens Door to a Wealth of New Smartphone Functions mobile phone. The sensor developed at TU Eindhoven is just as precise as the normal tabletop models used in sci- entific labs. The researchers present their invention in the journal Nature Communications. The researchers developed an ingenious sensor that can make such precise measurements in an entirely dif- ferent way using a special 'photonic crystal cavity,' a 'trap' of just a few micrometers into which the light falls and cannot escape. This trap is contained in a membrane, into which the captured light generates a tiny electrical current, and that is measured. PhD student Zarko Zobeni- ca made the cavity so that it is very precise, retaining just a very tiny frequency interval and therefore measuring only light at that frequency. Professor Andrea Fiore expects it will take another five years before the new spectrometer gets into a smart- phone because the frequency range covered is still too small. At the moment, the sensor covers just a few per- cent of the most common spectrum, the near-infrared. So his group will be working on extending the detectable spectrum. They will also be integrating an extra element with the micro-spectrometer: a light source, which will make the sensor independent of external sources.