Failure mode and effect analysis, or FMEA, is an attempt to delineate all possible failures, their effects on the system, the likelihood of occurrence and the probability that the failure will go ... [Read More]
My twin grandsons celebrated their first birthday on July 1, 2001. And while the majority of people reading this article don’t know Alex and Austen, there is another set of twins celebrating ... [Read More]
Scott Paton’s "The Chinese are Coming! The Chinese are Coming!" (Quality Digest, February 2005) describes how China’s Chery Automobile Co. plans to undercut American ... [Read More]
As quality professionals, we frequently report such facts as proportions (percentages), process capability indices, averages and standard deviations as if we know what we’re talking about. But ... [Read More]
For years, customers and auditors have been preaching to suppliers the need for the FMEA (failure mode and effects analysis) to be a “living” document. There are probably several ... [Read More]
“Then the Husaria broke into a wild g allop and the heavy mass of men and horses cascaded over the Turkish ranks, bowling over the first, slicing through the second… The Grand Vizir ... [Read More]
In a lean environment, training is the last part of the production process to be transformed by the new approach to efficiency. While smaller work groups are streamlining steps and multitasking to ... [Read More]
Six Sigma is a powerful tool for effecting change within an organization. Since its development in the late 1980s, it’s helped companies dramatically improve business processes, increase ... [Read More]
The maintenance problem Too many times, in lean manufacturing and other lean environments, 10- to 40-year-old equipment is re-deployed, moved and organized into lean cells without adequate concern ... [Read More]
Six Sigma, the statistical approach focused on increasing profitability by improving efficiency, has been part of the engineering world since the 1980s. Now, new innovative online and on-campus ... [Read More]
