All Features
MIT News
A couple of decades ago, visitors to the quiet city of Zaragoza, Spain, had no reason to think it would become a capital of world trade. But in 2000, the city opened Europe’s largest logistics hub, called PLAZA, and now Zaragoza is a global shipping link, connecting manufacturers, suppliers, and…
Akhilesh Gulati
Brian had been running his machine shop as a third-tier supplier to the aerospace industry for more than 15 years, and it had been successful as a small shop. Over the years he had learned the importance of ongoing training and continuous improvement. He contracted with trainers and encouraged his…
NIST
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- It’s been said that the one of the most prestigious qualifications a professional can have is to say that he or she was part of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Board of Examiners. To say you served as a Baldrige examiner and were part of building American…
Belinda Jones
Overlapping personal passion with technical expertise can often spawn a successful business. Chris Kelley, president of California Cycleworks, exemplifies the small business owner who envisioned opportunity and took a leap of faith.
While Kelley was working at CA Cycleworks as a college student,…
Bruce Hamilton
Last week I visited with JVS, a terrific Boston-area organization whose mission is “to empower individuals from diverse communities to find employment and build careers, and to partner with employers to hire, develop, and retain productive workforces.”
I was reminded of my first experience with…
Dale Pereira, Pete Marut
Firearm manufacturing has come a long way from the days when a room full of gunsmiths was needed to ensure accurate, quality weapons. Nonetheless, manufacturing firearm parts still requires a deep understanding of how the many small parts work together to create a successful weapon.
With the rapid…
Joel Smith
It’s no secret that in the world of statistics, the individuals chart and X-bar chart are pretty much the popular kids in school. But have you ever met their cousin EWMA? He’s all about exponentially weighted moving averages (EWMA). That’s him in the middle of the class, wearing the clothes that…
Pivot Management Consultants
(Pivot Management Consultants: Upland, CA) -- TRIZ (pronounced “treez”) is an innovative problem-solving method based on logic and data analysis that accelerates your ability to solve difficult problems creatively. TRIZ provides repeatability, predictability, and reliability due to its structure…
Renishaw
The Cliffs of Moher is one of Ireland’s top visitor attractions and a designated UNESCO Geo Park. O'Brien’s Tower stands proudly on a headland of the majestic cliffs, at the top of which you can see the Aran Islands, Galway Bay, and the Maum Turk Mountains in Connemara. The cliffs take their name…
Kyle Toppazzini
Confucius, also known as Kong Zi, was an ancient Chinese philosopher who believed that trust—or shin—enables people to contribute to society. He believed that, for a leader, earning trust was essential. In addition, according to Confucius, to consider the concerns and interests of another person…
Juran
(Juran Institute: Southbury, CT) -- Juran Institute has announced the launch of the new Juran.com website. The new site provides visitors with a description of Juran’s expertise and solutions, a history of Juran, videos of client results, as well as other useful tools that professionals use to…
Tim Egloff
Every manufacturer must conform to some level of product safety and quality, whether driven by consumer desires, competitive pressures, or government regulations. To this end, quality practices have become a business imperative for all industries.
Whether your company is certified to ISO 9001, the…
The Pyzdek Institute
(The Pyzdek Institute: Tucson, AZ) -- For 50 years, the go-to method of improving call center performance has been monitoring and coaching. Yet measures of performance like disclosure compliance, call resolution, cross/upsell rates, and handle time are not continuously improving and in fact have…
InnovMetric
(Innovmetric: Quebec, Canada) -- InnovMetric Software has released Phase II of DirectReplay, a new Play Inspection tool that automatically builds a guided, step-by-step sequence to capture 3D datasets of a new piece. The new tool is built into v. 12.1 of PolyWorks.
Phase I of DirectReplay, which…
Stanford News Service
The terms “black swan” and “perfect storm” have become common for describing disasters ranging from the 2008 financial meltdown to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But according to Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, a Stanford professor of management science and engineering, people in government and…
Paul Naysmith
My Tuesday evenings have recently been filled thanks to the entertainment provided by the very nice people at the History channel. I’ve been thoroughly entranced by the show, The Men Who Built America. Production quality aside, it’s really an incredible feat, on reflection, how a TV channel could…
Bill Kalmar
Thanksgiving is my favorite celebration. Unlike other holidays, there is no pretentiousness. One just arrives at the host home dressed in an everyday wardrobe and not encumbered with loads of presents.
Now, that is not to say that as a guest you can’t bring a tasty food dish or a bottle of wine…
The Conference Board
(The Conference Board: New York) -- Today, corporations are embracing and analyzing “big data” to transform business and industries and spur innovation. Despite the plethora of data gathered during the past two decades, human resources functions have made little progress in using these data to help…
Steinbichler
(Steinbichler: Plymouth, MI) -- Steinbichler, a worldwide provider of optic measuring and sensor technology, will present the a new portable coordinate measuring device, the handheld touch probe T-POINT CS at EuroMold 2012, Nov. 27–30, 2012. The T-POINT CS offers a new dimension in coordinate…
Jon Miller
At the heart of the Toyota Way are two pillars, continuous improvement and respect for people. These are supported by five values: challenge, improvement (kaizen), seeing for yourself (genchi genbutsu), respect, and teamwork. The word “challenge” means either a tangible thing, such as competition…
Matthew E. May
In our world of excess everything, savvy innovators realize that less is actually best. They know that delivering a memorable and meaningful experience hinges on user engagement, which is best achieved through a subtractive approach. Anything excessive, confusing, or wasteful is intelligently and…
Alan Nicol
Outsourced solutions are some of the simplest for the business improvement analyst and the biggest nightmares for the process improvement analyst. They are simple for the business improvement analyst because, on the surface, outsourcing expertise proves to be a cost-effective way to improve upon a…
Bruce Hamilton
Bob was an outside salesman in from the field for a sales meeting at the plant. We asked him to stop by to participate with a problem-solving team assigned to one of his customers, ABC Co. We’d tried everything, so we thought, to correct a defect in a product that we produced for ABC.
The product…
Mike Micklewright
If you’ve answered the question above with, “Absolutely yes, I am a very humble leader,” you probably are not.
But don’t get me wrong: Humility should not be a substitute for confidence. In fact, perhaps the two greatest assets a lean leader, change agent, innovation pioneer, or a continuous…
National Physical Laboratory
The National Physical Laboratory (NPL), part of the United Kingdom’s National Measurement Office, has developed a new range of 3D standards for verifying freeform coordinate measurement machines (CMMs). The standards allow the verification of portable and fixed noncontact coordinate measuring…
