All Features
Zach Murphree
The metal additive manufacturing (AM, aka 3D printing) industry is in vigorous pursuit of repeatable part quality. Its aim is to match the reliability and performance found in traditional manufacturing industries such as machining or casting. Repeatable quality opens the door to wide-scale…
Merilee Kern
As Covid-19 rages on, warning sirens have sounded of late amid a flurry of headlines surrounding ultraviolet C (UVC) light device-safety issues. Rightfully so, as the current pandemic has ushered in a veritable wild west of UVC gadget deployments with subpar consumer safeguards, instructions, or…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
I took a drama class in college. It was fun; we studied famous plays, practiced dialogue and performed scenes. Then we did some really goofy stuff like pretend to be different types of animals, and learn how to say, “I love you” or “I hate you” using only the word “rhubarb.” One day the professor…
Tinglong Dai, Guihua Wang, Ronghuo Zheng
The Covid-19 pandemic has crippled the airline industry. Passenger numbers are down more than two-thirds from last year, and airlines have been canceling flights and shutting down routes.
It’s frustrating for travelers, but for patients on organ transplant waiting lists, the loss of flights can…
Ayman Jawhar
As a business leader, you probably think similarly to McKinsey about what makes a great product manager (PM): a perfect combination of skills like business acumen, market orientation, and technical skill as well as soft ones... the usual suspects.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your…
Bruce Hamilton
One summer when I was a kid, my friend Rick and I built a pole vault setup in my postage stamp-sized backyard with a plant box (the place where you plant the pole as you begin your vault) and a couple uprights to hold the crossbar. We used bamboo poles acquired from a local carpet store for both…
Jeb Banner
As the current pandemic unfolds, organizations’ boards of directors—especially in the healthcare industry—must continue leading and guiding. But gathering board members for in-person meetings is no longer an option.
In response, board engagement has gone digital. Planning, hosting, and following up…
Dawn Bailey
I recently listened to a Ted Talk by Simon Sinek, author of the book Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Portfolio, the Penguin Group, 2009), and it caused me to reflect on some key questions in and related to the Baldrige Excellence Framework, as well as leadership…
Donald J. Wheeler
On Sept. 29, 2020, the recorded worldwide death toll from Covid-19 reached 1 million. Six days earlier the United States reached 200,000 Covid-related deaths. So how did the United States with only 4 percent of the world’s population manage to capture 20 percent of the world’s deaths in this…
Celia Paulsen
A survey from 2014 found that small and medium-sized manufacturers do not like to compromise on quality when it comes to communications devices, vehicles, or tea (yes, tea—the survey respondents were probably British) but were more likely to skimp when it came to things like manufacturing equipment…
Exact Metrology
(Exact Metrology: Cincinnati) -- Exact Metrology, a comprehensive metrology service provider, recently released the Hexagon RS6 laser scanner, designed for high-speed and accuracy scanning. It scans up to 1.2 million points/sec with a scan rate of 300 Hz. The RS6 also has a wider laser stripe of…
Eric Weisbrod
The idea of digital transformation can be scary. The growth of technology is outpacing a comfortable pace of adoption for many manufacturers. But remaining content with the status quo often means being left behind. Digital transformation has become an imperative to give manufacturing organizations…
Steve Wise
The importance of data analysis in manufacturing operations can’t be overstated. Over the years, manufacturers have used statistical process control (SPC) methods and tools to study historical data and reveal differences between comparable items: shifts, products, machines, processes, plants, lot…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest, Jason Chester
In previous articles of this series, we discussed how to master quality at the tactical and strategic levels. If you are like most readers, you probably nodded your head through article two’s tactical shop-floor view and vigorously shook your head through article three’s strategic view because…
Gleb Tsipursky
Although deeply fulfilling, establishing and growing a quality-oriented startup poses serious dangers for the mental health of quality leaders. During the expansion stage, a founder will often face brutally long work weeks, pressure from different sources to manage the startup while raising funding…
Jason Stoughton
Remember that documentary you saw that finally explained metrology and why measurements are critical to practically every aspect of modern life? Yeah, neither do I. Probably because that documentary doesn’t exist... or does it?
The Last Artifact, a new one-hour film that PBS stations started…
Jason Chester
Before we get into a case study about how enterprisewide SPC software would work on both the shop floor and the C-suite, let’s talk about a long-held bias about “blue-collar” workers: That because they’ve traditionally been associated with manual labor, they should use manual tools; “white-collar”…
Ryan E. Day, Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest, Taran March @ Quality Digest
In order to best illustrate how enterprisewide SPC software can help address shop-floor problems and then funnel the captured data to the corporate level where strategic issues can be analyzed, here is a case study of a hypothetical manufacturing facility. In it, the company makes effective use of…
Eric Weisbrod
In recent months, we’ve learned that manufacturing during a global health crisis puts organizations under immense pressure to maintain operational efficiency while upholding product quality and employee safety.
Initially, organizations focused simply on taking the steps required to survive. However…
Jon Speer
Risk can mean many different things depending on the situation. Flying on an airplane, biking on a busy road, driving in a car—all of these involve some level of risk.
Although risk is a variable we encounter in everyday life, it means something uniquely different to the medical device industry.…
Guoli Chen
A novelty in the C-suite not so long ago, the chief sustainability officer (CSO) is fast becoming a fixture in companies of note as climate change and inequality increasingly dominate global attention.
During the past year alone Citigroup, General Motors, and International Paper have each…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
It’s been 40 years since “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?”, W. Edwards Deming, and total quality management. More than 33 years have passed since the release of the first iteration of ISO 9001 (remember checklists?). For four decades the importance of building quality into processes rather than trying…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
In the intro to this series we noted that, too often, quality tools and the data we glean from them are used only to solve immediate, mostly shop-floor problems. These gold nuggets of opportunity aren’t used in an equally valuable way to address a company’s strategic goals.
Here we’ll consider how…
Ryan E. Day
If you're involved in business you know: Strategy matters. Your strategies guide you to reach your objectives. Behind every successful business are purposeful strategies. Then again, as Alvin Toffler said, “The absence of strategy is fine if you don’t care where you’re going.”
We’re talking…
Tom Taormina
After more than 50 years as a quality control engineer and having worked with more than 700 companies, it is my observation that the vast majority of quality professionals hold their prime directive to be reducing defects to the lowest acceptable level by minimizing process variability. Most of us…
