All Features
Eastern Michigan University
(Eastern Michigan University: Ypsilanti, MI) -- An undergraduate degree helped get you where you are today. Preparation for a management-level position is the obvious next step. Eastern Michigan University has designed a program that will help you become proficient at managing quality and…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
The year: 1989. Florida Power & Light had just won the Deming Prize, Japan’s national quality award, and became the first overseas company to do so. There were a lot of high-flown speeches in the aftermath and deservingly so. But for me, what stuck were the words of CEO Charles Turner.
“The…
Fred Schenkelberg
A conversation the other day involved how or why someone would use the mean of a set of data described by a Weibull distribution.
The Weibull distribution is great at describing a dataset that has a decreasing or increasing hazard rate over time. Using the distribution we also do not need to…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
For manufacturers, big parts pose big challenges. How does one measure parts that are in excess of 15 ft and also have complex geometry? Design and inspection are part and parcel of all manufacturing operations, but as product size increases, and part geometry grows more complex…
ASQ
(ASQ: Milwaukee) -- The ASQ Statistics Division announces that nominations are now open for its William G. Hunter Award for 2017.
William G. Hunter was the founding chair of the Statistics Division of the American Society for Quality Control (now American Society for Quality). His leadership as a…
Exemplar Global
(Exemplar Global: Sydney, Australia) -- Join experts in the quality auditing profession to hear about trends in the workplace, learn practical tips of the trade, and earn low-cost continuing professional development credits—all from the comfort of your home or office. Exemplar Global has gathered…
Mike Richman
On our most recent episode of QDL from this past Fri., April 14, 2017, we took a close look at innovation and engineering. Here’s a quick recap:
“SAE Institute Creates Webisodes to Benefit STEM Education” This piece demonstrates the good work that the San Jose, California, campus of the SAE…
Davis Balestracci
Many talk about reducing variation to improve quality. Does that include human variation, where everyone takes a different approach to improving overall improvement processes? What would happen if this variation were reduced?
Would some of you lean folks be interested in spearheading an effort to…
Gleb Tsipursky
Let’s say you’re interviewing a new applicant for a job, and you feel something is off. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you’re a bit uncomfortable with this person. She says all the right things, her resume is great, she’d be a perfect hire for this job—except your gut tells you…
Greg Cresswell
Occasionally, my colleagues and I will take a step back from the day-to-day and have a more philosophical discussion about the field of ergonomics. Recently, the question was raised, “In the plan-do-check-act continuous improvement cycle, which step is the most important?” This sparked some…
American Customer Satisfaction Index ACSI
(ACSI: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Gas and electric service recovers after three years of declining customer satisfaction, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Household satisfaction with utilities is up 4.2 percent to a score of 74.9 on a 100-point scale. According to residential…
Beamex
(Beamex: Atlanta, GA) -- Beamex announces the opening of attendee registration for Calibration Best Practices: Interactive Workshop, which will be held Wednesday and Thursday, Aug. 2–3, 2017, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The workshop will explore the latest insights, trends…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In last week’s Quality Digest Live: Enterprise quality management vs. integrated quality management. Our deteriorating U.S. infrastructure. Stress testing composites. The Fowler Precision Mobile Tech Center.
“Save Costs When Implementing Enterprise Quality Systems”
An integrated quality management…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
One of the biggest drivers for innovation is scarcity—of resources, time, even knowledge. Necessity and scarcity drive you to look at your approach differently than when you are surrounded by abundance. Forced to use different methods and tools, you improvise, you MacGyver, and the result is often…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
This month’s column comes from a convergence of finishing my article, “Statistical Thinking for OD Professionals,” for the OD Practitioner, and reading “How Statistics Lost their Power—and Why We Should Fear What Comes Next” in the Guardian, and Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil (Crown…
Jason Furness
In a previous column based on our recent book, Manufacturing Money (Amazon Digital, 2015), we explained how to maximize ROI. Here we describe some changes that business owners and managers can make on their way toward becoming a Black Belt in a manufacturing and distribution business.
Before any…
Mark Whitworth
Supplier quality assurance (SQA) is the process that ensures a supplier reliably provides goods or services that satisfy the customer’s needs. This process is collaborative to make certain the supplier’s offerings meet the agreed-upon requirements with minimum inspection or modification.…
LaRae Quy
To survive growing up on a remote cattle ranch in the middle of Wyoming, I needed to be scrappy, gritty, and tenacious. If I wasn’t keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes, I was avoiding horned bulls charging my horse as I tried to cut them from a herd of cows.
I learned many important life lessons…
Dawn Bailey
The message for audience members who attended the 29th Annual Quest for Excellence Conference held last week was, “Prepare for an inspiring journey.” This was the advice of keynote presenter Polly LaBarre, co-founder and director of Management Lab (MLab) and co-founder of Management Innovation…
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(Lawrence Berkeley National Lab: Berkeley, CA) -- A team of scientists at Berkeley Lab has developed an unsupervised multiscale machine learning technique that can automatically and specifically capture biomedical events or concepts directly from raw data.
In many data-driven biomedical studies,…
Lois Kelly
It’s discouraging and frustrating to work tirelessly on solving what you think is an important issue and nothing happens. Despite brilliant thinking, smart teammates, and innovative solutions, the organization never fully embraces the new approach.
There are a lot of reasons why good ideas never…
Michael Causey
The FDA has made it abundantly clear that it expects medical device manufacturers and other life sciences firms to have strong cybersecurity management programs. Since the FDA hasn’t always been clear on what it expects on a granular level, the Common Vulnerability Scoring System can provide much-…
Janet Forgrieve
Restaurant reservations systems such as OpenTable and Yelp Reservations may be one of the biggest areas where technology is working to help restaurants win new customers and build a bigger roster of loyal regulars. The services offer tools that help eateries customize the experience and add a…
Peter Marks
(FDA: Silver Spring, MD) -- The field of regenerative medicine encompasses a wide scope of innovative products including cell therapies, therapeutic tissue engineering products, human cell and tissue products, and certain combination products using such therapies. Examples include genetically-…
Bruce Hamilton
I grew up in a small manufacturing company where nine different languages were spoken. English was the language of managers, office workers, and some of our production employees. Additionally, these languages were spoken in our factory: Armenian, Laotian, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Italian, Creole,…
