All Features
Sonal Sinha, Wally Bell
During the 1990s and early 2000s, several global apparel, sports, and toy brands hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. Large-scale protests erupted against these companies for allegedly using ‘‘sweatshops’’ with dangerous working conditions to manufacture their products.
The Fair Labor…
Keith McDavit
Last weekend I decided to change the oil and tune up my classic car, a 1972 Datsun 1200. (My wife has other names for it.) It sports a “four on the floor” and a simple four-cylinder engine that doesn’t even need fancy smog controls. Since I hadn’t tinkered with this car in a long while, I was…
Debbie Collard
As I join others this year in celebrating 25 years of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, the only improvement program with a prestigious presidential award, I think about the Baldrige’s history of public service, and what the future holds for the only public-private partnership that…
Mark R. Hamel
When discussing lean math with other folks, I often get some less-than-optimal responses. Of course, much of the time it’s probably me.
In any case, this is how I would characterize the more nonvalue-adding responses to the subject. • Apoplectic. You know, the math-anxiety-induced stroke. Some…
John Flaig
Everyone in the quality world is familiar with the famous 80–20 rule for corrective action project prioritization. The “rule” suggests that 20 percent of the causes result in 80 percent of the effects or in technical terms, the principal of factor sparsity. For the engineer this can be thought of…
Judy Worth, Tom Shuker
Headlines shout the message almost every day: The U.S. healthcare delivery system is unaffordable, inefficient, and sometimes downright dangerous. It is in need of true transformation. To do this, we must tap into the wisdom of those delivering care and equip them with the means to create a new…
William A. Levinson
Automobiles were once high-maintenance luxuries that only the wealthy could afford. Renewable energy, such as that from photovoltaic sources, also is a luxury among whose sole redeeming qualities are its uninterruptable nature—at least during the daytime. Government efforts to compel its use, e.g…
Calvin Kwon
Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto—a significant Catholic pilgrimage site in Lourdes, France, visited by nearly 6 million people each year—was digitally documented on Jan. 29, 2013, by CyArk, a nonprofit organization in Oakland, California, whose mission is to preserve cultural heritage, and Organization…
Ford Motor Co.
Cutting waste-to-landfill at Ford Motor Co.’s Van Dyke Transmission Plant has always been important to workers there, but they weren’t satisfied until last fall, when a small, diligent local committee played a major role in solving a nagging 10-ton problem.
The solution, which keeps 10 tons’…
Gallup
In my experience, if you ask senior leaders if they would fire a sales manager whose team missed quota three years in a row, they usually say yes. If you ask them if they would fire a plant manager whose facility had a poor safety record for three consecutive years, they would say yes. But ask if…
Jeff Dewar
“Check on your customers every 10 minutes or so,” instructs the typical restaurant manager. And Deming turns in his grave again because the manager’s objective is arbirtrary. It’s not based on the capabilities of a process or the needs of the customer. But wait—there’s a new service quality…
AQSENSE
(AQSENSE: Girona, Spain) -- AQSENSE has incorporated into 3DExpress a new functionality to configure, with a single click, the “one camera—multiple lasers system,” which avoids capturing occlusions.
3DExpress software was presented November 2012 at the VISION show with the slogan, “3D Machine…
Patrick Runkel
If the title of this post made you think you’d be reading about Abraham Lincoln and Tyra Banks, you’re only half right.
A few weeks ago, statistician and journalist Nate Silver published an interesting post on how U.S. presidents are ranked by historians. Silver showed that the percentage of…
Stan Craig
The full-page ad in a Sunday edition of The New York Times stated boldly that $60 million was received during 2012—more than $1 million a week—by a variety of recognized charities and community causes. The ad was not from a charity or fund-raising organization. It was from one of America’s largest…
Umberto Tunesi
Last night I went to the theater. Actor and satirist Marco Paolini was performing his favorite monologue about Galileo Galilei. Not an easy task, when you consider the man and his place in history. Paolini was juggling religion, the Inquisition, mathematics, astronomy, astrology—and Galileo’s…
Matthew Littlefield
With the evolution of quality management, there has been a shift away from manual and paper-based solutions. Organizations are now leveraging the power of automation and integration across the value chain to improve the quality of products and processes. This progression has materialized directly…
Matthew E. May
A good friend of mine recently recommended a wonderful documentary to me: Jiro Dreams of Sushi. I now recommend it to you. It’s a phenomenal and fascinating study of a man who embodies the disciplined pursuit of perfection.
The 85-year-old Jiro Ono owns Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, $300-per-meal…
Joel Smith
One of the most poorly understood concepts in the use of statistics is the idea of assumptions. You’ve probably encountered many of these assumptions, such as “data normality is an assumption of the one-sample t-test.” But if you read that statement and believe normality is a requirement of the…
Steve Martin
Iran across an old but interesting article by Mara Lee on the Hartford Courant website: “Big Exports From Connecticut: Corn, Wheat, Soybeans, Oil; Feds Can’t Explain It.” The article provides a wonderful example of just how far one’s concept of reality can become skewed by not following the basic…
Karl Stephan
I assume many readers are either engineers or interested in engineering and its effects on society, so what I am about to say may surprise you. It is simply this: Engineers are playing a role in American society that may end American society as we have known it up to now. Let me explain.
George…
Jim Benson
Apersonal kanban is considered a productivity tool because it gives us the power to produce more. It’s also said to increase our efficiency by limiting work in progress (WIP) and increasing focus, which means we expend less energy to get results. This in turn boosts our effectiveness by providing…
Bruce Hamilton
This winter has presented folks in my clime with a perpetual blanket of snow that hides most of the welcome signs of an approaching spring. There is one early bloomer, however, that blossoms each February, even as temperatures fall to the single digits as they did last week. The small yellow and…
Donald J. Wheeler
Last month I looked at "The Secret of Process Adjustment." This column will review the history and purpose of specifications and look at two common ways that specifications are used in practice. Using simple examples I will illustrate the right and wrong ways to use specifications.
The voice of…
Mark R. Hamel
For millennia, warriors have taken war trophies to commemorate their victories. They range from the souvenir to war reparations to the just plain gory.
We’ve got flags and weapons and things like seagoing vessels, such as the U.S. Coast Guard’s tall ship Eagle—courtesy of the defeated Nazi navy…
Bull Wranglers
Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.—Carl Bernstein
Every form of media inundates us with information, most of it misinformation, scams, lies, and foolishness. The quality industry is by no means exempt from the flood. In this column we will attempt to expose the foolishness…
