All Features
Ron Kaufman
When an organization’s employees aren’t happy, it’s unlikely they’ll be providing the kind of quality service that leads to happy customers. One of the fastest ways to create internal strife is to let “difficult” people go unchecked. The best way to handle these personalities is to help resolve the…
Jossey-Bass
(Jossey-Bass: San Francisco) -- Rapid and disruptive change threatens the adaptive capacity of organizations, along with the individuals and teams leading them. Based on more than a decade of global research and consulting, Joseph E. McCann and John W. Selsky outline five capabilities highly agile…
Christina Tangora Schlachter, Terry Hildebrandt
The global economy has turned the rules of leadership upside down and shaken them vigorously for good measure. Where there was once a fairly defined hierarchy—Boss A tells Worker B what to do, and Worker B does it—there’s now a flat landscape where everyone is expected to take the reins as needed.…
Mark R. Hamel
We’ve all heard the flight attendant’s compulsory safety announcement regarding oxygen masks. Personally, I’ve grown pretty numb to the whole safety monologue. Not a good thing.
During a relatively recent trip on a Southwest flight there was a refreshing twist to the typically sober announcement.…
Miriam Boudreaux
No matter how much effort we put into meeting a quality standard’s requirements for continual improvement, there are times when we are not sure whether to call for a corrective action. Although there is no instrument that points to yes or no and determines when a corrective action is needed, I have…
Matthew Littlefield
In part one, “Overall Equipment Effectiveness,” (OEE) I gave a detailed explanation of how LNS Research thinks the OEE Formula is best applied to a given asset or production line to both maximize local production efficiency and overall supply chain performance. In this article, I’ll go through a…
Matthew Littlefield
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is an important metric for many companies' initiatives in operational excellence. As of Sept. 5, 2012, we have now benchmarked more than 350 different companies across a number of different strategic objectives, metrics, and operational excellence capabilities…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
I went into my local Barnes & Noble looking for a book and decided to check if they carried my book, Lean Six Sigma Demystified. There were four rows of business books on management, leadership, sales, and so on. The “quality” section, consisting of about 15 titles, was on the bottom shelf of…
Tripp Babbitt
In 1862, the bloodiest battle in American history was fought on Sept. 17, and 23,000 soldiers from the North and South were killed in about 12 hours of fighting. This military “victory” for the North paved the way for Abraham Lincoln to issue the emancipation proclamation a few months later. Not 10…
Umberto Tunesi
In 1995, Qualityworld magazine published a case study that examined how the 1993 European Quality Award (EQA) was scored by 175 participants who had undertaken assessor training for it. Three findings stood out: • Assessors who spoke English as their primary language gave lower scores in all nine…
Kyle Toppazzini
In a Harvard Business Review article Tom Davenport writes, “I hope that when companies start getting excited again about process improvement, they resist one method for doing so. A hybrid, combined approach is really the only approach that makes any sense. In religion many people worship only one…
William A. Levinson
The traditional control charts for nonconformances (np and p) and defects (c and u) date back to the 1920s, and they rely on the normal approximation to the binomial and Poisson distributions, respectively. This approximation works best when the expected number of events is 4 to 6, or even greater…
Timothy F. Bednarz
In their constant quest to improve results, managers are overwhelmed and burdened with many tasks and responsibilities. It is easy for them to ignore the challenges that confront them while hoping that issues will resolve themselves. However, rather than disappear, unmet challenges create a new set…
Matthew E. May
Nick Sarillo is the founder of Nick’s Pizza & Pub, the sixth busiest independent pizza company in per-store sales in the United States. It boasts margins nearly twice those of the average pizza restaurant and an impressive employee retention rate of 80 percent, in an industry where the average…
Timothy F. Bednarz
The events that have transpired since the onset of the current recessionary cycle underscore the turbulent times all organizations face. Although uncertainty is troubling, the time of greatest organizational opportunity is found when the business environment is experiencing its greatest turbulence…
Sakor Technologies Inc.
(SAKOR: Okemos, MI) -- SAKOR Technologies Inc., developer and manufacturer of automated test instrumentation, systems integration, and hybrid drivetrain testing, has designed and installed a complete turnkey hybrid and electric vehicle test system for UQM Technologies Inc., a developer and…
Michael Houlihan, Bonnie Harvey
Mistakes are a fact of life. No matter how much you try, you can’t completely avoid making them. And they can actually help to improve your company’s effectiveness and reputation if you handle them well.
It seems our society has turned dodging responsibility into an art form. From celebrities who…
Umberto Tunesi
I’ve been thinking of innovation these days, and how it’s being given as a password, and passport, to sustain economies, especially in the Old and New Worlds—that is, us. And how—and why—we are given rules to innovate. It’s odd to me that anyone should be told how to create.
I’m aware that…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
As I titled this column, I was reminded that W. Edwards Deming liked to say, “The most important numbers are unknown and unknowable.” But some numbers are important, and most managers do not know how to manage them. I don’t want to sound like a complainer, but this issue has been close to my heart…
Jay Earley
Some people are really good at procrastination: government bureaucrats, politicians, and kids, especially when it’s time for chores or bed. In a professional setting, the most common effect of procrastination is missed deadlines, which raises costs to the employer or client. For people who are self…
Verisurf Software Inc.
(Verisurf: Anaheim, CA) -- Verisurf Software Inc., developer of CAD, reverse engineering, and 3-D model-based inspection software, introduces complete manual coordinate measuring machine (CMM) retrofits that transform any manual CMM into a high performance 3D-model-based inspection system by adding…
Davis Balestracci
Editor’s note: This is the third of a three-part series on effective, focused data analysis. Part one discussed helping management deal with common cause; the first common cause strategy—stratification—was discussed in part two.
In my last column, I introduced some aspects of common cause…
NVision Inc.
(NVision: Coppell, TX) -- Purdue University’s Formula SAE team is utilizing NVision’s HandHeld laser scanner to pursue its goal of taking home a first-place trophy in the annual Formula SAE Competition. The team anticipates that reverse engineering data obtained by the HandHeld scanner will allow…
InfinityQS
(InfinityQS: Chantilly, VA) -- InfinityQS International Inc., which develops and provides products and services on manufacturing intelligence and real-time enterprise quality, has released ProFicient 5, the latest version of its enterprise quality hub. ProFicient 5 is designed to deliver real-time…
Siemens PLM Software
(Siemens: Plano, TX) -- Siemens PLM Software has significantly expanded its long-standing software license agreement with Bentley Systems Inc., a provider of software solutions for sustaining infrastructure. The expanded agreement, which adds licensing for two new software component products,…
