All Features
Mark Graban
I have as many bad customer-service experiences as the next guy, with health care and other businesses. As I’ve said before, unless there’s a broader lesson involved, I try not to be a “hack” blogger who just uses his platform to complain about the last bad thing to happen. However, I think the…
Mark R. Hamel
My dog, Bailey, has a sensei—a dog-obedience trainer. Actually, my wife and I have a sensei to teach us how to train our dog. In fact, my wife and I have used the same dog-obedience trainer for the last three dogs, all German shepherds. No one would mistake us for Mr. and Mrs. Dog Whisperer.…
Stewart Anderson
The recession has been an extremely disruptive event for many organizations. Many bear relentless pressure to identify new market needs, create appropriate products and services, become more effective and efficient, and develop and modify systems and processes to meet and deliver those goals. In…
Tripp Babbitt
While reading an issue of Quality Digest Daily, I came across an article by Kenneth Levine and Peter Sherman titled, “Ten Simple Principles for Treating Employees as Assets.” I thought it followed the usual themes about engaging employees and driving out fear until I ran across the following jewel…
Steve Moore
An article titled “Sharp Drop in Firefighter Fatalities in 2009” appeared in a safety trade journal recently. For the first time in three years, it said, on-the-job firefighter fatalities dropped below 100. The article went on to say that the 82 firefighter deaths in 2009 were substantially below…
Steven Ouellette
Story update 10/05/2010: Corrections were made to captions for Figures 6, 7, 8, 9.
As I was teaching class the other day, I told the students I was going to reveal to them the one secret they needed to learn to understand every statistical test they would ever use. The secret was the one thing…
Donald J. Wheeler
Capability indexes allow us to characterize the relationship between the process potential and the specifications. Performance indexes characterize the past performance relative to the specifications. Yet, in practice, we seek to make sense of these index numbers by converting them into other…
Mike Micklewright
In part one of this series I described what dyslexia is and how I linked “dyslexia” with “lean.” In part two, I suggested an approach to training in the work place called “universal design for learning” (UDL), which takes into account those who learn differently from others. In this part, I will …
Chet Marchwinski
One of my favorite value-stream walks is with the senior managers of several organizations who share and jointly manage a value-creating process that stretches all the way from raw materials to the end customer. I’ve been taking walks of this sort for more than 20 years and I usually see the same…
Angelo Lyall
When so many managers and businesses have access to virtually the same tools and information, it seems peculiar that two similar businesses can operate so differently, one being a success story while the other fails. To induce needed changes rather than superficial ones, managers must first accept…
Tom Pyzdek
In this four-part series, we take an in-depth look at how to design an effective work environment. Part one discusses the elements of continuous-flow work cells. Part two considers how to enhance the efficiency of such work cells. Part three explores the 5S methodology. In this, the last part of…
Donald J. Wheeler
Evidently Steven Ouellette did not like my June column, “Is the Part in Spec?” The adjectives he used were “complicated,” “unhelpful,” “backward,” “confusing,” “unnecessary,” “crazy,” and “disastrous.” (Ouellette’s response, “Know the Process Before Altering Its Specifications,” can be read here…
ANDREA LAHOUZE
John Berger is no stranger to the benefits of training within industry (TWI). In 1995, when Berger was working for global manufacturing giant Emerson, he was challenged to move an entire product line of electro-mechanical sensors from Minnesota to Singapore.
At Emerson’s Minnesota plant,…
Tom Pyzdek
In this four-part series, we take an in-depth look at how to design an effective work environment. Part one discusses the elements of continuous-flow work cells. Part two considers how to enhance the efficiency of such work cells. Part three explores the 5S methodology. In part four of the series…
Tom Pyzdek
In this four-part series, we take an in-depth look at how to design an effective work environment. Part one discusses the elements of continuous-flow work cells. Part two considers how to enhance the efficiency of such work cells. Part three explores the 5S methodology. In part four of the series…
Tom Pyzdek
In this four-part series, we take an in-depth look at how to design an effective work environment. Part one discusses the elements of continuous-flow work cells. Part two considers how to enhance the efficiency of such work cells. Part three explores the 5S methodology. In part four of the series…
Willie L. Carter
Higher customer expectations, cost-cutting pressures, thinner margins, and shorter lead times are some of the daily challenges that organizations face. A management system built around lean processes enables companies to achieve operational excellence, while providing flexibility in the way…
Jon Miller
When we say that a task is Herculean, it means it is extremely difficult. Heracles was a Greek hero (Hercules in the Roman version) who got into some trouble for killing a member of his family in a fit of madness and was assigned a series of challenging tasks as penance. Sometimes we face…
Value stream or other lean analysis helps identify the main obstacles to flow in a process. Improvement projects using lean tools in a transactional environment (i.e., office) are often confronted with the following problem: Lean teams lack a methodology to consistently problem-solve how to…
Steven Ouellette
So I thought I was done with measurement system analysis after my last column, but I just finished reading Don Wheeler’s June 1 column, “Is the Part in Spec?” and the first thing I thought was, “Well, that was… complicated and ultimately unhelpful in answering the article’s title question.” I like…
Bruce Ballinger
A recent article published in Quality Digest Daily pointed out that to foster a problem-solving culture, managers must serve as mentors and cultural leaders—building the systems and atmosphere that support and encourage team members at all levels to problem solve effectively.
That is…
Dirk Dusharme
For more than 20 years, Toyota’s methods, known as “lean,” have made headlines. And that’s how long engineer, researcher, and author Mike Rother has been involved with the subject. Like many others, Rother began with Toyota’s production tools. And like many others, he found that these are…
Jon Miller
In a recent e-mail, a reader of my blog asked me, “How can we enhance top management commitment and involvement for implementing total productive maintenance (TPM)?”
This is a great general question to ask during any effort to establish excellence, maintain excellence, or transform excellence…
National Association for Healthcare Quality
The Toyota Production System and U.S. health care improvement share a long history. What lessons can health care leaders learn from Toyota’s recent production troubles? A few experts recently discussed this on WIHI, an audio program sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). Here…
Donald J. Wheeler
During the past 20 years it has become fashionable to condemn measurement processes that are less than perfect. Yet the reality is that we must always use imperfect data. Given this fact of life, how can we ever know if a measured item is or is not within the specifications? Put another way, how…