Jody Muelaner
Understanding the causes of faults and defects, and then improving the system or process so it won’t happen again, is central to lean manufacturing. This article looks at some of the methods...
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Government bureaucracies are inefficient. They waste taxpayer dollars, and they have no incentive to improve. We’ve all heard and probably repeated these axioms about wasteful government spending....
Ryan E. Day
Lean: an employee-championed method of waste reduction. Six Sigma: a robust method of defect reduction. Embracing both methods provides organizations with multiple tools for continuous improvement....
Taran March @ Quality Digest
At the University of California at San Diego, lean concepts have taken hold. Along with its process improvement curriculum, the university applies what it teaches through initiatives around campus....
Takeshi Yoshida
‘Lean” is such a convenient term; everyone uses it based on their own definition. People frequently use “lean” in place of “efficiency,” probably because it sounds more cool. Another round of cost...
Harish Jose
In today’s column, I’m looking at Weber’s Law. It’s named after Ernst Heinrich Weber (born June 24, 1795, died Jan. 26, 1878), a German physician who was one of the pioneers of experimental...
William A. Levinson
The Automotive Industry Action Group’s (AIAG’s) and German Association of the Automotive Industry’s (VDA’s) new Failure Mode and Effects Analysis Handbook (AIAG, 2019) offers significant advances...
Bruce Hamilton
This year marks the 35th anniversary of a remarkable and unfortunately also singular event in my career: In 1985, my employer, United Electric Controls (UE), elected to remove time clocks from the...
Paul Foster
If you’re new to layered process audits, it’s critical to make sure everyone on your team is on the same page with basic terms. Here we provide a guide of 16 essential terms to know when launching...
Harry Hertz
‘I have been offered a significant increase in salary by another employer and am giving my two-week notice.”
My guess is that this is the most common reason given when employees quit their current...
Miriam Boudreaux
If you are wondering whether your organization could benefit from formal root cause analysis (RCA) and corrective action training, read on to see if any of these issues are present in your day-to-day...
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
What a year.
No matter your job, your industry, or your political beliefs, this year has been a heck of a ride. The (still ongoing) trade war with China, manufacturing gains (and losses), the 737 MAX...
Quality Digest
As usual with Quality Digest’s diverse audience, this year’s top stories covered a wide range of topics applicable to quality professionals. From hardware to software, from standards to risk...
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Values are beliefs about what is fundamentally important. They affect your decision making and your behaviors, whether you are conscious of them or not. Your real values are reflected by your...
Jim Benson
When we look at a Personal Kanban, its simplicity belies its power. Visualizing our work as individuals, as teams, and even as teams of teams creates trust, reliability, and understanding. When we...
Anat Amit-Eyal
Eric, a 40-something married father of three, runs a successful startup. Given his demanding career, he and his wife decided she would be a stay-at-home mum. Eric believed the attention he devoted to...
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Some mistakes managers make at the start of a visual conversion are serious and hard to repair. For example, when managers decide to commandeer the task of implementing the visual where—or simply...
Gleb Tsipursky
When was the last time you as a quality professional saw a major failure in implementing decisions? What about in project or process management? Such disasters can have devastating consequences for...
David Hart
Climate plans are the order of the day in the presidential primary campaign because carbon pollution is a global threat of unique proportions. But it’s worth asking whether candidates’ plans are...
Kevin Meyer
Most of us have learned that being busy does not mean you’re being productive, and that multitasking leads to being less productive—although I still see that being harped on as a “skill” on resumes...
