All Features
Tonianne DeMaria
I recognize that the title of this column might stir up some controversy, especially among fellow coffee enthusiasts. Not to mention it puts me at risk of getting exiled from my beloved adopted home, Seattle. And yes, perhaps “Clarity > Coffee” even seems a tad hypocritical, considering that I’…
MIT News
In March 2011, Leonardo Bonanni was preparing to defend his Ph.D. thesis about Sourcemap, software that lets consumers map every connection of a product supply chain on a digital map, when tragedy struck in Japan. Although the deadly earthquake and tsunami occurred half a world away, the events…
Knowledge at Wharton
A trained mechanical engineer, Mark Chang found himself “totally uncertain and unprepared” the first time he was called on to hire someone else.
“I didn’t even know why I was hired in the first place—what did they like about me?” Chang recalls. “So, how do I go out and look for the next person?”…
John Nolan
The ultimate aim of ISO 9001:2015 is to enable businesses to satisfy their customers effectively. You could say that all the standard’s clauses help to provide your customer with a consistent and rewarding experience from your goods or services, but ISO 9001:2015 actually deals with “customer…
William A. Levinson
Experiments that might require a handful of real-number measurements (variables data) could need hundreds or more attribute data for comparable power, i.e., the ability to determine whether an experiment improves performance over that of a control. Sample sizes needed for ANSI/ASQ Z1.4 (for…
Gallup
Increasingly dynamic workplaces have made organizational change an everyday reality. Demands for workforce agility require a step up from those commanding—particularly in ongoing measurement and making use of feedback during this breakneck pace of change.
There is a definite need for continuous…
Matthew Barsalou
The start of a failure investigation may involve brainstorming, but empirical methods will be required to actually identify a problem's cause. Implementing an improvement action without a confirmed root cause risks a reoccurrence of the issue because the true root cause has yet to be addressed.…
Mike Micklewright
When considering any effort toward performance improvement, you should always start by looking at the organization’s principles and culture, and making sure these are aligned so they not only permit positive changes to occur, but also ensure that the changes will be sustained over the long run. By…
In the race to design smaller handheld devices and smartphones, a key factor is decreasing the sizes of components. As the demand for thinner and lighter microelectronic devices increases, manufacturers often are limited by how oddly shaped the energy sources must become to make them conform to…
Barbara A. Cleary
When giant companies known for the quality of their products and services find themselves suddenly in the news due to massive recalls—think Volkswagen, Toyota, John Deere, Craftsman, or Chipotle—the first question to emerge often is: What went wrong?
Before jumping to the conclusion that quality…
John Elliott
Fly-fishing, one of my favorite hobbies, is a lot like process improvement. Here’s how: Fly-fishing seems very simple—you throw a line in the water and wait for dinner. Of course, it’s much more complicated than that because rainbow trout are clever; they won’t bite just anything.
You have to…
Thomas R. Cutler
It’s no surprise that multinational companies have complex global supply chains. What’s less obvious is how to simplify supply-chain processes and arrive at a lean, consistent, reliable, and cost-effective solution. One global leader, ITT Corp., has taken on this challenge with the help of Ultriva…
Meredith Griffith
Sponsored Content
Most of us have heard of a backward way of completing a task, or doing something in the conventionally wrong order, described as “putting the cart before the horse.” That’s because a horse pulling a cart is much more efficient than a horse pushing a cart. This saying may be…
Tim Mouw
Detroit recently hosted The North American International Auto Show. It’s an exciting event for consumers who want a sneak peek at what’s on the horizon in the automotive industry: energy efficiency, new gadgets, enhanced comfort, and of course, the latest paint colors and special-effect finishes…
Stephen Mundwiller
One of the more enjoyable discussions I’ve seen on the Internet recently has to be about what to do with the quality manual. A common question is, “So what do I call this thing I put all the procedures in, now that we can’t have a quality manual?” It’s part of the panic brewing among quality…
Davis Balestracci
This article is based on some ideas from my respected colleague Mark Hamel. Despite the lean framework, these ideas apply to any improvement approach—all of which come from the same theory, lean included.
During the past 35 years, quality has evolved from the necessary evil of quality control to…
Jim Benson
When you are a consultant, or worse yet, seen as a thought leader, people hire you expecting that you’ll know “the answers.” At best, what you actually know are paths to make sense of problems, communicate them, and then solve them. No consultant should ever arrive knowing the answers. If they do…
Bruce Hamilton
Here’s a personal reflection from my distant past that might describe a current state for some of you.
When I began working in manufacturing during the pre-lean era, the quoted lead time for my company’s products averaged 12 to 16 weeks. By the 1980s, however, many customers began to routinely…
Manufacturing Extension Partnership MEP
Whether it’s for performance management or for risk, it’s important to know who your suppliers are and have a close business relationship with them.
It’s a given you should already have a strong relationship with your key suppliers, but how often does your supplier request the following items? •…
Paula Oddy
Sponsored Content
As an auditor of quality management systems, I can tell you from firsthand experience that most auditees dislike corrective actions. Corrections are tied to findings of nonconformance; understandably, people generally want to emerge from an audit without any significant findings…
Arun Hariharan
A horrific accident on Dec. 16, 2015, claimed the life of an airline service engineer: He was sucked into the live engine of an aircraft. The engineer had been standing on the ground supervising the aircraft being pushed in reverse from its parking bay.
“No one knew what happened,” said an Air…
Harry Hertz
Even before the landmark publication of In Search of Excellence in 1982, bosses realized that operational excellence gets accomplished through dedicated employees. Yet, to this day, many organizations stifle high performance through the annual performance evaluation process for each employee. This…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
As global competition stiffens, manufacturing sectors of all stripes are embracing emerging technologies in order to meet customer demands. In the realm of metal casting, Pennsylvania-based Effort Foundry is leading the charge by investing in new technology as part of a…
Dawn Bailey
Dorothy: Now which way do we go? Scarecrow: Pardon me, this way is a very nice way. Dorothy: Who said that? Toto barks at the scarecrow. Dorothy: Don’t be silly, Toto. Scarecrows don’t talk. Scarecrow: [points other way] It’s pleasant down that way, too. Dorothy: That’s funny. Wasn’t he pointing…
Niranjan Deodhar
In the first article of this series, we explored what a process improvement (PI) function would look like if it could apply the principles of reducing waste and variation to its own processes. Here, we build on that analysis to identify the work practices that can drive better, faster, and cheaper…
