All Features
Scott Berkun
The great surprise for people with good ideas is the gap between how an idea feels in their minds and how it feels when they try to put the idea to work.
When a good idea comes together, it feels fantastic. Good ideas often come with a wave of euphoria, a literal dopamine high, and we’re joyously…
Sal Lucido
Policies and procedures tell your employees, partners, vendors, and customers how your system operates. With changing regulations and expectations, a static library is not enough. Policies are dynamic and require a system to manage their creation, documentation, distribution, and management. Here’s…
Jeffrey Phillips
I have been thinking a lot about why innovation fails. Not about why supposedly innovative new products fail, because there are multiple reasons for that. A product could be too early or too late in the market window, or it could simply have the wrong pricing or distribution. A new product may lack…
Steven Brand
By 2025, nearly 25 percent of the U.S. population is expected to be 60 years of age or older. With this demographic preparing to exit the workforce and enter retirement, what can be done to retain their knowledge and pass it down to the next generation of employees? After all, a good portion of the…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Too much of a good thing brings out its downside. Ever had too much team time? It makes you long for a solo vacation on a desert island.
One of the best portrayals of “too much of a good thing” was in Black Mirror’s Nose Dive (Season 3). In what initially looks like a utopian culture where everyone…
Marin Hedin
Limiting first-year medical residents to 16-hour work shifts, compared to “flexing” them to allow for some longer shifts, generally makes residents more satisfied with their training and work-life balance. It also makes their training directors more dissatisfied with curtailed educational…
Ryan E. Day
Invented in 1987 and commercially available since 1991, laser trackers have long been a mainstay of the aerospace industry. Automotive manufacturers have also adopted laser trackers for quality control (QC) and design. The fact is, any industry dealing with large-scale measurements—from small…
Jack Dunigan
This is the next secret in our series, “The Secrets to Success You Don’t Know That You Already Know ” at The Practical Leader. Here we’re going to talk about Secret No. 4: Don’t Set Goals.
You’ve probably heard of that famous Yale research study, the one in 1953 that said of the graduating class,…
Shawn Faircloth
The cost of ineffective corrective action can be astronomical when you consider the monetary and reputational impact of delayed problem-solving. On a small scale, repeat problems—even minor errors—send a message to customers that you just don’t care to get it right.
And when poor problem-solving…
Richard Harpster
The AIAG-VDA FMEA Handbook committee and everyone who responded to the request for comment on the proposed AIAG-VDA failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) manual must be applauded for their efforts. Harmonizing the VDA and AIAG FMEA methods is not an easy task. According to industry sources,…
Martin J. Smith
If you want to make sure your new Whirlpool refrigerator really is meeting the efficiency standards of Energy Star compliance, as the manufacturer claims, is it better to test that claim by relying on regulators at the U.S. Department of Energy—or one of Whirlpool’s competitors?
A new study co-…
Frank Defesche
Your company leadership team just issued a corporate goal (aka mandate) of reducing defects to fewer than five per million units made. This goal is coupled with a need to reduce manufacturing costs by 10 percent while meeting new good manufacturing practices (GMP) or ISO standards. Oh, and you have…
Mike Richman
During this past Friday’s episode of QDL, we presented two great interviews, both revolving around standards and certification, plus a piece about analytics, and a lively off-script about the responsibilities of media companies like Facebook when it comes to protecting user data. Here’s a closer…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
The six core questions you see below are a window to help us understand why we struggle at work. Why? Because the answers to them are missing! The remedy is to first notice that—to notice the motion caused by those deficits. Then remove the motion by implementing visual answers. Imbed the answers…
Georgia Tech News Center
It’s small enough to fit inside a shoebox, yet this robot on four wheels has a big mission: keeping factories and other large facilities safe from hackers.
Meet the HoneyBot. Developed by a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the diminutive device is designed to lure in…
Dan Jacob
Developing profitable, timely, high-quality products is more important today than ever before. Visibility of in-use product performance has never been higher, while competitive pressures continue to squeeze margins and time to market.
Manufacturers devote considerable cost and effort to new…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
After my recent extended illness, I was surprisingly shocked to reemerge into organizational life in its broadest terms. Frequently, I engaged in the organizational lives of my students, my friends, my colleagues, and my own workplace.
Everywhere I looked, I found: • Unhappy customers who, after…
Minitab LLC
Anticipating challenges is always a daunting task for continuous improvement professionals. Unforeseen inefficiencies in process or defects in product development can throw timelines and associated costs into disarray. How to commit to realistic forecasts and timelines when resources are limited,…
Naphtali Hoff
It happens to all of us, and often at the most inopportune times. We know that we have work to do—a job to complete, a new project to launch, some loose ends to tie up—but we just feel stuck in place. As if everything that we try doesn’t work. We take two steps forward and one or more steps b ack.…
William A. Levinson
Inspection is a mandatory but nonvalue-adding activity, and our objective is to do as little as possible, provided that we continue to fulfill the customer’s requirements. The zero acceptance number (c = 0) sampling plan requires far less inspection than the corresponding ANSI/ASQ Z1.4 (formerly…
Chad Kymal
ISO 45001 is the much-anticipated, first ISO-based international occupational health and safety (OH&S) standard. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has tried twice and failed in the past to create an international OH&S management system standard. Although there are a…
David Baker
Project management is a misunderstood profession that has often been equated with herding cats. Much of this confusion comes from the fact that project management isn’t a single discipline, but rather the practice of bringing a set of disciplines together to achieve a common goal.
One of the big…
Ryan Mandell
Analytics have now permeated into all levels of any company’s organizational hierarchy, creating exciting new opportunities but also some interesting challenges.
Not all businesses are equipped with data scientists and analytics experts to help them navigate what can seem to be a flood of…
Bonnie Stone
Dramatic cost savings. Lead time and inventory reductions. Improved transactional processes. Although lean has its roots in manufacturing, nearly every industry and type of organization around the world can benefit from it. A little while back, we reviewed the “Five Critical Lean Tools” that are a…
Karl Kleinkauf
If you’ve been thinking about software as a service (SaaS) for your quality management system (QMS) and trying to justify the “why,” here’s a quick case supporting SaaS. Although not for everyone, it certainly makes more sense than it used to. There will always be the detractors who are not…