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Jesse Lyn Stoner
Goal setting is powerful. No doubt about it. Research shows you are likely to perform at a higher level if you set smart goals. But how do you know what are the right goals to set?
Goals are milestones that mark the way on your journey. If you set the wrong goals, you will get sidetracked. Too…
Tim Lozier
When it comes to quality management, it’s not just about the requirements. As companies register to ISO 9001:2015, we see an additional shift. Not only are management system requirements changing to build an improved framework for the standard, but we also see an emphasis on an overall mindset…
Andy Henderson
This is the fourth part in a series about my perspective of what the future has in store for various aspects of manufacturing. I approached each aspect by imagining what is possible using what we know to be technically possible today. In part one I covered cutting tools for machining, in part two…
Ruth P. Stevens
Business marketers have much to gain from retention marketing. Business customers tend to be fewer in number, and each is more valuable—meaning you can’t afford to lose even one. But how do you keep your customers active and buying from you, vs. the competition? How do you prevent defection?
Let’s…
Paul Lachance
When it comes to asset management and facility management, everyone within an organization is affected by breakdowns and downtime. That means employees from the CFO to the environmental health and safety (EHS) director to the plant engineer should be involved in maintenance.
In the manufacturing…
Jim Benson
If you are reading this, you are likely human. Congratulations; I’m human, too.
Everyday we all wake up and wonder what the day will bring. We wonder who we will meet, what conversations we will have, and what we will do.
We all want to do things
In business we have processes, we have…
Katherine Watts
While at the National MACRA MIPS/APM Summit in Washington, D.C., I heard much discussion centered on how to create and implement strategies that pay physicians fairly, while controlling spending in the Medicare program. It’s a question we’ve wrestled with for almost 20 years and a challenge we…
Matthew Muller
I have been inspired to write this article after learning about Joseph Juran and understanding the effect he has had on our society. I started working at Juran Global about six months ago, and since then I’ve had several friends and past colleagues reach out to me with questions like, “What is…
Patrick Nelson
I love turnaround stories about teams that break down barriers to reach their full potential.
Case in point: 25 years ago a Major League Baseball team from a small market shocked the world by winning the World Series. That team, the Minnesota Twins, went from being the worst team in its division…
Davis Balestracci
In spite of the overwhelming odds against me, every new year I firmly resolve to reignite my relentless passion about creating a critical mass of colleagues committed to practicing improvement as “built-in” to cultural DNA using data sanity.
Will this be the year you join me?
Here is a …
Elisa K. Spain
Most of us who have been in leadership roles for awhile understand the importance of delegating. It’s simply a matter of leverage: The more we delegate, the more gets done. But sometimes we get confused. We think we are delegating, when in fact, we are abdicating. What’s the difference?
Delegate…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
Everything, it seems, has a vulnerability. For werewolves, it’s silver bullets. For Superman, it’s Kryptonite. For manufacturing—it’s rework. Rework means loss of throughput, which means loss of profit, which can mean death by a thousand rewelds. But, just as silver bullets can…
Eston Martz
A member of Minitab’s LinkedIn group asked how to create a chart to monitor change by month, specifically comparing last year’s data to this year’s data. My last post showed how to do this using an Individuals chart of the differences between this year’s and last year’s data. Here’s another…
Donald J. Wheeler
What can be done when a test is destructive? How do we characterize measurement error? How can we determine if a test method is adequate for a given product or application? How can we check for bias?
All of the techniques for assessing the quality of a measurement system require us to make…
Paul Naysmith
If you have ever used Maslow’s hierarchy of needs out of context, and especially as they relate to motivation in the workplace, I will track you down and tape you to a lamppost with a sign around your neck explaining your major error. Maslow’s theory dates back to ideas from the 1940s, and…
Dick Wooden
First of all, what does it mean to be orphaned by your customer relationship management (CRM) vendor? In short, it means that your CRM vendor sold you on a CRM product and for one reason or another forgot about you. Are you feeling left behind?
Of course, it’s no secret that choosing the right…
Jennifer Lynch
The process of alloy grade verification has advanced significantly with the development of portable and handheld devices that bring analytical capabilities traditionally found in the laboratory to anywhere rapid metals identification is needed. For years, handheld analysis technology has provided…
Fred Schenkelberg
If you have been a reliability engineer for a week or more, or worked with a reliability engineer for a day or more, someone has asked about testing planning. The questions often include, “How many samples?” and, “How long will the test take?” No doubt you’ve heard the sample-size question.
What…
Tannaz Mirchi
With airfares at their lowest point in seven years and airlines adding capacity, this year’s holiday air travel is slated to be 2.5 percent busier than last year. The system we use to coordinate all those flights, however, is decades old, and mostly depends on highly trained air traffic…
Dick Wooden
There are various phases to consider when focusing on a business strategy for customer relationship management (CRM). An initial phase is creating a vision of a better future with a customer-centric strategy fully implemented and supported by CRM technology.
This phase establishes a shared vision…
With more than 70,000 chemicals currently in common use—and 1,000 new chemicals coming into use every year—maintaining and managing their effective, appropriate, and responsible use is a challenging task. Cost, process, regulatory, and safety issues converge to make chemical management a critical…
Michael A. Witt
Editor’s note: This is part two of a two-part series. Read part one here.
While globalization has benefited humanity in many ways, its continued progress is in serious doubt. As I wrote previously, the two leading political science theories, liberalism and realism, both predict that globalization…
Bruce Hamilton
While holiday shopping at one of my favorite food places, Johnson’s Popcorn, I came upon a scene reminiscent of our lean training video, Toast Kaizen. After I placed my order for 18 one-gallon buckets of caramel corn for friends and family, the Johnson’s kitchen shifted gears from mail-order sales…
Mark Rosenthal
One of my readers, Darren, commented with some great questions about the “Takt Time-Cycle Time” post on my blog. He wondered which system is more efficient, a fixed, rigid takt-based production line or a flexible one-piece flow?
In terms of designing a manual-based production line to meet a…
Joe Schlecht
According to the ISO/IEC Guide 99—“International vocabulary of metrology—Basic and general concepts and associated terms (VIM),” the traceability of a measurement result is demonstrated through a documented unbroken chain of calibrations, each contributing to the measurement uncertainty. This…