All Features
Michelle LaBrosse
Let’s say you’ve found the perfect mix of people to staff your new project. They get along great together. They’re all top performers in their respective fields. They’re all gung-ho to get going. But then something happens.
First, one starts showing up late to meetings. Then, someone else plans a…
Scott A. Hindle
In all walks of life, being wrong can come with a penalty. It’s also true that, if you’re lucky, you sometimes get away with it without anybody being the wiser. To understand what this means in relation to the capability indexes Cp and Cpk, read on.
Introduction
In part 3 of “Process Capability:…
Christine Schaefer
To entertain you, to grab your attention, and (of course) to advance your understanding of the Baldrige Excellence Framework, staff members who contribute to this blog have occasionally written some odd posts—or, at least, given them curious titles.
In case you’ve missed one or more of these, I’m…
Brian Lagas
Embracing sustainable and green principles is more than simply “a good thing to do.” Manufacturers are realizing the many practical short- and long-term financial benefits to implementing environmentally conscious improvements. Such practices helps organizations become more efficient, competitive…
Bruce Hamilton
I was lucky that the first boss I ever had (at age 13) had much to teach at a point when I had much to learn. Chris M. was a brilliant but illiterate Italian immigrant and fisherman who had built a landmark restaurant and marina on the bay in Ocean City, New Jersey. That was my first lesson: You…
Davis Balestracci
Client A came to me for a consultation and told me upfront his manager would allow him to run only 12 experiments. I asked for his objective. When I informed him that it would take more than 300 experiments to test his objective, he replied, “All right, I’ll run 20.”
Sigh. No, he needed either to…
Peter Bussey
Operational risk management (ORM) centers on environmental, health, and safety (EHS) risks that can cause accidents or incidents anywhere that work takes place, whether it’s a manufacturing plant, an offshore drilling platform, a mine, or a marine terminal. This article will discuss why and how…
Kevin Meyer
When many people go into the office, they start their day by chatting with some colleagues, checking their email, and surfing the net for a while. Then they start working on whatever project is due that day. Soon, however, they hear the sound of a new email arriving, which they promptly open,…
Sponsored Content
The new Geomagic Control X inspection product from 3D Systems offers a computer-aided design (CAD)-like interface and an improved workflow for Geomagic Control users. By including extended product manufacturing information support, users of popular CAD systems can now seamlessly…
Jeff Sanford
Since we at Humantech developed an entire software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering to help our clients streamline the ergonomics process, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review gave me the opportunity to reflect on how our clients successfully implement ergonomics from a process management…
Serguei Netessine
Big data is helping us learn much more about what drives sales in the digital environment. The traditional service sector, however, remains very much a “black box.” A physical sales environment, such as a clothing store or restaurant, is subject to even more intangible elements than e-commerce…
Thomas R. Cutler
Manufacturers’ waste-reduction initiatives are rarely as effective as they could be. When reducing waste, inventory is often the main target. But how do you right-size inventory in an environment of constant variability? In a word: kanban.
Electronic kanban signals keep product moving throughout…
Festo Didactic
Manufacturing in the United States and Canada is marked by negative stereotypes left behind from 1955. Repetitive and simplistic duties in grimy workplaces, without a chance to change or advance a career, are the images most people see when they imagine what it means to work in a factory. But, a…
GBMP
Ellis Medicine is a 438-bed community and teaching healthcare system serving New York’s capital region. With four main campuses, five additional service locations, more than 3,300 employees, and more than 700 medical staff, Ellis Medicine offers an extensive array of inpatient and outpatient…
NQA
For companies that are registered to more than one management system, integrating them makes a lot of sense. Combining your management systems provides greater benefit than running separate management systems in parallel. An integrated management system (IMS) can help reduce duplication and…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
I hate banks. I’ve hated them since I was a drifty teenager who had a volatile relationship with math and trouble coming up with the required documents proving my adultness. My first checking account had less to do with the paltry sum I owned than it did with running head-on into the vast and…
Annette Franz
How are you getting to the root cause of any issue you or your customers are having? What types of root cause analyses are you conducting? Are you even thinking about root cause analysis?
Conducting some sort of root cause analysis (and there are many different types) any time you experience an…
Garry Oswald
If your company ships anything on a regular basis, you should know about freight invoice auditing. This is the method that shippers have used for 60 years to cut the costs charged by carriers and to make deliveries more efficiently to their end users.
Auditing does more than save on shipping…
Frank Armstrong
In manufacturing facilities many employees view the quality personnel as cops. “Their whole job is to come out and beat us up when processes don’t produce quality products,” they complain. “We can’t help it. Why are they always on our backs?”
There’s some truth to that mindset. If a process is…
Milan Kocic
Picture this: Your coordinate measuring machine (CMM) has crashed for the umpteenth time, and now it’s out of commission because you need to replace the probe head. Does this sound familiar? Across the world, manufacturers are facing the same problem: A situation occurs, you have to call the CMM’s…
Christine Schaefer
Every year a new cohort of Baldrige Executive Fellows gains intensive knowledge about leading organizations to excellence through cross-sector, peer-to-peer learning hosted at the sites of Baldrige Award recipients. Every Baldrige Fellow completes a capstone project as part of the executive…
RED FLAG. This was the text I received from a woman I’d been mentoring for a year or so. She had recently been promoted to a senior management position in the software division of a large technology company. We had developed our own language for when she had a serious professional problem. Texting…
There was a time when manufacturers thought that “hot test”—a test at the end of the assembly line of a fully functional engine—was the only way to ensure that each unit had been assembled to perform as expected.
A lot has changed during the past 20 years. Manufacturers, from automotive to…
By 2020, research shows that the number of connected industrial devices will grow 285 percent from 2015. If you’re like some industrial leaders who feel the industrial internet of things (IIoT) is more hype than real, you’re taking a wait-and-see approach. But if you’re like many of the leaders we…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Summer with its balmy evenings and long talks with good friends, lemonades in hand, is over. Let’s set the groundwork for this new season and get our definitions in place, once again—the difference between visual and lean.
What is lean?
Technically speaking, lean is a predetermined set of…