All Features
Chip Bell
It started out as a lackluster taxi ride from the airport to the hotel. But it turned regal and elegant the second I hailed the next taxi as I exited Charlotte Douglas Airport. The Crown Cab that pulled up was shiny and spotless. When the taxi driver raised the trunk to deposit my roller bag, I…
The common and recurring view of the latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) research is that sentient and intelligent machines are just on the horizon. Machines understand verbal commands, distinguish pictures, drive cars, and play games better than we do. How much longer can it be…
Vijay Iyer
As the director of the structural heart team at Kaleida Health’s Gates Vascular Institute in Buffalo, New York, I perform minimally invasive, endovascular surgeries to repair structural defects of the heart. I specialize in valve replacements, clip procedures, and other structural heart treatments…
Jeffrey Phillips
I love innovation. I love all facets of it: the discovery of needs, creativity, unique solutions, and the realization of ideas as new products and services. But what concerns me sometimes is the way in which we attempt to implement innovation, because we are likely to constrain it at the time we…
Kara Baskin
Care.com co-founder Donna Levin played a key part in that company’s growth, and the passion was personal. Levin’s work plans were curtailed when her son was 11 weeks old and had a seizure following a difficult pregnancy. Tests were inconclusive. Her daycare situation evaporated; she and her…
Siddharth Dhomkar, Jacob Henshaw
With the amount of data storage required for our daily lives growing, and available technology becoming saturated, we’re in desparate need of a new method of data storage.
The standard magnetic hard disk drive (HDD)—like what’s probably in your laptop computer—has reached its limit, holding a…
Mike Richman
In the quality profession today, the term “guru” tends to be thrown around with reckless abandon, more often than not self-referentially by the “guru” him- or herself. Don’t get me wrong; there are many outstanding people now working in our field, with interesting and perhaps even revolutionary…
Kevin Meyer
“Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence—only in constant improvement and constant change.”—Tom Peters
The plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycle is the core component of continuous improvement programs. You may have heard it called the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle—and they are very similar—but I…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
Although more than 140 years old, Colonna’s Shipyard Inc. has not stood still with respect to modernization. Colonna’s has made the capital investments necessary to improve efficiency and productivity—and those investments are paying off.
During the late 1990s, Steel America (SA…
Dan Jacob
You’ve identified a fledgling quality initiative to fix the bottlenecks in your processes. Or perhaps you need that application with the latest technology that is sure to improve performance. You might have even discovered the approach to advance a culture of quality. Now that you know the…
NIST
The U.S. Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, has named four organizations as the 2016 recipients of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest presidential honor for sustainable excellence through visionary leadership, organizational alignment, systemic improvement and…
NIST
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released the Federal Laboratory Technology Transfer, Fiscal Year 2014, Summary Report to the President and Congress. Including both quantitative and qualitative measures of effectiveness, the report provides the most current…
Annette Franz
Weology. What is it? If you guessed that it sounds like “the study of we,” you’re pretty close. The name of the concept stems from a Muhammad Ali poem, which simply goes like this: “Me... we.” Three unique letters rearranged into two powerful little words.
The concept itself, which is also the…
Mike Richman
Hard as it may be to believe, a close analysis of our extensive trove of behavioral data on the Quality Digest user group indicates that more than a handful of you don’t regularly watch our regular weekly web TV show, Quality Digest Live, which broadcasts from our studio in Northern California…
Chip Bell
We bought a new house in a real nice neighborhood. The house was perfect except for one important feature—it came with a yard! I do not like yard work, and my wife does not like yard work. I travel all the time, and she works long hours.
One Saturday morning, I got a big idea. “Why don’t we just…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
In a visual workplace, information is converted into simple, universally understood visual devices and installed in the process of work itself, as close to the point of use as possible. The result transforms a formerly mute work environment into one that speaks, eloquently and precisely, about how…
Andy Henderson
Editor’s note: This is part one of a four-part series offering the author’s perspective on how different aspects of manufacturing may be affected in the future. Part two covers production management; in part three, inventory management; and in part four, product quality.
Some time ago, I made a…
NIST
Until recently, if a company wanted the best measurements in the world for the physical dimensions of one of its dimensional standards, it had to book time on the NIST Physical Measurement Laboratory’s (PML) Moore M48 coordinate measuring machine (CMM). Operating at NIST since 2000, this CMM—…
Sudeep Pasricha
American mining production increased earlier this decade as industry sought to reduce its reliance on other countries for key minerals, such as coal for energy and rare-earth metals for use in consumer electronics. But mining is dangerous—working underground carries risks of explosions, fires,…
Dawn Bailey
Should an organization embrace risk or spend millions of dollars a year to avoid it? How do you know when a particular strategy is best?
Considerations for such thinking are covered in the Baldrige Excellence Framework, and the topic was recently explored by Brennan McEachran in an Innovation…
Barbara A. Cleary
Among the “10 top business trends that will drive success in 2016,” reported in an end-of-2015 Forbes article by author and consultant Ian Altman, was the point that “Top performing companies will focus on connecting customers.”
Citing examples that include Uber, AirBnB, Kickstarter, and others,…
Eston Martz
At last month’s Minitab Insights conference, experts from a wide range of industries offered some great lessons about how they use data analysis to improve business practices and solve a variety of problems. I shared five tips from quality leaders in yesterday’s column; here are five more.…
Industrial companies are facing critical challenges rooted in slow growth, globalization, the effect of disruptive technologies, and unforeseen competitive threats. A new report from global management consulting firm, L.E.K. Consulting, reveals how those companies are responding—and what the…
During the past year, my email inbox has been consistently pinged by law firms advertising seminars and workshops that promise to help medical professionals understand what is noteworthy for 3D-printed medical products, ranging from regulatory to IP concerns. Some of these have been quite alarming…
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…
