Barbara Hemphill
Kathy is the office manager for a large corporation. The great news is that the company is growing and Kathy is looking for employees to handle all the new clients. The bad news is that she has no...
Jennifer Robison
As many as 14.6 million Americans are unemployed, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That means 14.6 million people have been dealing with the losses that come with unemployment: the loss of...
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Editor's note: In this second in a series of articles on workplace visuality, Gwendolyn Galsworth, Ph.D., author of Work That Makes Sense (Visual Lean Enterprise Press, 2010) and Visual...
Steve Martin
I like the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle for three reasons: It’s simple, it provides a pathway for teaching, and it works.
I love teaching. For me, seeing the light bulb over a lean student’s...
Michelle LaBrosse
Are you tired of hearing people say that change is the only constant? I think we all need to keep saying it to remind ourselves that we must be ready to keep changing. But here’s the rub: How do we...
Mark Graban
I have as many bad customer-service experiences as the next guy, with health care and other businesses. As I’ve said before, unless there’s a broader lesson involved, I try not to be a “hack”...
Mark R. Hamel
My dog, Bailey, has a sensei—a dog-obedience trainer. Actually, my wife and I have a sensei to teach us how to train our dog. In fact, my wife and I have used the same dog-obedience trainer for the...
Jacques Hoffmann
In part one of this series, we considered the pros and cons of pressure-decay testing. In part two, we’ll take a close look at a leak-testing method called “differential pressure decay.” This method...
Bob Cramblitt
Although he’s not one for clichés, Rus Emerick, process improvement specialist at Schneider-Electric, endorses this one: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
This concept, which...
Bill Kalmar
Here it is, one week into August with loads of summer days still staring us in the face, and yet the “back to school” ads have been popping up for weeks. Every day brings advertisements for...
Stewart Anderson
The recession has been an extremely disruptive event for many organizations. Many bear relentless pressure to identify new market needs, create appropriate products and services, become more...
Robert Parsons
Finally, the long and arduous process that appears to be a requisite phase in the development of an international quality management system standard appears to be nearing an end. Though the AS9100:...
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Editor's note: In this first in a series of articles on workplace visuality, Gwendolyn Galsworth, Ph.D., author of Work That Makes Sense (Visual Lean Enterprise Press, 2010) and Visual...
Tripp Babbitt
While reading an issue of Quality Digest Daily, I came across an article by Kenneth Levine and Peter Sherman titled, “Ten Simple Principles for Treating Employees as Assets.” I thought it followed...
Steve Moore
An article titled “Sharp Drop in Firefighter Fatalities in 2009” appeared in a safety trade journal recently. For the first time in three years, it said, on-the-job firefighter fatalities dropped...
Environmental Quality Corner with Ken Appel
On July 8, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced an initiative “… to evaluate industry’s compliance and understanding of Part 11 in light of the enforcement discretion described in the...
Walter Pastorius
In sawmills, optimization is an in-process procedure that maximizes output of the highest-value board size and quality from the limited and environmentally valuable input of randomly shaped logs....
Tess Woods
Since almost 70 percent of all changes in organizations fail, you might be interested in knowing why that’s so. Rick Maurer, author of Beyond the Wall of Resistance: Why 70% of Changes Still Fail...
Steven Ouellette
Story update 10/05/2010: Corrections were made to captions for Figures 6, 7, 8, 9.
As I was teaching class the other day, I told the students I was going to reveal to them the one secret they...
Donald J. Wheeler
Capability indexes allow us to characterize the relationship between the process potential and the specifications. Performance indexes characterize the past performance relative to the...
