All Features
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Sometimes it’s interesting to watch trends develop from the relatively safe perch of business media. A press release from Aveta Business Institute last week drew my attention because it wasn’t doing what 99.9 percent of all press releases do: selling something. Instead of announcing a new product,…
Reporting and documentation are fundamental aspects of the modern quality control (QC) laboratory. Whether using digital imaging to document a defect on a mission-critical subcomponent, performing micron-level measurements of wear on precision machined parts, or collecting important statistical…
Mike Richman
Did you know that World Standards Day (being celebrated today) and Earth Day both began in the year 1970? How about the fact that Oct. 14 was chosen as the date because that was the day in 1946 when the delegates of what was to become the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) first…
Aly Fields
As my quest for knowledge and understanding of the real world continues, I decided to meet with an old professor of mine. I can remember almost every professor I ever had boasting about mentoring former students, so I figured my professor would be delighted to help me out. I am smart, hardworking…
Michelle LaBrosse
Napoleon Hill is credited with popularizing the concept of the mastermind group in his motivational book, Think and Grow Rich, which was first published in 1937 during the Great Depression. Hill wrote, “It is literally true that you can succeed best and quickest by helping others to succeed.”…
100 Customer Service Tips by Larry Williams
If you’re like most people, you have a routine that prepares you for your workday. Hopefully it involves mental preparation, cleanliness, and attention to your appearance. However, you wouldn’t be alone if your daily routine now found you more relaxed in the way you approach your personal…
Kimber Evans
Leadership by example is probably the hardest part of managing a group of people, although to date it remains the most effective management strategy. If you want your employees to work for you, then you need to work for them.
A great way to start is to find out what motivates them. Not…
Bill Kalmar
Back when I was employed by a Michigan bank in the auditing department and responsible for investigating fraud, both internal and external, I was never in want of work. It seems there’s no limit to the number of people who are hellbent on swindling others. After several years of uncovering crooks…
Steven Ouellette
Throughout the last couple of articles, I have explained and illustrated that understanding the random sampling distribution (RSD) of a statistic is key to understanding the entire basis of inferential statistics. Which is just a fancy way of saying “avoiding career-terminating decisions.” This…
Mike Richman
If you missed the news story “Baldrige Program Chooses New Name to Reflect Its Mission” published earlier this week in Quality Digest Daily, allow me to reiterate. What was formerly known as the “Baldrige National Quality Program,” the program behind the Baldrige Award, will now be referred to as…
Dirk Dusharme
A favorite media lament these days concerns the lack of high-school graduates prepared to go forth into design, engineering, or technology. That’s why we have seen so much push recently on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) programs for our schools. Industry is clamoring for…
The QA Pharm
We hear much about the importance of listening to customers and meeting their needs. Lean Six Sigma devotees say that metrics from the customer’s vantage point are at the center of their philosophy.
Many pharmaceutical companies embed their high view of the professional community and patients…
Direct Dimensions Inc.
“The Awakening” is a 70-foot sculpture by J. Seward Johnson that depicts a man struggling to free himself from the earth. The installation, which has been a landmark for nearly three decades in Washington D.C.’s Hains Point, is comprised of five aluminum body parts: a right foot, a left knee, a…
100 Customer Service Tips by Larry Williams
Editor’s note: This is the first of a series of columns from Larry Williams, author of the soon-to-be-released book Customer Service A to Z. In this series, Williams gives us 100 tips on what employees can do to look better and perform better in the eyes of their customers. These are actions and…
Aly Fields
Editor’s note: Several weeks ago, a young woman by the name of Aly Fields contacted us wanting to learn more about “quality” in general and Six Sigma in particular. A recent college graduate, Aly had taken it upon herself to earn a Six Sigma Yellow Belt. Why? Read her own words below. What…
Mark R. Hamel
I recently experienced the pain associated with coaching a team with poor chemistry. It happened within a kaizen event team, so the pain was finite, being that a kaizen event is a rapid improvement of a limited process area. It was, however, an opportunity to learn a few team-formulation lessons,…
Marvin Marshall
Leadership would be easy if it weren’t for those we lead. As any leader or manager knows, getting people to actually want to do the tasks you need them to do can be a challenge. People will not fully commit to a task unless they’re motivated to desire your goals and objectives or the reason behind…
Sal Lucido
Figure 1: Closed-loop process for managing regulatory compliance
In Part I, Part II, and Part III of this compliance series, I have described the benefits of using a closed-loop process for managing regulatory compliance (illustrated in figure 1).
Readers of this series…
Donald J. Wheeler
In my August column, “How to Turn Capability Indexes Into Dollars,” and my September column, “The Gaps Between Performance and Potential,” I showed how to convert capability indexes into the effective cost of production and use (ECP&U), and how to use these costs to quantify the payback for…
Stewart Anderson
Jack Welch, the famous and former CEO of General Electric (GE), once said that the markets in which GE competed were “brutally Darwinian.” The expression is apt because competitive markets always enforce a natural selection where only the fittest firms survive. As in nature, firms that can’t…
Donald Jasurda
The value of ongoing maintenance and prevention is no secret. We know we can save a lot of anguish and money by taking preventive actions today and every day to avoid major problems later. This principle also applies to the quality of the products designed each day by engineers.
The “…
Donald Jasurda
The value of ongoing maintenance and prevention is no secret. We know we can save a lot of anguish and money by taking preventive actions today and every day to avoid major problems later. This principle also applies to the quality of the products designed each day by engineers.
The “…
Thomas R. Cutler
Burger King’s advertising jingle during the 1970s was, “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce. Special orders don’t upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way!”
In late August, Sarah E. Needleman profiled in the Wall Street Journal that entrepreneurial manufacturers are experiencing…
Tripp Babbitt
Systems thinking requires a massive change in the way organizations design and manage work. Old thinking must be flushed out so that new and better thinking can replace it. The outdated functional design of organizations according to the type of work performed needs an overhaul. Frederick Taylor,…
Davis Balestracci
I attended a talk in 2006 given by a world leader in quality that contained a bar graph summary ranking 21 U.S. counties from best to worst (see figure 1). The counties were ranked from 1 to 21 for 10 different indicators, and these ranks were summed to get a total score for each county (e.g.,…