NIST
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program (VACSP) Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center (the Center) is a federal government organization that supports multicenter...
Nikon Metrology Inc.
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few years ago a Missouri-based casting company, O’Fallon Casting, realized that its touch probe-based inspection system was stretched to the limit for most of its rapid prototyping work. O’...
Bob Mauck and Richard Gee
Under an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract with the U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) Great Lakes Region, Ghafari Associates LLC, a full-service architecture,...
Jon Miller
Facilitation is the art of guiding but not leading, bringing learning but not lecturing, engaging but not directing. Coming from the Latin facilitar, meaning, “to make easy,” the role of the...
David C. Crosby
I recently wrote an article for Quality Digest Daily titled, “Quality Crisis in America.” It produced quite a response. Most readers agreed that quality needed to improve, maybe even that there is a...
David Rizzo
With the dawn of the new decade, retailers throughout the world are realizing the profit potential of going beyond their main channel of distribution and making products available through additional...
Keith Kokal
The collapse of the global economy has put a lot of manufacturing companies out of business. Even at this late stage of the recession, there are still auctions of recently closed plants conducted...
Terry Kosdrosky
When the phrase “social network” comes to mind, people generally think about Facebook or Twitter. Volumes of academic studies have been written on this relatively new phenomenon.
But engineers...
H. James Harrington Ph.D. and Frank Voehl
During the past six years, the Harrington Institute and its business partners have been involved in community improvement efforts that have produced significant results within the organizations...
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Seventeen years ago, I became the president of my community association. It was a lively organization with scores of activist members who were busy gentrifying an inner city neighborhood. One of my...
Steve Moore
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n 1991, I had the privilege of attending one of W. Edwards Deming’s four-day seminars and I still proudly display the certificate of completion in my office. One of the highlights of the seminar...
David C. Crosby
The quality business is all about producing a quality product, right? By that I mean a product that looks and performs just like it was promised. Well, based on the amount of poor quality items and...
Michelle LaBrosse
April 22 is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day. What better way to honor Earth Day than to develop your own renewable energy project? As a project manager, you have the skills to reduce your energy...
Mark Kiemele Ph.D.
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t is no secret that lean Six Sigma (LSS) and design for Six Sigma (DFSS) have arguably been the most effective initiatives for improving bottom line results and revenue growth since the advent...
Ron Hoffman
With today’s limited internal resources, it’s tough to transform machine maintenance from reactionary to preventive, and ultimately proactive, despite the obvious upsides in higher overall equipment...
Jennifer Patterson Lorenzetti
Where does the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) stand on good manufacturing practices (GMP), the set of regulations that govern manufacture and testing of medical devices and other medical...
GKS Global Services
A company based in the U.S. Southwest makes innovative optics for racing cars and other extreme vehicles. Recently the owners, who grew up in Southern California’s skateboard culture, came up with a...
Chet Marchwinski
I’ve now been continuously thinking about lean for 30 years, since the fall of 1979 when my bosses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) asked me to explore how a few Japanese companies...
Stewart Anderson
Recently, here in Canada, there has been a lot of talk about the need to increase productivity within Canadian businesses. Canada has consistently lagged behind other developed nations in...
Rick Johnson Ph.D.
Jim Collins, author of Good to Great (Harper Business, 2001), has said that “Good is often the enemy of great.” That may be true, but I also believe that good is often good enough, and too much...
