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...
Jon Miller
These days, there must be people at Toyota waking up in a cold sweat from dreams in which they are being scolded by Taiichi Ohno, furious at the massive vehicle recalls caused ostensibly by the...
Bill Kalmar
In the last several months, a new reality TV program entitled “Undercover Boss” has surfaced. The premise is that a CEO or top executive of a company travels to a store or factory of the company...
Donald J. Wheeler
Courses in statistics generally emphasize the problem of inference. In my December column, “The Four Questions of Data Analysis,” I defined this problem in the following manner:
Given a single...
Direct Dimensions Inc.
In 2009, Direct Dimensions Inc. was approached by Texas A&M University’s Flight Research Laboratory (FRL) with a challenging yet typical 3-D problem. The FRL, while primarily an active teaching...
Anantha Kollengode
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he check sheet is a simple and effective tool useful in lean Six Sigma projects. It is sometimes referred to as a concentration diagram or location plot. It is a handy tool for qualitative and...
Paul Leavoy
Courtesy of another controversy surrounding hazardous substances in children’s toys, China’s massive manufacturing sector is reliving a public relations disaster.
Four years ago, a nationwide...
Rip Stauffer
It’s better to measure things when we can; that’s been well-established in the quality literature over the years. The use of go/no-go gauges will always provide much less information for improvement...
Thomas R. Cutler
Supply chain organizations face significant pressures resulting from global competition, shorter product life cycles, and lean economic conditions. The escalating requirements of large customers...
Norman Bodek and Jeremy Green
Imagine an automobile owner who goes to the service desk at the dealership and reports a problem, describing the symptoms in detail to the customer service representative. If the service desk...
