All Features
Matthew Barsalou
I gave a rather successful talk on communicating design of experiments (DoE) at the recent ENBIS 14 conference in Linz, Austria. Things went mostly well, but it’s also fair to say many attendees had one major criticism: I didn’t explain why one factor at a time testing (OFAT) isn’t ideal. That…
Marta Collier
The lazy days of summer are a thing of the past. Through a remarkably diverse set of summer camps and other enrichment programs, kids all over Arkansas spent the summer of 2015 participating in activities designed to spark their curiosity and teach them the joy of creating. That joy—and the 21st…
Maurice DeCastro
Would you market your business today the same way you were marketing it 30 years ago? Would you use the same technology? Would you lead your team the same way? I’m guessing most leaders would answer each question with a resounding “No.”
If that’s the case, why has the work culture for business…
William A. Levinson
We all know what happens when we assume. For example, traditional designed experiments assume that residuals, the differences between the actual and modeled data, follow the normal distribution (as seen in figure 1). These experiments include t tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA), factorial…
Michelle LaBrosse
When project managers establish effective routines for their daily work as well as for managing their teams, they develop healthy project management (PM) “hygiene.” This metaphor relates to having consistent processes in place, and it’s what project management is all about. Consistent routines…
Akhilesh Gulati
The big data revolution is requiring a seismic shift inside organizations, both in the way we build relationships and the way we make decisions. Each is now driven by data rather than intuition.
In general, decision making is accomplished via a thought process of selecting a logical choice from…
Michael Causey
Ironically, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is sometimes wary of issuing guidances out of concern it will appear to be imposing new rules that will stifle innovation, according to Ken Skodacek, a policy analyst for the Clinical Trials Program at the Center for Devices and Radiological…
Arun Hariharan
In my previous article, “Is Poor Quality ISO 9001’s Fault?” I shared the example of the chairman of a large company who ridiculed ISO 9001, saying, “Even the municipal office of this city is ISO 9001-certified. And we all know how bad the municipality is. I don’t believe ISO 9001 can do my…
Kevin Meyer
Awhile ago I discussed the value created by writing by hand. By writing on whiteboards or scribbling in a notebook, ownership, learning, and understanding is created. Similarly, truly understanding numbers creates ownership, learning, and understanding—thereby creating the potential for action.
I’…
Bob Emiliani
There are many ways to improve your thinking skills. One way is by practicing critical thinking. Teachers require their students, from elementary school on through college and graduate school, to do research to gather information, analyze the validity of data, determine the strengths and…
Jim Colton
How many samples do you need to be 95-percent confident that at least 95 percent—or even 99 percent—of your product is good? The answer depends on the type of response variable you are using—categorical or continuous.
The type of response will dictate whether you’ll use: 1. Attribute sampling:…
Arun Hariharan
The chairman of a large company once ridiculed ISO 9001, saying, “Even the municipal office of this city is ISO 9001-certified, and we all know how bad the municipality is. I don’t believe ISO 9001 can do my business any good.”
The chairman had similar uncharitable things to say about other…
Bruce Hamilton
A favorite Twilight Zone episode that played during Labor Day weekend put me in mind of the stressful “push production” environment that many organizations still endure today.
In a technical sense, push production refers to launching orders into production before customer requirements are known…
Barry Johnson
The adage “if you aren’t moving forward, you’re falling behind” is true more often than not. Regardless of the type of business, all organizations need to improve to survive. The last words uttered by managers in failing organizations are, “We’ve always done it this way.”
The key to long-term…
Donald J. Wheeler
The best analysis is the simplest analysis that provides the needed insight. Of course this requires enough knowledge to strike a balance between the needed simplicity and unnecessary complexity. In parts one and two of this series we looked at the properties of Weibull and gamma probability…
American Customer Satisfaction Index ACSI
Customer satisfaction with personal computers is down for a third straight year, according to new data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The ACSI Household Appliance and Electronics Report 2015 includes desktops, laptops, and tablet computers, as well as household appliances,…
Andrew Hughes
So much has been written about the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) that separating the wheat from the chaff is becoming an ever more gargantuan task. The problem is complicated by the fact that the IoT in consumer markets is hyped beyond comprehension. Although the potential benefits are real…
Tim Healey
Visual management is increasingly common in offices implementing lean. Yet even though signs, large LCD displays, whiteboards, and charts dominate the wall space, these tools often become part of the wallpaper. After just a few months, many offices revert back to meetings and management to provide…
Jack Dunigan
It seemed like a good idea at the time and an incredibly generous act on the part of the company. When Gravity Payments founder and CEO Dan Price announced that he would raise everyone’s minimum wage to $50,000 a year with $10,000 a year increases until everyone’s minimum was at $70K in 2017, it…
Brian Lagas
Embracing sustainable and green principles is not just a trend. Cultivating such practices helps organizations become more efficient, competitive, and profitable. It’s more than simply a good thing to do. Manufacturers are realizing the many short- and long-term financial benefits from…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
I have had friends and relatives who worried all the time. About all sorts of things. Most of which never came to pass. The problem for me was that all the exposure to their negative thinking was contagious. And, then I’d find myself worrying about things, too.
On occasion, I’ve had some serious…
Kelly Graves
Three months ago I sat in a meeting with seven talented executives whom I’ve worked with on and off for five years. For the past two, there have been major undercurrents of friction between them during executive meetings. After attending a few of these, I noticed people were on their best “fake…
Thomas R. Cutler
Established in 1982, the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) is a nonprofit association with a diverse group of stakeholders—including retailers, suppliers of all sizes, automakers, manufacturers, service providers, academia, and the government—working collaboratively to streamline industry…
Nero Haralalka
Double-digit productivity improvements resulting from workflow redesigns and new-capital equipment investments always get a lot of attention. But over time the returns from many smaller, more methodical changes and investments can rival more highly visible projects. Total productivity maintenance…
Barbara A. Cleary
Last year’s Gallup poll of worker satisfaction revealed that almost 90 percent of workers were either “not engaged” with or “actively disengaged” from the work at their jobs—a shocking revelation that has apparently been repeated in many polls.
Barry Schwarz, a professor of psychology at…
