All Features
Mike Micklewright
Years ago, there was a memorable TV commercial of a toaster waffle that had this very memorable tag line: “Leggo my Eggo.” Today, this product still exists, as does the tag line, but the tag line is much more obscure than it once was.
Today, CEOs and top executives everywhere are quaking in their…
Chet Marchwinski
Companies don’t last for 100-plus years unless they do a lot of things right. But Ingersoll Rand, the 143-year-old home of such iconic brands as Club Car, Thermo King, and Trane, thought it could do even better when it launched a lean transformation about four years ago. As part of that effort, it…
Patti Arms
When you consider rising energy costs, the uncertain nature of foreign fuel sources (regardless of the country in which you operate), and the environmental impact associated with many fuels, then any system that helps you wisely manage your energy consumption and improve your energy performance…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
My wife, Carole, and I decided to get out of town to get warm during my recent spring break. While at our destination, Carole decided to look on the Internet for a restaurant that was new to us, had a great view, and a great reputation for food and service. Carole, always value conscious, also…
Grant Ramaley
Electrically powered medical equipment will soon be subject to the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) Directive 2011/65/EU.
As of July 22, 2014, most powered equipment sold within the European Union (EU) must not contain more than the allowed quantities for each homogeneous material…
Dave K. Banerjea
Story update 4/24/2014: We bumped up the cost of accreditation based on comments that the original article was on the low side. We also added references to ILAC as well as additional accreditation bodies that operate in the United States (ACLASS, NVLAP, L.A.B.)
Getting calibration accreditation is…
Bruce Hamilton
An old TV series I watched recently reminded me of an experience I’ve had many times in my work. In this I Love Lucy episode, Lucy is ordered by Ricky to create a schedule to make her “more efficient.” A schedule board, posted in their home, is a “best practice,” but without the best intent. The…
Christine Schaefer
On April 6, 2014, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker presented two U.S. organizations with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest honor for organizational innovation and performance excellence.
The 2013 award recipients are: • Pewaukee School District in Pewaukee…
Dawn Bailey
Why should an organization integrate lean methodology with the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence? And how should it go about doing that?
When I asked Pattie Skriba, vice president of Business Excellence at Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital, a 2010 Baldrige Award recipient, she said that…
Scott Berkun
Many people never learn how to work on a team. The reason many projects fail has little to do with expertise or intelligence. Instead it’s the fact that as soon as you have two or more people working together, they have to figure out to how to share, collaborate, and trust each other.
“Playing…
Thomas R. Cutler
Within the retail industry, it’s impossible to look at the quality of material handling processes without looking at delivery to retail outlets. Nearly three-fourths of the total costs of direct store delivery (DSD) rest with warehouse, order assembly, and delivery to retail customers. The…
Miriam Boudreaux
In part one of this series I described how many auditors want your quality manual to repeat what is in ISO 9001, API Spec Q1, or API Spec Q2. Since auditors don’t always make the connection between how you wrote the quality manual (in a way that’s useful for you) and the standards in question, your…
Alan Nicol
When we learn the ways of lean methodology, we’re taught that there are two types of waste: pure waste, which needs to be eliminated; and necessary waste, which does nothing to improve our performance or profits but must be produced anyway.
I’ve decided that there’s a third type of waste, called…
Patrick Runkel
My previous article examined how an equivalence test can shift the burden of proof when you perform a hypothesis test of the means. This allows you to more rigorously test whether the process mean is equivalent to a target or to another mean.
Here’s another key difference: To perform the analysis…
Ryan E. Day
And so the debate rages on about whether the wildly popular Flappy Bird app is actually a tool for teaching lean or teaching theory of constraints. Really? No, not really. But at least I’m not the only one thinking about it.
Actually, it was Jens Woinowski’s article “What You Can Learn about Lean…
Mike Roberts
In industries like aerospace, defense, or automotive where an adulterated part or component can have a catastrophic effect to your business performance, managing supplier quality and compliance are top-of-mind issues for executives. With sometimes thousands of such relationships and dependencies,…
Sandia National Laboratories
Sandia National Laboratories engineers have been studying the most effective ways to use solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays—a clean, affordable, and renewable way to keep the power on. Systems are relatively easy to install and have relatively small maintenance costs. They begin working immediately …
Dennis Payton
In 1908, the first Model T was created and more than 15 million were sold through mid-1927, proving that a focus on core product can create a tidal wave of success. The plan and processes Henry Ford put in place to create the Model T revolutionized the automotive industry.
Having a streamlined…
Patrick Runkel
With more options come more decisions. With equivalence testing added to Minitab 17, you now have more statistical tools to test a sample mean against target value or another sample mean.
Equivalence testing is extensively used in the biomedical field. Pharmaceutical manufacturers often need to…
Dan Nelson
Why is internal auditing important to your quality management system (QMS)? To ensure that processes conform to ISO 9001 requirements, or to ensure that the company conforms to management’s own defined plans? Although audits can be done for both reasons, the second choice is more important.…
Davis Balestracci
To summarize my last three articles, most improvement approaches come out of the same theory and are based on the assumption that everything is a process.
The universal process flowchart in Figure 1 sums it up beautifully. The boxes at the top are how executives think the process works. The…
Dan Harris
How often do you stop to think about the ubiquitous “Made in China” label? If you’re a China lawyer, you should think about it almost every day.
To convince recalcitrant clients of the need for product liability protection for the products they are having made in China, I sometimes send them the…
Mike Micklewright
Well, phew… I’m relieved. We have someone to blame. At least GM will be able to fire the engineer who allegedly lied under oath about a 2006 design change to fix the faulty switches on the Chevy Cobalts. Now we can all get on with our lives, right? And feel comfortable that the problem will never…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Available time for changeovers per period (Ta∆), also called available time for (internal) setups, represents the time per a given period (e.g., day, shift, week) during which a machine, equipment, or resource can be changed over (i.e., from one product to another, prepared for a different medical…
Carly Barry
Ugh, your process is producing some parts that don’t meet your customer’s specifications. Fortunately, after a little hard work, you find a way to improve the process.
However, you want to perform the appropriate statistical analysis to back up your findings and make it easier to explain the…
