All Features
Annette Franz
Do you really know who your customers are? Do you take a 30,000-foot view or a more granular, zoomed-in view in understanding and describing them?
I did several workshops this week on personas and journey mapping. The two are intimately intermingled, and that’s an important point to remember.
But…
John Millican
What could go wrong? As an information security manager, I am often asked that question. But, there are two ways it is asked.
The first is my preferred way. It is a genuine effort to identify and evaluate the risk associated with the item at hand. That is a conversation I want to have. That is a…
Mark Schmit
This is a story about U.S. manufacturing, honoring heroes past and present, and teaching children in ways that textbooks and rote regurgitation cannot. This is a story about why I am optimistic about the future.
This is also a story about Kylan. He’s 8. Before I tell his story, though, I need to…
Nick O’Donohoe
Wayward and capricious, the wind has long been used as a metaphor for constant change. Wind turbine engineers deal with that changeability every day, along with a host of other challenging factors.
Turbines must operate in desert sandstorms and corrosive saltwater. The ambient temperature at the…
Dan Nelson
When we think of plan-do-check-act (PDCA), W. Edwards Deming might spring to mind… and Walter Shewhart, maybe Kaoru Ishikawa as well. But the thinking that results from PDCA today can most always be traced to Shewhart’s 1939 book, Statistical Method From the Viewpoint of Quality Control; these…
NIST
JILA researchers have engineered a short, flexible, reusable probe for the atomic force microscope (AFM) that enables state-of-the-art precision and stability in picoscale force measurements. Shorter, softer, and more agile than standard and recently enhanced AFM probes, the JILA tips will benefit…
Davis Balestracci
Critical thinking does not necessarily result from using a practitioner’s toolbox framed within a formal improvement structure such as Six Sigma, lean, lean Six Sigma, or the Toyota Production System. It’s very easy to get seduced by all the fancy tools, acronyms, and Japanese terminology—and…
Scott Berkun
Status quo is a powerful beast. No matter the organization, once people are in powerful roles they tend to want to change as little as possible out of fear of losing that power. Despite all of their rhetoric about progress and change, most bosses are hard to convince to try new things.
It’s human…
Kevin Meyer
I’ll preface this article by saying that yes, I’m from crazy California. I eat granola with fruits and nuts in the morning, am vegetarian (well, pescatarian), dislike wearing shoes, and practice yoga. At least I don’t have dreadlocks—yet. So there—now you’re warned.
I’m currently winging my way…
William A. Levinson
In their article “Deconstructing Inherently Safe Technology,” authors Glenn Hess and Jeff Johnson warn of the risks that result from high inventories of hazardous chemicals, and cite four approaches to inherently safer technology (IST): 1. Minimize inventories of hazardous chemicals 2. Replace…
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…