All Features
New River Kinematics, API Services
St. Luke’s Church of Smithfield, Virginia, dates back to 1632. As the oldest surviving Gothic building in the United States, St. Luke’s Church is a historical landmark that is very significant to the Smithfield community and surrounding area. Despite being carefully preserved by a dedicated group…
Patrick Runkel
Muntasir Mamun and Mohammad Ujjal are riding across the United States on a bicycle built for two. As they pedal in sync from Seattle to New York, they’re not only gazing at our purple mountains’ majesty and amber waves of grain. They’re also keeping their eyes peeled for plastic soda bottles, glass…
Matthew E. May
Have you heard any of the following lately?
“I’m OK with how things are.” “The timing for this isn’t quite right.” “Seems like a lot of pain for such little gain.” “We need more buy-in to do this.” “That may work elsewhere, but not here.” “We tried something like this before, and it didn’t work.”…
Geomagic
Olympic sports keeps pushing athletes to find new and nuanced ways to condition their bodies. The same is true with their equipment. Engineers continually look for new refinements that propel the competition to a new level.
Much of this latter challenge lies in the realm of biomechanics, or…
Tripp Babbitt
Too many service organizations use measures that disconnect them from customers. The result is predictable: higher costs and worse service.
In service organizations, the systemic relationship between purpose, measures, and method is often clouded. These measures have nothing to do with what…
The Conference Board
Amid continued economic, financial, and political turmoil, several European Union countries are seeing improvement in a crucial measure of competitiveness. According to a new Executive Action Report from The Conference Board, the cost of labor per unit of output has fallen significantly in a number…
Bruce Hamilton
Referred to either as “work in process” or “work in progress” (I think they’re the same thing), WIP is one of those manufacturing concepts that’s designed to confuse.
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First, it’s not really “work” but the object of work. In fact, in a…
Donald J. Wheeler
Three years ago this month Quality Digest Daily published my column, “Do You Have Leptokurtophobia?” Based on the reaction to that column, it contained a message that was needed. In this column I would like to explain the symptoms of leptokurtophobia and the cure for this pandemic affliction.…
Davis Balestracci
“If Japan Can… Why Can’t We?” was an American television episode that aired on June 24, 1980, broadcast by NBC as part of its show, NBC White Paper. That episode is often credited with beginning the quality revolution and introducing the methods of W. Edwards Deming to American managers.
In the mid…
Timothy F. Bednarz
The primary barrier to mutual communication is a person’s natural tendency to approve or disapprove of what is being said by another person. Judging takes place because people tend to evaluate what they hear from their own personal point of view and reference. These evaluations short-circuit their…
Miriam Boudreaux
Deciding how to control your documents can be difficult. ISO 9001, the quality management system (QMS) standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), requires you maintain accurate and up-to-date procedures, but doesn’t give a lot of guidance on how to get there. Between…
Mike Roberts
Adverse food safety events can have disastrous effects on branding and profitability. Because information today can go viral in a matter of hours, companies in the food and beverage industry are faced with increasing pressures to operate seamlessly, with little or no room for error…
The Conference Board
U.S. corporations continue to lag far behind their counterparts in other developed economies—notably the European Union and Japan—in transparency of environmental and social practices. According to a new study by The Conference Board, the overall disclosure rate of this type of information by U.S.…
NIST
A new versatile measurement system devised by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) accurately and quickly measures the electric power output of solar energy devices, capabilities useful to researchers and manufacturers working to develop and make next-generation…
Alan Nicol
Often it is the simple and basic question that unlocks the mystery of our business or process problems. What’s more, we don’t have to be trained experts in process improvement techniques to ask the all-important, all-powerful dumb questions.
I was listening to a friend and colleague describe the…
Kyle Toppazzini
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “We don’t have the data for this. I guess we’ll need to make an educated guess.” In the lean Six Sigma engagements I work on, my response to this is, “Let’s create the data.” Without fail, I get the deer-in-the-headlights stare for a couple of seconds…
Mike Roberts
The issue of ensuring quality in manufacturing is eternal. What changes are the complexities of these issues and how decision makers respond to them. Market-leading companies are developing a model of operational excellence that aligns financial and operational objectives with the right mix of…
Erik Martinsen
When investigating a statistical process control (SPC) system, it can be difficult to build a business case for it. As a quality engineer, the value in having easy access to data seems obvious, but this can be a hard sell to an organization focused on cost and payback opportunities for capital…
Michael Causey
The Cold War may be over, but apparently spying is still a growth industry. The latest spy-craft news comes from the seemingly staid Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which appears to have more George Smiley and John le Carré types than we’d ever imagined.
According to reports in The New York…
Charlyne Meinhard
You can hire the right employees for your business, but if your managers don’t manage them well, those capable employees may wind up messing up rather than stepping up.
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Jen and Tim are managers of two totally different functions within…
University of Michigan
Emerging nations, long seen as a source of low-cost services such as manufacturing and IT support, now are home to a new breed of multinational company. These new players, stepping forward from the background and building global brands, pose a new and serious threat to established multinational…
Akhilesh Gulati
Starting from scratch, Gil had slowly built a small business and was running it quite successfully. He was a professional at heart: He gained the confidence of customers and prospects, met their expectations, negotiated better prices, and provided personalized service. Life was good. Things were…
Edward D. Hess
Innovation is a popular buzzword in the business world today. Everyone wants to be the next Apple or Facebook, revolutionizing their products and services by creating the next iPad or Zappos-style service model. But they don’t. They can’t.
Most companies pump out the same old gadgets and services,…
Knowledge at Wharton
It was 2003, exactly 56 years after Ole Kirk Christiansen bought the first plastic injection molding machine in Denmark to start manufacturing plastic bricks for building-block toys. On the surface, or so it seemed, the LEGO Group had done everything right over that time period.
The company was an…
Matthew Littlefield
Executives today are making quality management a focal point in their operations and as a result, the role of the chief quality officer (CQO) is gaining ground in both popularity and relevance. Couple emerging technologies, such as enterprise quality management software, with the task of changing a…