All Features
Davis Balestracci
You know what the third-quarter review meeting means: a packet will be handed out with bar graphs and, no doubt, trend lines on each of about a zillion “key performance indicators” that show:
• This month vs. last month vs. 12 months ago (maybe year-to-date as well)
• The three months’…
David C. Crosby
Publisher's note: It is with great sadness that I must report that David Crosby passed away on Monday, November 15. This article nicely embodies and encapsulates David's life work, in which he always pressed for personal accountability through a creative yet realistic approach to process…
David C. Crosby
Publisher's note: It is with great sadness that I must report that David Crosby passed away on Monday, November 15. This article nicely embodies and encapsulates David's life work, in which he always pressed for personal accountability through a creative yet realistic approach to process…
100 Customer Service Tips by Larry Williams
Telephone communication is thought of as the greatest technological advancement of the 20th century. It can certainly be credited with nearly every facet of progress that commerce has ever enjoyed. What’s not to like? We are all addicted to this user-friendly medium. However, there are times when…
Bill Kalmar
Buying a car used to be a relatively easy process. But now that the government and various consumer protection organizations have become involved in the transaction, it has become mind-numbing. Car dealerships must now comply with myriad rules and regulations that have escalated a simple purchase…
Jeffrey G. Stark is president of Sensor Products Inc.
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odern microprocessor-controlled electronics and high-power LED lighting operate at elevated temperatures due to Joule heating. As a result, heat sinks, to dissipate temperature, have become important in electronic system designs.…
Environmental Quality Corner with Ken Appel
Ken Appel is the manager of regulated industries for Veriteq.
In part 1 of this article, we discussed the pros and cons of various systems for stand-alone monitoring instruments (e.g., chart recorders and data loggers) and wired networks, with and without power over Ethernet (POE). In the…
Mike Micklewright
Just imagine for a moment that you are a major league baseball player in 1990. If you wish, you can even choose your name and position. Perhaps you would like to be a pitcher, let’s say, Dodger Lemens, or a hitter, perhaps Marcus McWired or Al Roidriguez. You want to improve your performance…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
The boys slumped against the wall of the dugout; you could read the despair on their faces. “What’s the point?” mumbled the right fielder. “We’re just going to lose again.” The team was on an eight-game losing streak, with a record of three wins and eight losses, and five games left to play.…
Environmental Quality Corner with Ken Appel
Ken Appel is the manager of regulated industries for Veriteq.
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he U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its European Union counterparts recently agreed to cooperate on pharmaceutical plant inspections to enable stepped-up enforcement of safety guidelines. These agreements will help…
Minitab LLC
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efore Michael Mercer established his consulting company, he accumulated more than 30 years of quality improvement experience at 3M. That experience led him to develop a deep trust in the power of Minitab Statistical Software. He began using one of the earliest mainframe computer versions to…
Thomas R. Cutler
Food safety standards are becoming increasingly stringent. Although government legislation has long been implemented, your customers may be driving an even higher standard of food safety through the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) or Safe Quality Food (SQF) Institute, which require third-…
Bob Kill is president and CEO of Enterprise Minnesota.
For manufacturers that watched their businesses decline as original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) opted to transfer their supplier relationships to cheap-labor countries such as China and India, there is now solid evidence that those…
Michelle LaBrosse
Michelle LaBrosse is the founder of Cheetah Learning
There’s a reason that top-performing executives all over the world have coaches. It’s because good coaching dramatically improves performance.
A study by Metrix Global showed coaching produced a 529-percent return on investment (ROI).…
Xing-Fei He is senior product manager at DALSA Corp.
Flawless brake operation is so essential to the safety of a vehicle that all brake systems have passed some type of safety testing before a driver ever gets behind the wheel. But how much better would you, as a driver, feel knowing that the…
Rob Snoeijs is a freelance technical writer for LayerWise.
LayerWise, a company based in Leuven, Belgium, focuses on selective laser melting (SLM), a powerful technology that shapes any desired metal-part geometry by melting metal powder layer by layer. Using this digital approach, the optimum…
In 2008, wheel-alignment machine builder Burke E. Porter Europe NV (BEP) approached 3-D measurements specialists LMI Technologies Inc. for advice. At the time, BEP was developing plans to improve performance for end-of-line wheel alignment with its series of noncontact-alignment (NCA) machines.…
The QA Pharm
My definition of “specification” is rather simple: It’s a promise.
Just like any other promise, you’d better be sincere when you make it and be able to keep it. Failure to keep a promise brings disappointment. Frequent failure leads to distrust. And consciously breaking a promise is nothing less…
Steven Ouellette
I know we have been talking about statistics a lot in my last few articles, but recent reader comments have prompted me to think more about why doing statistics properly matters. Come with me, dear reader, on a journey to find out why you should embrace, and not run screaming from, your inner…
Tripp Babbitt
In my previous article, “Prying Management Away from Old Assumptions,” we talked about the relationship between thinking, system, and performance. W. Edwards Deming told us that to improve performance, the system has to change and that the system represents 95 percent of any organization’s…
Minitab LLC
Gold'n Plump Poultry provides chicken products to stores, delicatessens, and restaurants in 40 states. Commitment to process excellence has helped the company thrive even in tough times, and Minitab Statistical Software has provided the powerful tools they needed to analyze quality data. But the…
Mike Richman
A recent article appearing in the Quality Digest Daily e-newsletter (“Why Lean? Why Now?” by Dean Bliss http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/health-care-news/why-lean-why-now.html) discusses the value of lean in a health care setting. In his editorial, Bliss writes about the manufacturing origins…
100 Customer Service Tips by Larry Williams
If you think your time spent outside the workplace is devoid of circumstances that can affect your job, you’re mistaken. There are many factors outside of work that can be detrimental to your employment. The following tips will help you avoid leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that will lead right…
Donald J. Wheeler
Last year I discussed the problems of transforming data prior to analysis (see my August 2009 column, “Do You Have Leptokurtophobia?,” my September 2009 column, “Transforming the Data Can Be Fatal to Your Analysis,” and my October 2009 column,“Avoiding Statistical Jabberwocky.”) There I…
Jeff Dewar
Earlier this week, 100 attendees from near and far descended on Salt Lake City for the 2010 International Visual Workplace Summit, sponsored by the QMI Visual Lean Institute and the Utah Manufacturing Extension Partnership. We were all there to discuss the visual workplace. My first question was…
