All Features
Donald J. Wheeler
In the 1940s the War Production Board trained approximately 50,000 individuals in how to use process behavior charts (also known as control charts). At that time the computations were done by hand, and the emphasis was on making things as easy as possible for those doing these computations. As a…
David C. Crosby
A major part of the zero defects concept is to recognize outstanding performance on the part of employees by presenting them with an award. After all, you asked for zero defects performance, so let people know when you get it.
Recognition can be a tricky business. Done right, it’s full of…
Mike Richman
As you can see, and as I tend to do in these occasional column entries, I’m freely mixing metaphors above. My point, or points, as it were, are that, first, times are tough. Well… duh. OK, point number two is that in tough times, change, which is always inevitable, seems inevitabler. Yup, I…
BMGi
On July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, signaling the attainment of President John F. Kennedy’s vision to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth. The accomplishment required nearly a decade of research and experimentation by NASA as it worked to overcome one…
Max Kalehoff
The science of harnessing customer loyalty and satisfaction is getting very trendy in business. And perhaps nothing has been more responsible for driving excitement than Net Promoter.
Developed by Fred Reichheld, Net Promoter is a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to…
James Wells
How many times has this happened to you? You’re leading a Six Sigma project on a transactional process of some kind, something not directly tied to manufacturing or measurement of product quality. You get to the measure phase of your Six Sigma project and struggle to figure out how to satisfy the…
Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMMs) are used in practically every industry that requires precise dimensional inspection of manufactured parts. In today’s competitive environment, manufacturers demand CMMs that are accurate, reliable, fast, economical, and provide maximum flexibility with respect…
Located near Montreal, Canada, the Nova Bus manufacturing team was routinely building many hundreds of complete bus frames per year. Production grew as new models were introduced. The addition of a new diesel electric hybrid design necessitated a re-examination of the quality inspection…
Knowledge at Wharton
Toyota’s legendary lean processes didn’t come out of nowhere. They were forged by the fire of urgency in post-World War II Japan when resources were scarce. Toyota innovated—and continued to innovate. Today, the Toyota Production System is the most respected manufacturing and inventory control…
Dave Maxham
A joint project of NCMS called Volumetric Accuracy for Large Machine Tools (VALMT), partnering Automated Precision, Boeing, Siemens and Mag Cincinnati, has pioneered an innovative process and established new methodology in volumetric error compensation for large machine tools. Volumetric error…
Vigneshwaran Chandran
Testing times for the automotive industry continues as uncertainty looms over an anticipated sales rebound in developed markets in 2010. While some forecasters expect demand contraction owed to scrappage incentives in 2009, most expect full year sales in Western Europe and North America to grow…
Bill Kalmar
Have you noticed that the world is getting crazier by the minute? Every day we hear about someone in search of his or her 15 minutes of fame or someone who operates on a different wave length than the rest of the civilized world, and in some instances, quality and performance excellence have taken…
Bob Cramblitt
Although he’s not one for clichés, Rus Emerick, process improvement specialist at Schneider-Electric, endorses this one: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
This concept, which dates back to Aristotle, is at the core of an approach called functional analysis that has…
Ron Rode
As “Old Man Winter” continues to toss his wrath at many of us, it is quite easy to turn our thoughts toward warmer, sunnier places. One of those locations we are all starting to think about is Reno, Nevada, the location for the 2010 Coordinate Metrology Systems Conference (CMSC) hosted by the…
redOrbit
With a silicone rubber “stick on” sheet containing dozens of miniature, powerful lenses, engineers at Harvard are one step closer to putting the capacity of a large laboratory into a microsized package.
The marriage of high-performance optics with microfluidics could prove the perfect match for…
A spring-loaded guided core AC-LVDT is an air-extended, spring retracted LVDT offering consistent measurement for dimensional gauging, factory automation, and similar position measurement applications.
Linear variable…
Paul Scicchitano
Some experts could barely hide their disappointment when the total number of ISO 9001 certificates recently failed to break the long-awaited million-certificate mark—as if it isn’t enough to have the world’s most widely used voluntary quality standard of all time.
With 982,832 third-party…
(ISM: Tempe, AZ) -- The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) will present the 95th Annual International Supply Management Conference and Educational Exhibit April 25–28 in San Diego, California. The event includes four days of supply management professional development, training, and networking…
R. Eric Reidenbach Ph.D.
One of my clients, a wireless business-to-business (B2B) telecom company, was experiencing a significant problem in their call center. They were absolutely inundated with calls—most of them problems. They were spending a significant amount of money trying to manage the call center—adding new call…
Mark Graban
When I was in Sweden recently, we had a lot of good discussion about the lean concept of “standardized work.”
There was much agreement from different presenters at the lean laboratories conference, and from the hospital people we visited, concerning standardized work—that it isn’t a robotic…
National Standards Authority of Ireland NSAI
(NSAI: Nashua, New Hampshire) — Even though no firm action was taken during the 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the U.S. administration has still pledged that the country will tighten carbon emission regulations. The most plausible possibility is what is referred to as a “cap and trade”…
Knowledge at Wharton
In 2008, the University of North Carolina (UNC) Health Care System faced a challenge: Length of stay per patient at this major nonprofit health system and academic medical center was longer than it needed to be. If administrators could figure out how to cut the length of stay by an average of just…
Patrick Beauchemin
Optical comparators, also referred to as profile projectors and contour projectors, were first introduced in the 1940s and they are still widely used today in a broad range of industries to verify that manufactured parts are within tolerance. These versatile instruments are easy to use and the fact…
Bill Kalmar
In March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell uttered these now famous words, “Mr. Watson, come here—I want to see you.” That day marked the beginning of an extraordinary time in communication—the advent of the telephone. Since then there have been thousands of changes in our communication systems, many of…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
On a summer weekend in 1977, my friend Tony and I made plans to go water-skiing. When he picked me up there were two people in the car that I did not know. He introduced his new girlfriend, Sue, and her brother, Bubba.
Bubba was the quintessential redneck. Within minutes of getting on the boat…