All Features
Ian Golding
During the last five years, a small number of organizations have been featured multiple times in my writing. In the vast majority of cases, I have used these businesses as a way of bringing to life global best practices in the field of customer experience management.
It is inspiring to be able to…
Peter Dizikes
Given the complexities of healthcare, do basic statistics used to rank hospitals really work well? A study co-authored by MIT economists indicates that some fundamental metrics do, in fact, provide real insight about hospital quality.
“The results suggest a substantial improvement in health if you…
Naphtali Hoff
Workplace productivity is a huge challenge for nearly every company, business, and organization. Leaders struggle to get their own work done (and do the right work,) while also guiding, empowering, and motivating their people to achieve maximal productivity. Although the projections vary, estimates…
Paavo Käkelä
After two decades of offshore productions in low-cost countries, manufacturers are now struggling with the rapidly growing salaries and countereffects of cheap production. The question that industries are asking today is: Do we continue offshoring, or should we consider reshoring?
The right answer…
Jon Speer
Believe it or not, paper is very expensive. Although the going rate for a ream of standard copy paper is only about 10 bucks, the expense of relying on paper for your medical device quality management system is downright outrageous.
Some medical device manufacturers have recognized how expensive…
Anne Trafton
After a patient has a heart attack or stroke, doctors often use risk models to help guide their treatment. These models can calculate a patient’s risk of dying based on factors such as the patient’s age, symptoms, and other characteristics.
While these models are useful in most cases, they do not…
Anthony Veal
When Microsoft gave its 2,300 employees in Japan five Fridays off in a row, it found productivity jumped 40 percent.
When financial services company Perpetual Guardian in New Zealand trialed eight Fridays off in a row, its 240 staff reported feeling more committed, stimulated, and empowered.…
Tom Taormina
In part one of this series, I said that I want to help my colleagues use their ISO 9001 implementation as a profit center and to turn risk-based thinking into risk avoidance. To do this I will share a set of tools that help evolve quality management into business management.
These tools include…
Phanish Puranam
Machine learning, the latest incarnation of artificial intelligence (AI), works by detecting complex patterns in past data and using them to predict future data. Since almost all business decisions ultimately rely on predictions (about profits, employee performance, costs, regulation, etc.), it…
Jennifer Lauren Lee
3D printing of metal objects is a booming industry, with the market for products and services worth more than an estimated $2.3 billion in 2015, a nearly fivefold growth since 2010, according to Wohlers Report 2016. For this type of manufacturing, a metal part is built up successively, layer by…
Kelvin Lee
Biopharmaceutical manufacturing uses living cells to produce therapies that treat diseases like cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune disorders. Manufacturing medicine using biology presents different challenges from the traditional chemical manufacturing processes that stamp out identical pressed pills…
Christine Schaefer
Robert Rouzer is retired, but he may be busier than ever as a Baldrige volunteer. In recent years, Rouzer has served not only as a Baldrige examiner for the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, but also as a state-level examiner for two Baldrige-based award programs that are part of the…
Jim Benson
‘It’s the shoes!” Spike Lee yelled into the camera on the Air Jordan ads.
But it was never the shoes. Michael, Magic, and LeBron would have outplayed their leagues in golf cleats.
It was never the shoes.
But it was us, the salespeople. In our case, the intelligencia that “trains” people to be…
Annalise Suzuki
The argument for moving toward enterprisewide model-based definition is simple: The way we describe products is increasingly digital, not paper-based. The way we optimize and validate products seems almost entirely digital, except for a few remaining destructive tests. The way our production…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Two of my articles (the first regarding standards, standardization, and standard work; and the second on visual standards) drew a lot of response. Readers were kind enough to share their thoughts and definitions. Some offered new terms to include in the mix: standardized work and visual standard…
Michael Baxter
You would expect a building where vinegar is made to have a sour smell, highly pungent, perhaps with a whiff of apple. World Technology Ingredients (WTI) smells nothing like this. Their manufacturing facility, off a county two-lane in Jefferson, Georgia, has a vaguely mineral aroma. More dry than…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Government bureaucracies are inefficient. They waste taxpayer dollars, and they have no incentive to improve. We’ve all heard and probably repeated these axioms about wasteful government spending.
And it’s often true; you don’t have to look far to find examples of government overpaying for products…
Ryan E. Day
Lean: an employee-championed method of waste reduction. Six Sigma: a robust method of defect reduction. Embracing both methods provides organizations with multiple tools for continuous improvement. Developed for manufacturing, lean Six Sigma has now been recognized by government agencies as a…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
At the University of California at San Diego, lean concepts have taken hold. Along with its process improvement curriculum, the university applies what it teaches through initiatives around campus. Projects both complex and simple tackle the snags, waste, and bottlenecks of academic life. Students…
Ryan E. Day
Lean looks at ways to reduce waste and improve flow. The principles are relevant to virtually every organizational sector and vertical. It’s no surprise, then, that so many organizations tout lean and devote resources to lean initiatives. But, too often, there is a tendency for a company to promote…
Harry Hertz
It has been a little more than two years since I last summarized the topics that are keeping CEOs up at night, either thinking about challenges their organizations face, or opportunities and innovations that should be explored. I ended that column by stating that I looked forward to taking another…
Orit Peleg
Gathered inside a small shed in the midst of a peaceful meadow, my colleagues and I are about to flip the switch to start a seemingly mundane procedure: using a motor to shake a wooden board. But underneath this board, we have a swarm of roughly 10,000 honeybees, clinging to each other in a single…
Donald J. Wheeler
Short Run SPC, Part 1 and Part 2 showed how to use zed charts and difference charts to track the underlying process while making different products. This part will illustrate both the robustness of the zed chart and an incorrect way of standardizing the data from the different products.
The…
Knowledge at Wharton
Have you heard of a media company called T-Series? Chances are, you probably haven’t. Gulshan Kumar, whose résumé up to 1983 read, “Fruit juice seller, streets of New Delhi,” founded it that year. Since its inception, T-Series has become an unlikely media powerhouse—its YouTube channel has 119…
David Isaacson
During the last decade, product quality has become increasingly important to consumers. In fact, a recent B2C study found that consumers rank quality as the most important component in making a purchase, rather than price. This change in focus can be attributed to several factors but is paced by…
