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(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Learn how your organization can achieve outstanding performance. Plan now to join us in Baltimore, April 12–15, 2015, at the premier showcase of the 2014 Baldrige Award recipients: • PricewaterhouseCoopers Public Sector Practice • Hill Country Memorial • St. David’s…
Good ideas—for new products, new processes, or new services—are terrible things to waste. Yet time and time again, inventions and discoveries that first sprouted in the United States have taken root in the factories and economies of other nations.
Think of computer-controlled machine tools, solar…
In 1982 the late, great W. Edwards Deming condensed more than 50 years of innovation and experience into a book designed to be a wake-up call for U.S. industry. That book was called Out of the Crisis (MIT reprint, 2000). At that point in his career Deming’s legacy as a mathematical physicist,…
(ANSI: Washignton, DC) -- Recent comments from Chinese Premier Li Keqiang indicate support at the highest levels of the Chinese government for deepening the reform of China’s standardization system, a process that has been underway for several years. According to Chinese leadership, the goal is to…
In 1959 Nils Bohlin, an engineer at the Swedish car manufacturer Volvo, invented the first three-point safety belt. It was far more effective than the standard lap belt, like the ones still used on airplanes. Volvo, realizing the importance of this invention, chose not to patent it but rather…
(FARO: Lake Mary, FL) -- The easiest, fastest, and most affordable way to measure parts and products is with a lightweight portable coordinate measuring machine (CMM) that offers both contact and noncontact measurement.
The challenge is that everyone is seeking to reduce required inspection times…
My friend Roger Martin (No. 3 on Thinkers50 ranking in 2013) penned a terrific article in The European Business Review on how Tennis Canada, the national governing body for the sport within that country, rose from recent oblivion to now boasting two young players ranked well inside the top 10 on…
As more physicians are integrating their patient electronic medical records (EMRs) with third-party patient portals, they’re looking for clarifications on many issues to stay within the various regulations boundaries and to be meaningful use-attested. It can be difficult to differentiate fact from…
Most professors and many administrators have great difficulty accepting the idea of students as customers. Some put great effort into finding ways to describe students as anything but customers, preferring such terms as “partners,” “empowered learners,” “producers,” and so on.
The resistance to…
With the evolution of technology, experts have been able to transform and develop equipment into ways that no one ever thought possible. For example, most people no longer use paper maps as a guide for travel, or phone calls as a means of communication. These have been replaced with portable…
(Sigmetrix: McKinney, TX) -- Sigmetrix, global experts in geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) and mechanical variation, has announced the availability of its CETOL 6 Sigma v. 8.4 software for PTC Creo, Creo Elements/Pro, CATIA V5, and SOLIDWORKS CAD systems. CETOL 6 Sigma v. 8.4…
This is a geeking out on the intersection of W. Edwards Deming and our Lean Coffee format. It is brief and assumes some prior knowledge of the System of Profound Knowledge and Deming’s 14 Points for Management. If you don’t know these yet, please go to the sources. Deming’s writings have had a…
Recently I watched the motion picture Underdogs. It is a formulaic, feel-good movie about a losing high-school football team that’s motivated by a new coach to win a championship.
The coach teaches them the skills necessary to succeed, yet they still don’t win any games. He realizes that what…
One of my favorite bloggers about the application of statistics in healthcare is David Kashmer, an M.D. and MBA who runs and writes for the Business Model Innovation in Surgery blog. If you’re interested in how quality improvement methods like lean and Six Sigma can be applied to healthcare, check…
The fact is, we humans usually think much bigger than we can do. When that happens, collaborating to bring ideas to fruition becomes crucial for success. From that first time a woolly mammoth made a Neanderthal’s mouth water for a big juicy steak, humans have been working together to solve…
(Mahr: Providence, RI) -- Mahr has introduced a new high-precision measuring station to measure and evaluate optical components, including freeform, aspheric, and spherical lenses. Developed to provide quick 2D and 3D testing to support the entire lens production process, the MarForm MFU 200…
I sang baritone and sometimes tenor in the St. John’s Lutheran Church choir, according to the key of the hymn we were rehearsing and also depending upon who showed up for rehearsal. There were no tryouts for our choir; willingness to sing on Sunday was the primary requirement for membership. One…
At the risk of sounding like a pharmaceutical quality assurance heretic, standard operating procedures (SOPs) often don’t work as intended. In fact, they can do more harm than good by giving a false sense of security: We must be okay; we have procedures for that.
Having procedures is certainly…
Humans tend to abhor chaos, and love to invoke rules to supposedly create order. We like rules because they make us feel protected, aligned, and perhaps operating on a fair playing field.
At the same time, we dislike rules because they can protect us to the point of being smothering, align us to…
Training management’s significance is often overlooked by executives, despite its grave importance and interrelationship with compliance, quality, health, safety, and other areas related to business performance. Fortunately, automation, combined with other next-generation software capabilities, is…
Every spot in the photo below is a galaxy, not a star. Each of them contains perhaps 100 billion stars, and along with them, probably hundreds of billions of planets.
The center area is a supercluster of galaxies, colorfully labeled CL 0024 + 1654, which is five billion light years from us. The…
(Matrox Imaging: Montreal) -- Matrox Imaging is offering classroom training on the latest Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) processing tools and the MIL/MIL-Lite environment April 13–17 at the company’s headquarters in Montreal, Canada.
“Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) Processing” is an intensive three-…
When you think of value stream transformation, what are the most common desired outcomes that come to mind? Shorter lead times? Higher quality? Reduced expenses? Expansive thinkers often go beyond these classic performance indicators and aim for improvements such as quicker time to market for new…
Author clarification--3/5/2015:It appears that I somewhat overstated my case in this article. I had forgotten that there are some families of distributions where we can estimate the shape of a probability model using the statistics for location and/or dispersion. Because of this, these families get…
Are prices in China really as low as they seem? This is not an easy question to answer. Prices for goods imported from China used to be very competitive but are beginning to look less attractive. Sourcing in China has become more difficult as negotiating with a Chinese supplier for a much lower…
