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Ultrasonic thickness gauging is a widely used nondestructive test technique for measuring the thickness of a material from one side. It's fast, reliable, and versatile, and unlike a micrometer or a caliper it requires access to only one side of the test piece. The first commercial ultrasonic gauges…
Disclaimer: I love John Coltrane, Billie Holliday, and Count Basie. Great jazz, to me, ranks right up there with Einstein’s theory of relativity and Newton’s laws of motion in terms of insightful genius. Smooth jazz with a glass of wine and a roaring fire can be the catalyst for a special evening…
What relationship do the various functions and personnel in your organization have with your quality group? Is it collaborative, adversarial, or one of total domination? It can be a slippery slope that runs from successful to disastrous. Is your organization climbing or slipping?
Each time we make…
(Wiley: Hoboken, NJ) -- Make the move up to senior management with lessons from world-renowned business school experts.
Based on themes from INSEAD’s popular Transition to General Management program, authors Kevin Kaiser, Michael Pich, and I. J. Schecter offer sound advice and practical insights…
Scholars still debate how long it took to build the Great Wall of China, but it’s generally agreed it was built in stages between the 5th century B.C. and the 16th century A.D. The Great Pyramid of Giza took about 20 years to construct, according to ancient historians, but it must be remembered…
If you’re not a statistician, looking through statistical output can sometimes make you feel a like you’ve wandered into Alice in Wonderland. Suddenly, you find yourself in a fantastical world where strange and mysterious phantasms appear out of nowhere. For example, consider the T and P in your t…
Recently, I paid for a magazine subscription with a check. A few days later, a person from the magazine’s office phoned me to say that my check had been returned unpaid by my bank. I wondered what the reason could be, as I had enough money in my account.
When I phoned my bank, the bank rep…
(The Quality Group: Atlanta) --The Quality Group (TQG), a leader in blended learning solutions and process improvement, has introduced Lean for Education, a lean training series for the education sector. The curriculum includes 12 newly developed e-learning modules, designed to help academic…
Whenever the original data pile up against a barrier or a boundary value, the histogram tends to be skewed and non-normal in shape. Last month in part one we found that this doesn’t appreciably affect the performance of process behavior charts for location. This month we look at how skewed data…
(PQ Systems: Dayton, OH) -- Predicting potential failure of calibration equipment is possible with the latest release of GAGEpack from PQ Systems, allowing users to stay one step ahead of their work and preventing costly failures.
A Global Wear Trend Analysis tool in the application quickly…
Does your vision sound something like this? “Our vision is to provide aggressive strategic marketing with quality products and services at competitive prices to provide the best value for consumers.”
Bad news. You have a blah, blah, blah vision. Do yourself and everyone on your team a favor: Take…
There was a time when connectivity was oriented to location, with stationary computers communicating with one another across the Internet. With the advent of smart phones, the Internet tied people, not places, together as users accessed the Internet on the move. Now, the next great shift is…
At roughly 7 a.m. every Monday through Friday, I fire up my Lenovo T520 laptop and wait for email, chat, Google Drive, Google Hangout, Skype, remote desktop, an FTP program, two different browsers, and depending where I’m at, my voice over IP applications to load. It may have an Intel 2.5 GHz…
(Danatronics: Danvers, MA) -- Danatronics Corp. has introduced the ECHO 9 Series of ultrasonic thickness gauges. The series combines more than 50 years of ultrasonic know-how into an extremely versatile and easy-to-use ultrasonic thickness gauge.
Packaged in a custom-designed, IP67-rated case, the…
This is the last in a series about how lean manufacturing has affected the people and the companywide culture at Hytrol Conveyors, a designer and manufacturer of advanced conveyor systems. As described in part 1 and part 2, dozens of interviews were conducted with a wide range of employees at the…
When my mother looked at the prices of new hats, studied their features, and then went home and tried to remodel her old hat with feathers or lace to look like those fancier models, I saw the value of doing things yourself—for my mother, an attitude perhaps shaped by her own parents and their…
Books and their authors can be very influential. They can initiate widespread awareness of a subject and maintain loyal followings long after the publication of their best works. However, when you read books about lean management, or follow influential lean authors, how confident are you that the…
The United States now ranks not first, not second, not third, but 12th among developed nations in terms of business startup activity. Hungary, Denmark, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Israel, and Italy all have higher startup rates than does the United States.
Our single most serious economic…
(Tooling U-SME: Dearborn, MI) -- Committed to raising awareness of the importance of human capital to ensure sustainability of manufacturers in the long term, Tooling U-SME, an industry leader in manufacturing training and development, is introducing a new white paper, People Power: Human Capital…
Isaac Asimov’s mystery stories often begin with a guest of the Black Widowers being asked, “How do you justify your existence?” On a darker note, George Bernard Shaw said of the concept of eugenics, “If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you’…
I really can’t make this stuff up.
I wrote a post a couple of years ago titled: “How to Talk to Your Kids About... Quality Improvement,” in which I lamented about Community Hero Day in my daughter’s first-grade class and the need to explain to her why I wasn’t at the “community-hero level” of…
My wife, Carole, and I recently saw And So It Goes, a film with Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton. Michael Douglas’ behavior in the movie reminded me of one of Stephen R. Covey’s classic habits in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon & Schuster, anniversary edition 2013). The habit…
I've been presenting at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) annual forum for 21 consecutive years. Maybe the biggest surprise from these two decades has been the awesome power of simply "plotting the dots," i.e., plotting important organizational data in their naturally occurring time…
On the eve (sort of) of the biggest day of the year for the advertising industry (for commercials, anyway... love those Super Bowl commercials), I’d like to share some thoughts about the common disconnect between advertising and the customer experience.
Or, as Robert Stephens, co-founder of Geek…
(MCA: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Motion Control Association (MCA), the global trade group for the motion control industry, has launched a completely redeveloped website. Motion Control Online originally launched in 2006 and has grown to become the leading global website for motion control and related…
