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Organizations pursue registration to international standards for a variety of reasons, but in the broadest possible sense most agree that the goal is to improve business operations and reap financial rewards, either by saving money through increased efficiencies or in making money by getting or…
Up until a few years ago, I wasn’t a big fan of run charts. Why not just go ahead and construct a process behavior chart and move on? Well, sometimes a run chart is more appropriate for certain data structures.
For example, some data are “chunky”—see Donald Wheeler’s treatment of chunky data in…
(LMT: Caro, MI) -- Laser Marking Technologies LLC, a division of The LMT Group, featured its newest edition to the COBALT product line at IMTS 2014. The eCobalt is the lowest cost and highest quality fiber laser-marking system on the market today. This laser can be used for direct part marking,…
Provision 4.2 of ISO 9001:2015 cites “Needs and Expectations of Interested Parties.” Interested parties include not only obvious stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, and owners), but also anybody who is affected, or perceives himself as being affected, by the product or service.
Not all…
The word “kurtosis” sounds like a painful, festering disease of the gums. But the term actually describes the shape of a data distribution.
Frequently, you’ll see kurtosis defined as how sharply “peaked” the data are. The three main types of kurtosis are shown below.
Lepto means “thin” or “…
Shortly after the death of the brilliant comedian and actor Robin Williams, his daughter Zelda quit Twitter and Instagram following online harassment over his death. How sad. We seem to somehow like to see the dark side of the world.
Even my three tennis buddies seem unable to keep from trash…
Employees want feedback that is meaningful and relevant to them, but often what they hear sounds like it’s been taken verbatim from one of those phrase books using stock comments like, “Mary is a team player and consistently thinks of others.”
That statement could apply to Mary, or it could apply…
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) medical device recalls are on the rise. An increasingly active FDA coupled with an increase of medical device software components is adding up to new challenges for manufacturers. It’s important to understand how the FDA uses IEC 62304, an international standard…
Connecting our information about customer desires with our designs is difficult. If it seems simple, we probably missed something. In the realm of product development, the most challenging and often the riskiest part of the design process is deciding precisely what features or functions our…
(Frost & Sullivan: Mountain View, CA) -- Frost & Sullivan honored recipients of its 2014 Growth, Innovation & Leadership Awards at a dinner gala held Wed., September 17, in San Jose, California, at The Fairmont San Jose. The awards gala was preceded by a 60-minute CEO leadership…
This is the fifth installment in our six-part series on how automating common business processes with enterprise quality management software (EQMS) can benefit your organization. In this installment, we’ll focus on the automated audit management process.
Manual systems often don’t provide the…
Along with an opposable thumb, we share one other trait with our hairy primate cousins: curiosity. We have an innate desire to understand “what happens if…” that begins in childhood. As we grow into adults, that natural curiosity dissipates, and we’re expected to have those answers (school, anyone…
In a previous article, I showed why there is no R-squared for nonlinear regression. Anyone who uses nonlinear regression will also notice that there are no P values for the predictor variables. What’s going on?
Just like there are good reasons not to calculate R-squared for nonlinear regression,…
Full-time equivalent(s), commonly referred to as FTE(s), represents the number of equivalent employees working full time. One full-time equivalent is equal to one employee working full time. Typically, FTEs are measured to one or two decimal points.
FTEs are not people. Rather, FTEs are a ratio…
(InfinityQS: Fairfax, VA) -- InfinityQS International, the global authority on real-time quality and manufacturing intelligence, offers six tips to help the automotive industry improve quality and reduce recalls across the supply chain, which will be discussed during the 2014 AIAG Quality Summit…
Ihave worked with a number of CEOs during my many years of helping companies improve quality. Although all are different in their leadership styles, when it comes to their attitudes toward excellence, most top leaders fall into one of three categories.
The honeymoon CEO
The first is what I call…
Rachel was a new employee at a retail outlet. She was given the requisite week in the training room and then sent out to the sales floor. Part of her job was to restock merchandise that had been returned. She had been on the job but a few days when an item was returned in a damaged box. She…
(LNS Research: Cambridge, MA) -- LNS Research, a technology research and advisory firm focusing on the industrial value chain, has released its Environment, Health & Safety (EHS) Research Library. Comprising research-based best practices, benchmark data, and thought leadership publications,…
I chatted about u-charts for rates last time, and this column was going to be about p-charts for percentage data. These are the two major charts for dealing with count data and are helpful for stratifying a stable section of process performance.
But something recently happened that saddens me and…
I recently read an article about a new dress code being imposed on Walmart employees (effective later this month). The purpose of the new dress code is to help customers more easily identify employees. I don't have a problem with that; given my recent experiences in a few different stores, more…
The regulatory landscape continues to change. One of the quality system approaches defined by regulators and the industry for mitigating risk is corrective and preventive action, better known as CAPA. Companies are often challenged by the CAPA process, which is one of the most important and…
(BioCision: San Rafael, CA) -- BioCision LLC, a developer of advanced thermal technologies for biospecimen handling and standardization, has announced the availability of BioT Temperature Stability Systems, a new portfolio of mobile temperature management products that support transport and…
A recent viewing of a Marx Brothers film caused me to reflect on one of the questions I’m frequently asked: “How do you deal with people who are against lean?”
My stock response is to quote Shigeo Shingo’s advice that “99 percent of objection is cautionary,” that is, people who appear to…
(Verisurf: Anaheim, CA) -- Verisurf Software Inc. announces Verisurf X8 with many new enhancements that make stationery coordinate measuring machines (CMMs), portable CMMs, and 3D scanners more productive for automated inspection, guided assembly, and reverse engineering.
Built on a powerful CAD…
Editor’s note: This article ties in with the new video training series, “Enhancing and Sustaining Lean Improvements While Adding Spark to the Quality Management System” by the author. Click here for more details, or check out the free preview of the series, specifically focused on the topic of…
