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Editor’s note: Distinguished statistician and essayist David Kerridge passed away last month in Aberdeen, Scotland, at the age of 81. The former head of statistics at Aberdeen University, Kerridge was a leader in the British Deming Association and lectured with W. Edwards Deming.
There is not one…
There is an ever-growing need to transform supply chain management. More companies are feeling the pressure to produce high-quality products at low costs. To produce these products efficiently and effectively, companies must clearly express their needs to their suppliers; they must work to improve…
Momentum is a very powerful thing. In physics, momentum = mass × velocity. The cool thing about momentum is that the faster an object is moving, the harder it is to stop. This is also true for any project that you are working on.
Accomplishing project tasks (gaining “mass”) in a quick and…
At the invitation of our friend and colleague, Margaret (Meg) Wheatley, my wife, Carole, and I just returned from a conference called “Resilience: Strength Through Compassion and Connection.” I want to share some thoughts about the conference theme and I want to add strength through celebration…
Earlier this month an ex-CIA employee and whistleblower, Edward Snowden, exposed the federal government’s 6-year old, clandestine initiative, referred to internally as PRISM, a covert data-gathering program that began in 2007 as a corollary to the Patriot Act of 2001.
This White House-directed,…
Recently, a reader wrote me to suggest that rather than trying to encourage someone, a better way to motivate them is to issue a challenge. So, I felt challenged to write about it.
Whenever I think of laying down a challenge, I think of a classic story about Charles Schwab, the magnate of…
The idea of the garage as an incubator for startup businesses is as American as hot dogs, baseball, and apple pie (although I like apple cobbler better). From Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniack, Dave Hewlett, and Bill Packard to your next-door neighbor who always seems to be out there…
(Costa Mesa, CA) -- The ATOS Core series is the newest addition to the ATOS product line of advanced 3D scanners engineered by optical metrology systems expert GOM in Braunschweig, Germany. The ATOS Core is truly a mini-powerhouse. It fuses the latest 3D scanning technology and intelligent…
Double a city’s population, and its economic productivity goes up 130 percent. MIT researchers think they know why.
In 2010, in the journal Nature, a pair of physicists at the Santa Fe Institute showed that when the population of a city doubles, economic productivity goes up by an average of 130…
Whether you are a shelf stocker at Walmart, a second-year associate at a consulting company, or an equity analyst at an investment bank, you may feel that you are not adequately compensated for the work you do; in other words, you are underpaid. But underpaid relative to what? How do employers…
Manufacturing in the United States isn’t healing as fast as we’d like or as quickly as we deserve. On that, most of us can agree. But it sure seems like we’re seeing a steady stream of misguided understanding among much of the economic and academic elite. They often seem to miss what a strong…
Editor’s note: This article continues the series exploring structured innovation using the TRIZ methodology, a problem-solving, analysis, and forecasting tool derived from studying patterns of invention found in global patent data.
The monthly council meetings continued as different members shared…
Six Sigma evolved during the time of an economic boom. It was the mid-1980s, and companies had begun to feel the effects of stiffer competition. The theory of constraints (TOC) was losing its luster, while the customer began to play a key role for a product or service. Organizations were trying to…
With ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 currently being revised by ISO technical committees, Mike James, the managing director of LRQA, and David Lawson, LRQA’s technical director, talked about the progress to date on both standards as well as what the revisions could mean for the market at large.
David,…
As an enthusiast of LinkedIn’s group discussions, I have seen and contributed to a fair number of discussions on risk within project management. One thing that strikes me is how the understanding of risk differs depending on the context within a project, and how often these differences lead to…
Recently, Creaform’s Metrology Services division was contacted by a French electric power-generation company to inspect a set of hydraulic penstocks, or water channels. The targeted installation was suspected to be deformed after its 50 years of operation. Pressure changes, corrosion, temperature…
Arecent online story in TIME magazine, “A Better Return on Investment” profiled the U.S. Army’s Fort Stewart in Georgia, focusing on the base’s Baldrige journey. Baldrige staff and stakeholders that I’ve heard from have varying opinions of whether the article has a negative or neutral spin.…
Paul Sly, general manager of CSGtech, an Australasian supplier of seals and gaskets, stresses the importance of quality governance when sourcing from China.
A manufacturing component specialist, Sly says that even minute quality-control problems can have extensive consequences for manufacturers…
There is much to be learned from history. Lately, I’ve been researching Frederick Winslow Taylor and scientific management. Better known as Taylorism, scientific management was popular from the early 1900s to the 1930s. The lessons and future impact of his efforts still drives how we design and…
Steve Bennish writes about business and economics for the Dayton Daily News. He’s also the author of the 89-page, self-published book, Scrappers: Dayton Ohio and America Turn to Scrap. It’s not an easy book to look at. It’s a sobering, disgusting, gut-wrenching thing to see—the photographic…
For far too many organizations, it’s never been harder to stay ahead, to achieve and sustain results, and to balance short- and long-term success. Organizational survival means doing more with less, standing out from competitors and unlocking value—all to win the global contest for customers,…
(Keyence Corp. of America: Itasca, IL) -- Building on its extensive microscope lineup, Keyence Corp. has released a new multipurpose microscope. The VHX-700F allows users to leverage some of the advanced functions of the VHX Series, such as depth composition and 3D display, while offering the same…
Editor’s note: This continues Jack Dunigan’s series about unsung heroes in the workplace, and the 16 traits they all share.
With nothing to do but wait while we stood patiently in line at the local post office, we happened to see that there was but one “If It Fits It Ships” box in the rack. For…
The shell game called the federal budget added another nut recently as media reports revealed that during the last 20 years, approximately $1 billion in fees paid by patent applicants has been diverted from its proper use at the United States Patent Office (USPTO).
Critics argue that, as a self-…
A while back my colleague Jim Frost wrote about applying statistics to decisions typically left to expert judgment; I was reminded of his post this week when I came across a new research study that takes a statistical technique commonly used in one discipline, and applies it in a new way.
The…
