All Features
Kimber Evans
Leadership by example is probably the hardest part of managing a group of people, although to date it remains the most effective management strategy. If you want your employees to work for you, then you need to work for them.
A great way to start is to find out what motivates them. Not…
Bill Kalmar
Back when I was employed by a Michigan bank in the auditing department and responsible for investigating fraud, both internal and external, I was never in want of work. It seems there’s no limit to the number of people who are hellbent on swindling others. After several years of uncovering crooks…
Steven Ouellette
Throughout the last couple of articles, I have explained and illustrated that understanding the random sampling distribution (RSD) of a statistic is key to understanding the entire basis of inferential statistics. Which is just a fancy way of saying “avoiding career-terminating decisions.” This…
Mike Richman
If you missed the news story “Baldrige Program Chooses New Name to Reflect Its Mission” published earlier this week in Quality Digest Daily, allow me to reiterate. What was formerly known as the “Baldrige National Quality Program,” the program behind the Baldrige Award, will now be referred to as…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
A favorite media lament these days concerns the lack of high-school graduates prepared to go forth into design, engineering, or technology. That’s why we have seen so much push recently on STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) programs for our schools. Industry is clamoring for…
The QA Pharm
We hear much about the importance of listening to customers and meeting their needs. Lean Six Sigma devotees say that metrics from the customer’s vantage point are at the center of their philosophy.
Many pharmaceutical companies embed their high view of the professional community and patients…
Direct Dimensions Inc.
“The Awakening” is a 70-foot sculpture by J. Seward Johnson that depicts a man struggling to free himself from the earth. The installation, which has been a landmark for nearly three decades in Washington D.C.’s Hains Point, is comprised of five aluminum body parts: a right foot, a left knee, a…
100 Customer Service Tips by Larry Williams
Editor’s note: This is the first of a series of columns from Larry Williams, author of the soon-to-be-released book Customer Service A to Z. In this series, Williams gives us 100 tips on what employees can do to look better and perform better in the eyes of their customers. These are actions and…
Aly Fields
Editor’s note: Several weeks ago, a young woman by the name of Aly Fields contacted us wanting to learn more about “quality” in general and Six Sigma in particular. A recent college graduate, Aly had taken it upon herself to earn a Six Sigma Yellow Belt. Why? Read her own words below. What…
Mark R. Hamel
I recently experienced the pain associated with coaching a team with poor chemistry. It happened within a kaizen event team, so the pain was finite, being that a kaizen event is a rapid improvement of a limited process area. It was, however, an opportunity to learn a few team-formulation lessons,…
Marvin Marshall
Leadership would be easy if it weren’t for those we lead. As any leader or manager knows, getting people to actually want to do the tasks you need them to do can be a challenge. People will not fully commit to a task unless they’re motivated to desire your goals and objectives or the reason behind…
Sal Lucido
Figure 1: Closed-loop process for managing regulatory compliance
In Part I, Part II, and Part III of this compliance series, I have described the benefits of using a closed-loop process for managing regulatory compliance (illustrated in figure 1).
Readers of this series…
Donald J. Wheeler
In my August column, “How to Turn Capability Indexes Into Dollars,” and my September column, “The Gaps Between Performance and Potential,” I showed how to convert capability indexes into the effective cost of production and use (ECP&U), and how to use these costs to quantify the payback for…
Donald Jasurda
The value of ongoing maintenance and prevention is no secret. We know we can save a lot of anguish and money by taking preventive actions today and every day to avoid major problems later. This principle also applies to the quality of the products designed each day by engineers.
The “…
Donald Jasurda
The value of ongoing maintenance and prevention is no secret. We know we can save a lot of anguish and money by taking preventive actions today and every day to avoid major problems later. This principle also applies to the quality of the products designed each day by engineers.
The “…
Thomas R. Cutler
Burger King’s advertising jingle during the 1970s was, “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce. Special orders don’t upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way!”
In late August, Sarah E. Needleman profiled in the Wall Street Journal that entrepreneurial manufacturers are experiencing…
Tripp Babbitt
Systems thinking requires a massive change in the way organizations design and manage work. Old thinking must be flushed out so that new and better thinking can replace it. The outdated functional design of organizations according to the type of work performed needs an overhaul. Frederick Taylor,…
Davis Balestracci
I attended a talk in 2006 given by a world leader in quality that contained a bar graph summary ranking 21 U.S. counties from best to worst (see figure 1). The counties were ranked from 1 to 21 for 10 different indicators, and these ranks were summed to get a total score for each county (e.g.,…
Mark Graban
Lean thinkers see the waste in health care when they are at the hospital gemba. I think this is true whether you are a lean person who is new to health care or if you’re a long-time hospital person who has learned lean. Experts (doctors) ranging from John Toussaint to Patricia Gabow to Don Berwick…
Today’s entrepreneurs and business leaders must tread a tightrope through a universe of distractions. Information pours into our brains in a relentless, never-ceasing deluge. A rising army of companies across the globe competes for our customers using “new and improved” business models and…
Bill Kalmar
While watching the local and national news recently, I hearkened back to the 1950s when TV news was void of all the theatrics and proud puffing. Today we hear that station WBUZZ got the “exclusive report” on the upcoming storm, or WGRIM indicates that the station has the “exclusive report” on…
Jon Miller
I am in Japan helping to lead one of our lean manufacturing benchmarking trips. What I took away from the debriefing from yesterday’s lean benchmarking visit was a series of lessons on how to sustain a lean culture after 10 years. The company we visited had made a few defining choices, played its…
CEED
Students of CEED—an Australia-based program that links university engineering students with industry and government companies to complete specific on-site projects as part of their studies—are contributing significantly to the success of manufacturing projects, including those focused on making…
Manufacturing is getting easier in many ways, at least as far as the technology is concerned. For example, machine tools are simpler to program and operate, rapid prototyping means that product development is faster and cheaper than ever, and user-friendly CAD software may even negate the need for…
Davis Balestracci
During my recent travels, I have noticed an increasing tendency toward formalizing organizational quality improvement (QI) efforts into a separate silo. Even more disturbing is an increasing (and excruciating) formality. Expressions such as “saving dark-green dollars” are creeping into…
