All Features
Alan Nicol
Often it is the simple and basic question that unlocks the mystery of our business or process problems. What’s more, we don’t have to be trained experts in process improvement techniques to ask the all-important, all-powerful dumb questions.
I was listening to a friend and colleague describe the…
Kyle Toppazzini
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “We don’t have the data for this. I guess we’ll need to make an educated guess.” In the lean Six Sigma engagements I work on, my response to this is, “Let’s create the data.” Without fail, I get the deer-in-the-headlights stare for a couple of seconds…
Mike Roberts
The issue of ensuring quality in manufacturing is eternal. What changes are the complexities of these issues and how decision makers respond to them. Market-leading companies are developing a model of operational excellence that aligns financial and operational objectives with the right mix of…
Erik Martinsen
When investigating a statistical process control (SPC) system, it can be difficult to build a business case for it. As a quality engineer, the value in having easy access to data seems obvious, but this can be a hard sell to an organization focused on cost and payback opportunities for capital…
Michael Causey
The Cold War may be over, but apparently spying is still a growth industry. The latest spy-craft news comes from the seemingly staid Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which appears to have more George Smiley and John le Carré types than we’d ever imagined.
According to reports in The New York…
Charlyne Meinhard
You can hire the right employees for your business, but if your managers don’t manage them well, those capable employees may wind up messing up rather than stepping up.
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Jen and Tim are managers of two totally different functions within…
University of Michigan
Emerging nations, long seen as a source of low-cost services such as manufacturing and IT support, now are home to a new breed of multinational company. These new players, stepping forward from the background and building global brands, pose a new and serious threat to established multinational…
Akhilesh Gulati
Starting from scratch, Gil had slowly built a small business and was running it quite successfully. He was a professional at heart: He gained the confidence of customers and prospects, met their expectations, negotiated better prices, and provided personalized service. Life was good. Things were…
Edward D. Hess
Innovation is a popular buzzword in the business world today. Everyone wants to be the next Apple or Facebook, revolutionizing their products and services by creating the next iPad or Zappos-style service model. But they don’t. They can’t.
Most companies pump out the same old gadgets and services,…
Knowledge at Wharton
It was 2003, exactly 56 years after Ole Kirk Christiansen bought the first plastic injection molding machine in Denmark to start manufacturing plastic bricks for building-block toys. On the surface, or so it seemed, the LEGO Group had done everything right over that time period.
The company was an…
Matthew Littlefield
Executives today are making quality management a focal point in their operations and as a result, the role of the chief quality officer (CQO) is gaining ground in both popularity and relevance. Couple emerging technologies, such as enterprise quality management software, with the task of changing a…
Craig Cochran
President Obama was recently quoted in a CBS news article as saying that if he could change anything about his presidency, it would be to tell more stories. That got me thinking. Could “storyteller” really be a legitimate role for a leader?
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Matthew E. May
In a business climate where only the best companies survive and thrive, one thing is clear: You must avoid the stupid stuff. You must eliminate the things that leave customers and employees scratching their heads, frustrated, and mystified.
The problem is that every company, no matter what size,…
Jim Frost
Statistics can be unintuitive. What’s a large difference? What’s a large sample size? When is something statistically significant? You might think you know, based on experience and intuition, but you really don’t know until you actually run the analysis. You must run the proper statistical tests to…
Jake Dylik
You won’t hurt RUTH the robot’s feelings if you disagree with her, but it will be difficult to prove your point, given that her opinions are backed by mathematical evidence.
For example, the robotized unit for tactility and haptics (RUTH), which arrived in North America earlier this year, has…
Michelle LaBrosse
Do you remember when you were younger and the excitement you had when you learned something new? That feeling when you were riding your bike and suddenly realized there was no hand holding onto your seat anymore, and you were zooming down the street all by yourself? Or the thrill of picking up…
NIST
In the name of science and to study firefighting methods, members of the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) spent much of the first two weeks in July setting fire to 20 abandoned townhouses on Governors Island, about a kilometer from the southern tip of Manhattan.
In a series of “live burn”…
Joel Smith
Fifty-seven seconds. After more than 2,000 miles and nearly three weeks of grueling cycling, Cadel Evans needed 57 seconds to catch the leader. And he would have to do it riding alone for only 26.4 miles.
He gained 2 1/2 minutes.
When you watch the Tour de France, you realize that amid the extreme…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
The next hatbox I pulled off the top shelf of the closet nearly tipped me off the ladder. It was the weight that surprised me; it was far too heavy for just a hat. As I regained my balance, I wondered why this one weighed more than the others. I set it on the vanity and started untying the strings…
Paul Naysmith
It’s two days before the quality audit, and as the Texans say, “This isn’t my first rodeo.” My team has done an outstanding job to help me and the production team prepare. I’m at my desk looking over the auditor’s schedule and audit scope, and finalizing in my head the conversations I’ll have to…
Tim Lozier
In part one of this series, we looked at the various challenges associated with supplier quality management, and how these challenges can inhibit an organization while building a system to interact with its supply chain. Now let’s look at the ways technology can help overcome these challenges.…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
One of the most important events I remember experiencing years ago as part of my MBA was an introductory conversation I had with J. B. Black, Jr., a dean at Wright State University. One of the things I learned from Black was that a most important part of my forthcoming job as a manager was to “make…
Talion Edwards
Let me start with a confession: I’m an imposter in the metrology community. My background is in the design engineering community—well-meaning folks who don’t quite grasp the complexities of the manufacturing process and the measurement systems that support it.
Measurement people know the…
Ryan E. Day
I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop, but at 36,000 feet inside a Boeing 747, things are pretty cozy, and the guy across the aisle from me wasn’t exactly shy. He was having what sounded like a not so pleasant conversation with a client. It seems he began a transaction based on some assumptions that may not…
Sara Ebright
Have you ever walked through a museum and noticed a sculpture that you just wanted to reach out and touch? Of course you didn’t risk it because the first rule of museums is that you can look, but you don’t touch. But your desire to reach for certain pieces may have been exactly the reaction that…
