All Features
Timothy F. Bednarz
T eams are created to tackle difficult issues and tough organizational problems. Invariably, the solutions that teams develop result in active transformations that disrupt the status quo and personal agendas—including, sometimes, removing people from their positions of power. Consequently, there is…
Michelle LaBrosse
It has been said, “Teaching is the best form of learning.” When was the last time you put on your teaching hat to help someone else? When you take time to help others, you not only do them a favor but you also improve your own skills in the process of helping them with theirs.
Part of being a good…
Joanna Leigh
To continually improve operations, satisfy customers, and successfully achieve universally recognized accreditations such as the National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program (Nadcap), it is important to have a company culture that is focused on quality.
Too often, the quality…
MIT News
Complex systems inhabit a “gray world” of partial failures: While a system may continue to operate as a whole, bits and pieces inevitably degrade. Over time, these small failures can add up to a single catastrophic failure, incapacitating the system.
“Think about your car,” says Olivier de Weck,…
Miriam Boudreaux
There you are, in the middle of an internal or external audit, and the auditor asks you a question that you are truly not sure about. What do you do?
1. Hit the panic button. 2. Ask the audience for a hint. 3. Phone a friend.
Well, there isn’t a studio audience, and chances are the auditor didn’t…
Umberto Tunesi
I recently met a good friend who works as a junior member of a cabin crew for a well-known airline. I won’t disclose its name or hers for obvious reasons; you’ll see why as you read on.
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Suffice to say that working conditions for flight…
Britt Reid
When it comes to statistical process control (SPC), it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and forget what you are really trying to accomplish. The whole point is to make better products for the customer. To do that, you have to perform the same exact processes over and over across every production…
Ryan E. Day
Edison, Bell, Carver, Ford. Names synonymous with ingenuity and perseverance. These people inspire me to listen to that small voice that guides and goads my intuition. That voice is rarely wrong, but my translation of intuition into action sometimes leads me to bite off a tad more than I can chew.…
Blom
In recent years the demand for high-accuracy laser data within the infrastructure sector has increased. The market has discovered the benefits of using both existing off-the-shelf laser data, and ordering new laser data-capture systems suited for high-accuracy planning, building, and maintenance…
Andrew Sobel
We’ve all experienced moments when we feel at a loss for words and wish we had been able to think of the right thing to say. Regardless of how tough the situation and conversation gets, no interaction is ever completely lost. You can transform tough conversations—and the relationships they affect—…
Earlier this year, Air Academy Associates helped a large multinational client assess its business improvement capabilities. Only 70 percent of the business leaders there believed quality initiatives were sustainable, while 100 percent of those responsible for the improvement believed the company…
Mike Richman
In recent weeks, you have likely heard a lot of chatter about various conventions, conferences, trade shows, and expos. (A rose by any other name....) If you’re sitting there thinking, “Yeah, and you’re one of the chatterboxes,” I’ll respond, “Guilty as charged.” We have frequently discussed trade…
Geomagic
Geomagic, a developer and global provider of 3-D software for capturing, creating, and inspecting digital models of physical objects, has acquired Sensable Technology Inc.’s 3-D design and haptics businesses. Sensable Technology, of Wilmington, Massachusetts, is a leading developer of volumetric…
Kevin Rudy
If you like baseball pitching statistics, then you’ve loved the month of June. On the first of the month, Johan Santana pitched the first no-hitter in Mets history. Then a week later, the Seattle Mariners used six different pitchers to do the same thing, which tied the Major League Baseball record…
Bill Kalmar
Every now and then an unexpected encounter with an unknown person can affect your thought processes and make you rethink your own mortality. Such an incident occurred several weeks ago at a Panera Bread store in Chesterfield, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. It was on this day that my grandson,…
Rip Stauffer
I recently closed the doors of my own consulting company on the prairie in Minnesota and headed back into the wild, wacky, wonderful world of larger consulting groups, joining a group in Northern Virginia. One of the consequences of that transition was that I was unable to meet a couple of speaking…
API Services
This past month API Services and New River Kinematics teamed up for a historic preservation project at St. Luke’s Church and Museum in Smithfield, Virginia. Together, they provided a full building scan and collected point cloud data to keep records for the church and its ongoing restoration.
For…
IBM
The Charleston Police Department in South Carolina is working with IBM to assist the city’s more than 400 police officers to more accurately evaluate and forecast crime patterns. The department is using predictive analytics software to better allocate its resources and identify criminal hot spots…
Four-dimensional computed tomography, or 4-D CT, is the latest development in the realm of industrial X-ray inspection for the nondestructive testing industry. In the simplest of terms, 4-D CT is a 3-D X-ray computed tomography process that captures movement over a period of time.
Like most other…
Akhilesh Gulati
An optimist would say a glass is half-full, while a pessimist would say it’s half-empty. Someone with a mind for physics would say, “The volume of this cylinder is equally composed of a colorless, odorless liquid and a colorless, odorless gas. Thus, the cylinder is neither full nor empty.”
With…
NIST
A powerful color-based imaging technique is making the jump from remote sensing to the operating room—and a team of scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have taken steps to ensure it performs as well when discerning oxygen-depleted tissues and cancer cells in the…
Ron Kaufman
You start your morning running late and sprint into your local coffee shop for your morning cup of joe. As you breathlessly place your order, you notice the barista doesn’t smile at you. She utters a flat, “Here you go” as she hands you the steaming cup. “Why didn’t she put the cardboard sleeve…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Right, let me get this straight. The uncomfortable process of air travel, bad enough with its crowding, overpriced food, and seating melees, will soon be intensified by a new airport humiliation: asking a hologram for help. And we think old ladies are odd talking to their cats.
Beginning next…
Steven Ouellette
Why is improving quality so important? Why not spend our money on something else in the business? I know it seems a little odd to ask this, especially to readers of Quality Digest, but could those not initiated into the mysteries of the quality gurus be right? Is getting it “out the door” the only…
Mary Beth Edmond, Jonathan Flanders
Ensuring patient safety is one of the most vital and challenging roles in health care. Public reporting of preventable medical errors has forced hospitals to report their medical error numbers accurately and to improve the quality of care. Organizations such as the Institute of Medicine recommend…
