All Features
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
Ask almost anyone what is the No. 1 requirement for Six Sigma success, and he will say: top leadership commitment. It’s easy to look at Six Sigma successes like General Electric (GE) under Jack Welch and use them as evidence of the power of leadership commitment. The belief is so often repeated…
MIT News
There’s good news and bad news about the United States’ ongoing deficit and debt problems, according to high-profile economists who discussed the subject recently at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
The good news is that the country’s long-term debt is a less pressing economic…
Paul Naysmith
My wife and I were waiting near the departure gate at a miniature regional airport in Louisiana when the announcement blared: “Due to weather in Atlanta, your scheduled flight will not be disembarking for 15 minutes.” Dismayed by the news, we exchanged worried looks and prepared for the worst.…
ISO
A series of groundbreaking case studies by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and partner organizations shows that implementing standards can provide economic benefits from between 0.5 and 4 percent of companies’ annual sales revenues. The studies are based on the…
Mike Micklewright
Igor Centric, CEO of Dysfuncompany of America Inc., is lolling behind his desk with his legs crossed on top of it. He is staring up at the ceiling with his hands clasped behind his head.
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Igor has just called Miyagi, holder of a thin…
Mark R. Hamel
Reflection, or hansei in Japanese, is a critical part of lean. Without purposeful reflection it is difficult to improve our value streams, processes, or ourselves. Socrates’ oft-referenced, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” rings true within lean. But may I be so bold to add a twist?…
Quality Digest
1.
Wild craziness
No one knows diddly here
Going homeward bound
2.
We have an issue!
Looking for the root cause?
Go to the gemba!
3.
5 Whys finds root cause
Corrective action needed
Must sustain changes
4.
My quality plan
Seven kids and wife at hand
Life is paradise
…
Michael Causey
Under pressure from all sides, the beleaguered Food and Drug Administration (FDA) keeps announcing new reorganization initiatives, name changes, and all sorts of stuff that would be funny if it was scripted by the same team handling Steve Carell’s departure from The Office and the ushering in…
Bill Kalmar
We are told that St. Peter has the keys to the kingdom of heaven, and that he stands in front of a wrought iron gate only allowing in certain people who have lived exemplary lives. I suspect that he has only one large key (maybe a skeleton key—heh, heh), unlike the millions of Americans who…
William A. Levinson
Frederick the Great stated that a general who tries to defend everything defends nothing. The same principle applies to business performance metrics: He who tries to measure everything measures nothing because it is impossible to focus effectively on “everything.”
The Defense Acquisition…
American Customer Satisfaction Index ACSI
Customer satisfaction across three durable goods industries stalled in 2011, with the majority of companies staying almost exactly where they were in 2010, according to a recent report by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The report covers customer satisfaction with personal…
H. James Harrington
China is blessed with an abundance of hard-working, conscientious, and low-paid laborers who are driven to improve their living conditions. The result of their efforts has been a rapid and steady increase in production capabilities and demand for China-built products. Contrary to the approach…
Akhilesh Gulati
During a recent strategic planning session with a county’s leadership council, the participants were asked about their vision for their departments as they worked on a template for the strategic plan. Although there were many responses, one that stood out clearly came from the chief of one of…
Argonne National Laboratory
Perhaps one of Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest paintings has never been reprinted in books of his art. Known as the Battle of Anghiari, it was abandoned and then lost—until a determined Italian engineer gave the art world hope that it still existed, and a physicist from the U.S. Department of…
Mike Micklewright
Those who are cynical toward an ISO 9001-based quality system often ask sarcastic questions similar to, but often more vulgar than, the one in the title of this article. These rude anti-ISOs just don’t understand us quality folks.
The issue of how much should a company document keeps rearing…
Duke University
Outsourcing service providers are taking steps to diversify service offerings to stay competitive, according to new research from The Center for International Business Education and Research’s (CIBER) Offshoring Research Network (ORN) at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and PwC US.…
FDA
The Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) international program has logged nearly 75,000 hits to its web pages on the new food safety law, as foreign companies that export food to the United States scramble to learn how the law affects them.
“A lot of our foreign offices are being deluged with…
Donald J. Wheeler
All charts for count-based data are charts for individual values. Regardless of whether we are working with a count or a rate, we obtain one value per time period and want to plot a point every time we get a value. This is why four specialty charts for count-based data had been developed before…
American Association of Advanced Metrology
Manufacturing and metrology leaders have announced a new certification body establishing performance standards for service providers and equipment manufacturers in the rapidly expanding digital metrology industry.
The American Association of Advanced Metrology (AAAM) “encourages and…
Ryan E. Day
Now I don’t mean to brag, but I make a mean filet mignon... usually. The preparation always involves a good soaking in my secret marinade recipe (McCormick’s and red wine) then grilling on the BBQ turned up to its “ludicrous” setting. So why the occasional extra char in the char-broil?
Two…
Kimberly Egan
Last May, the director of the vegetable research institute at the Qingdao Academy of Agricultural Science in Qingdao, China, told the media that the Chinese government does not encourage farmers to use plant hormones on watermelons because watermelons “are very sensitive.”
The Chinese have learned…
Bill Kalmar
Back in the Dark Ages when I was growing up, people traveling by plane considered it a privilege and a social event. As such, airline travelers dressed accordingly. Men wore suits and perhaps a tie, while ladies wore dresses. Even children adopted society’s norms back then and wore outfits…
Cognex Corp.
In the not-so-distant past, manufacturers using laser scanners and conventional area-scan image-based readers had to put up with inherent technology limitations. Laser scanners, for example, have a hard time reading bar codes through plastic shrink-wrap, bar codes printed on flexible material…
Michelle LaBrosse
When a wedding invitation comes in the mail, my gut instinct is to leave it in the mailbox and have the mailman take it away to someone else who might actually want to attend. This is my thought for about two seconds, before logic sets in and I realize that wedding guests are not so replaceable…
MIT News
Ask someone with her hands in her lap to pick up a coffee mug on the table she’s sitting at, and she’ll extract her hand from under the table and stretch her arm out toward the mug. Instruct an autonomous robot to perform the same feat, and it may think for a few seconds, zigzag its robotic…
