All Features
Mark R. Hamel
Some lies you can see a mile away: “The check is in the mail.” “Your table will be ready in a few minutes.” “I didn’t say that.” “This won’t hurt a bit.” Add to this rather long list some lies of the lean variety. I’ve heard more than my fair share.
Often, I just shake off the falsehoods and…
Dottie DeHart
If you don’t think our society is experiencing a communication overload, you really are living under a rock. We can record all of the ups and downs of our personal sagas through blogs. We can call or text anyone at any time. And this communication avalanche doesn’t exist just in our personal…
Technology developed by Oxford University’s classics department could help reveal the secrets of historical documents. A scanning device that uses different wavelengths of light to detect faded or erased ink can be used for analyzing manuscripts and archived documents, as well as for detecting…
Tripp Babbitt
Improvement in any organization is difficult enough, but if you don’t know about these counterintuitive truths, you stand to make things worse.
I had long searched for a way to be able to improve service organizations the same way that W. Edwards Deming did for manufacturing. No approach was…
Tracker Handbook by Art Kietlinski
I’ve had the privilege of using laser trackers on many applications. One of the most interesting and rewarding applications is their use on machine tool calibrations. I have used laser trackers to measure machine tools since the instruments first became a viable solution in the machine tool…
Bruce Hamilton
In 1985, when I transferred to an operations role, I inherited a production-only suggestion program. I recall that we received 16 ideas that year, of which one was awarded $1,600 calculated as a percentage of one year’s savings. The remaining ideas did not make the cut.
So I asked employees…
Stanford News Service
A readily portable miniature microscope weighing less than 2 grams and tiny enough to balance on your fingertip has been developed by Stanford University researchers. The scope is designed to see fluorescent markers, such as dyes, commonly used by medical and biological researchers studying the…
FARO
FARO Technologies, Inc., a global provider of portable measurement and imaging solutions, announces the debut of CAM2 Measure 10, its newest software for the FaroArm, ScanArm, and FARO Laser Tracker. This groundbreaking release marks the first time FARO has included features for collecting and…
Gallup
As of 2008, the war for good jobs has trumped all other leadership activities because it’s been both the cause and the effect of everything else that countries have experienced. This will become even more real in the future as global competition intensifies. If countries fail at creating jobs,…
Reshoring Initiative
The nonprofit Reshoring Initiative enables U.S. companies to close the cost gap with offshore manufacturing by helping each company understand the true cost of offshoring—as well as the total cost of ownership.
When they combine reshoring with cost-saving and customer value-enhancing techniques…
Ron Hiraki
Recently, I was working with a committee of leaders, support staff, and line personnel interested in encouraging and soliciting suggestions from their firefighters in an effort to improve their operations and service. The agency already had an employee suggestion program that worked well, but…
Vision and Control GmbH
Jürgen Tautz is the founder of the BEEgroup, a research entity at the University of Würzburg in Germany that is studying ways to keep bee populations healthy. He also works with the HoneyBee Online Studies (HOBOS) group, which promotes education along with developing an information database on…
Memex Automation Inc.
Radio frequency identification (RFID) has become an indispensable tool that allows manufacturers to see information about assets in real time. Applications built around RFID help report immediate deviations and exceptions to any process. RFID has allowed companies to build authentication and…
IBM
T he annual IBM survey of the daily commute in a cross-section of some of the most economically important international cities reveals a startling dichotomy: While the commute has become a lot more bearable during the past year, drivers’ complaints have spiked.
The Commuter Pain Survey reveals…
ISO
Six Sigma, a data-driven method for improving business and quality performance, has been published as a two-part standard from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Six Sigma was originally developed by Motorola in 1986 to ameliorate manufacturing processes with the goal of 99.…
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Quality control for the series production of home appliances at Bosch and Siemens Hausgeräte GmbH (BSH) in Traunreut, Germany, used to be based on coordinate measuring machines (CMMs). Last year, the tactile measuring system was replaced by optical 3-D measuring technology from Steinbichler…
Patrick Stone
What products will be affected by the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) quality by design (QbD) stipulation, as outlined in its report, “Pharmaceutical Quality for the 21st Century: A Risk-Based Approach”?
It will apply to new marketing authorization applications, new drug applications, Type…
University of Arizona
A University of Arizona (UA) engineering professor may have a solution to a U.S. infrastructure problem that’s growing deadlier each year. The National Gas Technology Institute (GTI) recently published a test report approving a new technology called PipeMedic, which uses carbon and glass…
American Management Association AMA
I
t’s easy to complain about the boss sometimes. Many of us are guilty of the “If I were running things, it would be different!” rant among co-workers. But, it’s not always easy being on top, and the boss likely doesn’t always associate you with blue skies and rainbows, either. Take the initiative…
Mark R. Hamel
I love simple questions. Specifically, I love questions that are ostensibly simple but can spur deep reflection about important stuff… and ultimately improvement.
I like the question, “So what?” Those two words seek to identify the “actionability” of things like performance metrics and…
Steven Ouellette
Yesterday in “Blocking Out the Nuisance, Part One,” we saw the results of an experiment done by That Guy Over There that didn’t control for the environmental variable of humidity. There was a lot of variability in that experiment, so we didn’t see a whole lot of improvement to be made. I also…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
A few years ago I was surfing the Internet on a Friday afternoon and discovered a contest asking amateurs to make TV commercials for a famous ketchup brand. The prize was several thousand dollars, and your commercial would actually run on television. Instantly I had an idea for a romantic…
Johns Hopkins University
A digital dumping ground lies inside most computers, a wasteland where old, rarely used, and unneeded files pile up. Such data can deplete precious storage space, bog down the system's efficiency, and sap its energy. Conventional rubbish trucks can't clear this invisible byte blight. But two…
Steven Ouellette
No, I am not writing about going, “Lalalalala! I can't hear you!” when someone is trying to tell you bad news. In the last couple of articles, we have been exploring how to properly perform research in industry. In this one, we will take a look at how you can handle variables in the real world that…
The Advisory Board Co.
In our current health care environment, hospitals face increasing urgency to strengthen relationships with physicians. Among the concerns are an aging population driving increased demand for health care (as well as a growing Medicare population), reimbursement reductions and changes, and…
