All Features
With a heavy focus on research and development, and innovation, Eltek Valere develops and manufactures advanced electronic power supplies. They were the first company to release and manufacture a high-efficiency power rectifier.
Eltek Valere is the world technology leader in energy conversion,…
John Flaig
A run chart is a graphical display of data over time. Run charts are used to visually analyze processes according to time or sequential order. They are useful in assessing process stability, discovering patterns in data, and facilitating process diagnosis and appropriate improvement actions.…
Management system standards trace their beginnings to the use of simple preventive practices that were developed and used at the beginning of the industrial revolution. These preventive practices included responses to common problems, for example, ensuring changes are communicated to everyone…
William A. Levinson
Professional societies can and should break the costly paradigm that a conference requires the physical presence of all attendees. A conference with a virtual attendance option can increase participation enormously while demonstrating how businesses around the world can reduce travel expenses.…
Patrick Stone
I don’t know about you, but I sleep easier now knowing that our Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared war on unpasteurized milk in the United States [Editors note: also see Fox News, NaturalNews.com]. It’s not enough that the U.S. government is fighting the war on terror (an oxymoron)…
Tripp Babbitt
Charlie Bucket and his adventures in a chocolate factory may be fantasy, but anyone watching realizes that the Oompa-Loompas provide most of the innovation and work at the factory. Yet in today’s service companies, the emphasis is less on the Oompa-Loompas and more on the Willy Wonkas…
American Express
Americans are placing an even greater premium on quality customer service this year. Results from an American Express survey indicate that seven in 10 Americans (70%) are willing to spend an average of 13-percent more with companies they believe provide excellent customer service. This is up…
Akhilesh Gulati
Cooking is not my forte, but I try. I intended my latest concoction to be interesting, new, and easy. It was a soup, made with nontraditional ingredients, and it won rave reviews at a neighborhood potluck. No one could guess all the ingredients, so it won the “unique” dish award. When asked…
In part one of this two-part article, we looked at the history of management system standards. Part two details some of the evidence that supports the assertion that these standards add value to organizations.
A 2008 detailed study published by the Harvard Business School provides real data,…
Dave Anderson
Every leader tells a white lie every now and then, right? Perhaps—but that doesn’t make it OK. White lies can do serious damage to your reputation and can lead to much bigger issues down the road. Read on to see why cleaning up your act can help save your business.
Picture this: It’s 4:30 p.m.…
The QA Pharm
The truism, “Quality, cost, and speed—pick two,” was often quoted throughout my career: meaning a production company could not achieve all three ideals and therefore must choose which two out of three ideals to concentrate on;
• Sacrifice quality with low cost and high speed
• Sacrifice cost…
When the Japanese word kaizen entered the language of quality improvement via Masaaki Imai’s seminal book, Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success, (McGraw-Hill/Irwin, 1986), the author defined kaizen as “ongoing improvement involving everyone.” In a 2011 video posted on YouTube, Imai…
Bill Kalmar
Most of us, I’m confident, have some rather significant events in our lives that bring joy and excitement. It could be marriage, the birth of a child, perhaps a first grandchild, a new home, or retirement. Somewhere in all those events many of us will celebrate our 50th high-school reunion. That…
Duke University
Duke University electrical engineers have developed a man-made material that they say literally allows them to manipulate light at will.
They say that the results of their latest proof-of-concept experiments could lead to the replacement of electrical components with those based on optical…
Mark R. Hamel
First, the introduction. This post was earnestly written by my friend, Jeff Fuchs. He’s the director of the Maryland World Class Consortia, a lean nonprofit assistance organization in the mid-Atlantic. He’s also president of Neovista Consulting, which works with large and small organizations on…
Mike Richman
From the minute I arrived on site, I knew that this would be a Coordinate Metrology Systems Conference unlike any other. First of all, it was in Phoenix… in July. So, the 100-plus-degree temperature wasn’t unexpected; the humidity, on the other hand, was a bit of a surprise. The evening preceding…
Stewart Anderson
There has been a lot of press in recent years about the importance of the “learning organization.” While many authors have explored the idea of a learning organization from the perspective of how learning can be enabled and shared, the economic impact of learning, and its resulting effect on…
Davis Balestracci
Finally, the medical industry is putting aside its “We’re medicine; we’re different” mindset and taking a more practical look at quality improvement. Bravo! Although an element of physician culture remains convinced that improvement is all about outcomes and double-blind clinical trials, the…
More than ever, businesses need ways to improve their operations to better gain, serve, and retain customers while reducing costs and improving margins. Implementing management systems and attaining third-party accredited certification can help businesses achieve success on all of these fronts…
Donald J. Wheeler
In part one we found that the skewness and kurtosis parameters characterize the tails of a probability model rather than the central portion, and that because of this, probability models with the same shape parameters will only be similar in overall shape, not identical. However, since software…
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have discovered a new relation among electric and magnetic fields and differences in temperature, which may lead to more efficient thermoelectric devices that convert heat into electricity or electricity into heat.
“In the search for new sources of…
Gallup
Empire building is the pinnacle and most extreme level of the pyramid of bureaucracy. It occurs when one group attempts to regain or enhance its self-sufficiency by encroachment or by expanding its span of control even when that is not in the best interest of the organization. There are several…
Paul Naysmith
While playing her role as Maria Kutschera in The Sound of Music, Julie Andrews once sang about her favorite things, among which were geese flying with the moon on their wings, doorbells, and brown paper packages. Remembering these things was how Maria would distract herself when times were bad…
Donald J. Wheeler
With the use of statistical software, many individuals are being exposed to more than just measures of location and dispersion. In addition to the average and standard deviation, they often find some funny numbers labeled as skewness and kurtosis. Since these numbers appear automatically, it is…
MIT News
The migration of manufacturing from the United States to Asia could be having a significant impact on which advanced technologies are commercialized. Specifically, there is evidence that the shift in manufacturing is curtailing the development of emerging technologies in areas such as…
