All Features
MIT News
Conventional wisdom among managers holds that employees helping each other can only be good for a company. Accordingly, firms spend money, time, and effort to promote what’s known as “knowledge transfer.” Policies range from the popular (e.g., lavish company retreats) to the maligned (switching…
Paul Naysmith
If W. Edwards Deming could see what you’re doing, he’d punch you in the face. OK, not really. He may have been brutally honest in his lectures, but I don’t think he ever punched anyone. However, he would have plenty to say about how often one business copies (I believe the term today is “benchmarks…
MIT News
Recommendation algorithms are a vital part of doing business on the Internet. They provide the basis of the targeted advertisements that account for most commercial sites’ revenues, and of services such as Pandora, the radio site that tailors song selections to listeners’ declared preferences. The…
The Conference Board
According to a new report released by The Conference Board, companies need to incorporate risks from workforce and people-management issues more fully into their overall risk-management structures. Based on a global survey of executives at 161 leading companies, “Managing Human Capital Risk: A Call…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
I saw six people huddled on the sidewalk in front of me; through their legs I saw what looked like a body on the ground. I rushed over to see what was going on. I saw a man with a bloody gash on his head; he appeared to be unconscious. I pushed through and started checking him out using my Boy…
FDA
As headlines from Europe implicate tainted vegetable sprouts in more than 4,000 illnesses and dozens of deaths, American consumers may wonder, “Could that happen here?”
The United States has had its own headline-grabbing outbreaks from contaminated vegetables—such as lettuce in 2010, peppers in…
Steven Ouellette
Last month I showed you a process to use to save money, time, and sanity when doing any type of research, including applied problem solving and quality improvement (“Don’t Design the Experiment Until You Research the Process”), However, I didn’t have room to go through the steps to show you how…
Bruce Hamilton
Significant digits, the number of digits to the right of a decimal point that are warranted by the accuracy of the means of measurement, are a critical part of scientific investigation. In developing products and services, the concept is essential. For example, how many products have failed to “…
A surprising (and eclectic) number of scientists, mathematicians, and astronomers have some form of measurement named after them. We found close to 100 names; no doubt there are more. For this Quality Digest Daily contest, you must match the names of all 20 of these measurement…
Microscan
Machine vision systems rely on quality images for quality output. High-quality images enable a system to accurately interpret the information extracted from an object under inspection, resulting in reliable, repeatable system performance. The quality of the image acquired in any vision…
Productivity Press
Of the 100 companies named to Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s largest companies in 1956, only 29 of them remain on that list today. Many lost their way because they failed to recognize the changes taking place, or were too big to react quickly enough to shifting market conditions.…
Paul Naysmith
I love films. I just love that cinematic experience. It’s the best experience you can have in a darkened room when someone has spent $200 million on two hours of entertainment. I often truly can’t believe how creative and brilliant some minds are. Do you remember the last movie you saw and walked…
Joseph A. DeFeo
In the U.S. health care system, quality and safety have developed into strategically important issues. Progress is being made at the local level, even if it is slow and doesn’t get much of the public’s attention. Health care improvement has certainly come a long way since the early 1990s, when an…
NIST
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a tunable superconducting circuit on a chip that can place a single microwave photon (a particle of light) in two frequencies, or colors, at the same time.
This curious “superposition,” a hallmark of the quantum…
Akhilesh Gulati
Wanting to be known for his hospitality in the neighborhood, a restaurant owner advertised take-out Thanksgiving turkey dinners, ready to go. With the holiday coming up, Joe planned to have friends over for dinner and decided to take advantage of the offer. When he called in his order, he was…
John Flaig
Story update 7/08/2011: We corrected an error in Figure 2, and in the section preceded by "Expressed symbolically for a stable process...".
Two topics that have generated significant interest and frequent comments are, “Is normality required for control charts?” and “You need to estimate the tail…
Daniel Brown
Traditionally, 3-D dimensional inspection was performed in the quiet, stable, spotless, and controlled environment of quality labs. But during the past few decades, manufacturers have been increasingly interested in measuring devices that are both comprehensive in scope and portable. Nowadays,…
Michael Feuer
If you’ve ever watched NBC’s The Office, you know the show makes hilarious use of business-world stereotypes. Granted, the personalities, quirks, and antics of the employees of the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Co. are taken to extremes, but we find them funny largely because they’re true. We know…
Michael Causey
Well, this is getting interesting. For the past several months, we’ve had relatively partisan folks on each side of the medical device industry vs. the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) debate saying either the 510(k) premarket notification process wasn’t doing so badly (the FDA), or that it was…
Frost and Sullivan
Since 2009, there has been a recovery in the white-light scanner market, and the manufacturing industry and metrology vendors acknowledge this. However, research indicates that there is still uncertainty among end-user spending.
White-light scanner end-users are increasingly becoming aware and…
GKS Global Services
A Minnesota-based manufacturer of high-quality ATV, snowmobile, and motorcycle parts and accessories had a design and development problem with a snow blade that created a lot of time-consuming rework. Thanks to 3-D scanning from GKS Global Services, the problem was recently solved.
The…
Toyota Motor Engineering and Manufacturing North America
Toyota has launched a national program to donate its Toyota Production System expertise to help schools, hospitals, and nonprofits improve their operations, extend their reach, and increase their impact. The company will be working with up to 20 community organizations across the United States…
Ryan E. Day
Standard: “A document, established by consensus and approved by a recognized body, that provides, for common and repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context” (ISO/IEC Guide 2:2004—“…
Miriam Boudreaux
You’ve heard about “measuring training effectiveness” but aren’t quite sure how to do it. You’ve been filling out training attendance sheets for as long as you can recall, and they have served the purpose. So why is training effectiveness all of the sudden a topic of discussion, and what exactly is…
Jidoka is one of the core principles of the Toyota Production System, one that empowers production workers to stop the assembly line and solve problems at the moment they occur. Jidoka integrates the two guiding principles of the Toyota Way: continuous improvement and respect for people.
Recently…
