All Features
Anderson Jacintho
Poor quality products, an unsafe work environment, or failure to comply with regulations ranging from product safety to social responsibility, can cause business disruption, financial loss, costly lawsuits, and long-lasting damage to the brand and corporate image of organizations that are…
Peter Cappelli
Failing to manage your company’s talent needs is the equivalent of failing to manage your supply chain. Supply chain managers ask questions like ”Do we have the right parts in stock?“ “Do we know where to get these parts when we need them?” and “Does it cost a lot of money to carry inventory?”…
Rory Granros
When regulatory compliance and risk management come to mind, they usually evoke feelings of fear, uncertainty, and doubt as to how well an organization is prepared for government scrutiny or any worst-case business scenario. Questions arise, such as: Have we developed the proper procedures to…
The results of a recent Aberdeen outsourcing survey of more than 300 organizations of all revenue classes launched during December 2007 shows that small businesses (with annual revenues of up to $50 million U.S. dollars) are reporting a major uptick in demand for supply chain management (SCM)…
Joe Caliro
Many companies include a variation of the goal “Provide world-class service” in their mission statements. These same companies have well-planned business strategies and comprehensive marketing strategies. But ask them about their customer-service strategy and you’ll find it’s often nothing more…
Joseph OBrien
A few months ago, I received training on ISO 9001 process auditing. It was very thorough and put on by a very enthusiastic man. I was really enjoying the training, and I planned to take my newfound knowledge and begin to process audit my division.
One of the last things the trainer said to me…
Nancy Fullbright
Alan Kent, president and CEO of Meadows Regional Medical Center in Vidalia, Ga., was a champion for implementing lean principles in the hospital’s emergency department. Photo by Gary Meek Emergency rooms in the United States aren’t known for their…
David F. Giannetto
Who does your company exist to please? In your daily business operations, who ultimately determines whether you and your people get paychecks or pink slips? Who do the mission and vision statements place at the center of your employees’ universe? If your answer to all three questions is the…
Ron Kirscht
Donnelly Custom Manufacturing of Alexandria, Minnesota, a short-run injection molding company, knows that proper training is vital to productivity and quality. Still, training at Donnelly was taking longer than desired and employees often weren’t retaining enough of what had been learned with…
Jeffrey A. Miller
Elevated systemic anxiety can have severe effects, and most organizations are at risk. The good news is that it takes only one person to break the cycle and turn the company around.
If you’re a leader, you feel it in your gut: Stress is at an all-time high, and no wonder. The uncertain economy…
Tune into “The Apprentice” television show, and you get an all-too-common view of business. Every week, all of the wannabe moguls try to impress Donald Trump by preening, cajoling, and conniving. In this world, toughness is the measure of every CEO, and the boss glories in firing people and…
Tej Mariyappa
Organizations embarking on the journey to process excellence have much to gain if appropriate actions are taken in the early stages of deployment. A key principle of Six Sigma is that defects identified and fixed upstream will result in significant leverage and benefits downstream. Similarly, the…
Denise Robitaille
Isn’t it annoying when you call a company to complain about a problem and they won’t even give you the chance to describe what’s wrong? They take down the information that they think is important or whatever the generic form directs them to record. You hang up thinking, “They couldn’t even give me…
Craig Cochran
War heroes are a special category of leaders. They embody bravery, resoluteness, and strength—quintessential attributes of good leaders. This is exactly the sort of leader Shakespeare gives us at the beginning of Macbeth.
At the start of Act 1, Macbeth, a Scottish nobleman and field general, has…
Patrice L. Spath
Measurements of patient care continuity should encompass all of the components of health care delivery—structure, process, and outcome. “Structure” in health care delivery refers to the way a health care entity organizes itself and sets up operations. Health care structures include elements such…
Brian Hughes
Part one of “To Root Or Not To Root,”presented a dilemma that many managers face all too often. Regardless of approach, does a problem warrant a full-blown root cause analysis? A scan of the comments to part one indicates that root cause analysis has different meanings to different people. Some…
Bill Kalmar
One of my favorite movies is a dark gangster movie starring Joe Pesci entitled "8 Heads in A Duffel Bag." Pesci, a mob courier is hired to transport the heads of eight murder victims to a mafia boss to prove that the “hits” had in fact taken place. Unfortunately and comically, the duffel bag…
In the world of marketing and branding, sticking out like a sore thumb isn’t necessarily bad, advises brand innovation specialist Chandran Dharmarajan, a co-founder of I-morph, a marketing innovation consultancy based in Singapore. Dharmarajan, who has worked for more than a decade with Unilever…
From an antacid to a new cancer treatment, every drug must be proven safe and effective in controlled clinical trials before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows it to be sold in the United States.
When federal law first required controlled clinical trials in 1962, most people…
Peter J. Sherman
Today’s hyper-competitive business environment is creating a need for even more new products, new services, and new processes. Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) offers a generalized and effective approach for designing new products and services from the ground up. One of the more popular DFSS…
Steven Ouellette
By the time you read this, the amazingly long U.S. presidential election will be over. All U.S. citizens will be wandering around aimlessly bumping into objects, pressing their hands to the sides of their heads as the indignation poisons slowly leave their bodies, leaving them with a hangover-like…
Thomas R. Cutler
Lean theory suggests that the possibilities for quality improvement exist everywhere. Rarely does that concept translate to a damaged corrugated box in a warehouse—but it should. The cost of damaged packaging, particularly cardboard containers, is very significant in bottom-line costs (damaged…
Brian Hughes
Jodi Ullman glanced at her watch: 10:25 a.m. She pushed back from her desk, stood up, and stretched—after first peeking out the door of her office toward the cubical maze to make sure no one was watching. She’d been staring at the screen of her laptop for two hours, poring over the latest…
Wini Hayes
A well-respected surgical group requests a new surgical device that they swear will revolutionize how surgery is performed in your hospital. The price tag is well into seven figures, with significant annual maintenance and training costs. A competing hospital is advertising to consumers that they…
Akhilesh Gulati
A physics exam question asked students to describe how they would use a barometer to measure the height of a skyscraper. One student who failed the test contested that his answer was correct. He was given a second chance to defend his position, verbally, to the professor. When the student didn’t…