All Features
Dawn Keller
Generally speaking, I have a problem with authority. I don’t like being told what to do or how to do it. I’m not proud of that.
I recall debating with my high school trigonometry teacher regarding the value of the homework “process”—specifically in those situations where the student in question…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
If you are in a leadership role, chances are you believe it’s better to give than to receive. This means you also probably believe you should always be competent, never make mistakes, and always be strong. You may also feel that you should only receive when you have something to give in return.…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
In an era when every square foot and extra minute along a supply chain mean dollars saved or squandered, it’s not surprising that auto dealerships have been facing uncomfortable scrutiny. Protected by franchise laws, these icons of American commerce struggle to justify their value to customers as…
Matt Treglia
Ah, the scientific method. How elegant, how useful—and how easily ignored. The process of studying a problem, formulating a hypothesis, running a controlled experiment, analyzing the resulting data, and then making an objective decision is so quickly cast aside in the interest of quick-and-dirty…
Jens R. Woinowski
As you browse through lean management pages on the Internet, you may have seen reports on companies having little success with lean, or comments about how misunderstanding lean can lead to bad consequences. From time to time I can sense the level of frustration from those comments, and I…
Shardul Varma
My career in quality engineering started off at the endoscopy division of Stryker Corp. in San Jose, California. The endoscopy equipment included scopes, cameras, and accessories, and I was in charge of the camera line. Mind you, I didn’t really have much of a clue what this role entailed. I’d…
InnovMetric
E xtreme Fab Inc. is a structural metal fabrication company that has the tools and skills to build the massive machinery that the oil and gas, power, energy, and trucking industries require. One of their key customers is GE Aero Energy, a company that gives businesses and communities around the…
Large-volume metrology measurements are conducted at every major phase of alignment and integration of the Integrated Science Instrument Module (ISIM), which forms the main payload of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). Both ambient and cryogenic…
Earlier this spring, thousands of people from all over the nation gathered in Springfield, IL, to honor the life of our beloved President Abraham Lincoln. After his death in 1865, his body was carried hundreds of miles by a funeral train. It passed through more than a hundred cities, with formal…
Ron Rode
Yesterday, May 20, 2015, we celebrated World Metrology Day. This is an annual commemoration of the signature by representatives of seventeen nations attending the Metre Convention, which was held on May 20, 1875. This convention set the stage for global acceptance and collaboration for “Metrology…
Phillips Precision Inc.
Methods Machine Tool Sales (MMTS) of Sudbury, Massachusetts, is the New England distributor and sole training center for Carl Zeiss inspection equipment. Customers can train in MMTS’s state-of-the art lab or send examples of problem parts to the lab for help with their inspection solutions.
To…
Bruce Hamilton
I was speaking last week with, Jen, a senior manager at a large manufacturer, and she commented to me, “I know it’s important for me to get to the floor, but the time involved for me and my staff to regularly visit two dozen different departments makes this seem like an impossible task.” She was…
Paul Naysmith
This June will you be wishing the Magna Carta a very happy birthday? An 800-year-old document might not necessarily warrant a lovely slice of cake, but I’m sure someone somewhere will be celebrating this anniversary. No doubt many readers will be wondering why I want to discuss the Magna Carta,…
Gallup
A brand promise is an agreement between a company and its customers. Yet Gallup finds that companies are largely failing to make good on their agreements. Only half of the almost 18 million customers Gallup has surveyed strongly believe that the companies they do business with always deliver on…
Alan Nicol
Perhaps the biggest mistake business leaders make is to assume that people are resources like any other. The truth is that people are resources unlike any other. At the heart of many business disasters is the misunderstanding that people and man-hours are one and the same.
A close friend of mine…
Quality Digest
There is a famous (and often misquoted) line from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which reads, “Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.”
Odyssey Teams Inc. of Chico, California, is collaborating with the Water Works Program of Pyrmont, Australia, to…
Kevin Meyer
I recently came across the TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie where she discusses the “danger of a single story.” From growing up as a kid in Nigeria to studying in the United States into adulthood, she describes how she and others, having only heard a single story about a certain situation,…
Davis Balestracci
In the past couple of weeks, I have stumbled onto three things that triggered this column. Two of them came from academic-type healthcare journals, one of which shall remain nameless. This type of journal is still trying to make a formal case for improvement. Article after article belabors the…
Bill Kalmar
We’ve all heard and seen commercials that claim “Customer service is No. 1 with us” or “We treat our customers like we want to be treated.” If these statements rang true, you’d think we’d hear more about contented consumers and their positive customer experiences.
The American Customer…
Laura Studwell
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1 in 6 U.S. citizens are affected by foodborne illness each year; the Public Health Agency of Canada estimates the figure at 1 in 8 Canadians. Both agencies state that illness can stem from either contaminated products or allergies relating to…
Eston Martz
Last week I attended the American Society for Quality’s World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Nashville, TN. The ASQ conference is a great opportunity to see how quality professionals are tackling problems in every industry, from beverage distribution to banking services.
Given my…
Richard DeRisio
Editor’s note: Quality Digest will present Richard DeRisio’s webinar, “Effective Strategies for Complaint Handling” on May 19, 2015, at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific. DeRisio will be a guest on Quality Digest Live on Friday, May 15, also at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific, to preview the webinar…
Thomas R. Cutler
Whitney Blackburn began her career as an art director for a visual communications company, where she built a reputation for intuitive design and creative leadership. Equipped with a passion for intelligent marketing and a deep curiosity for all things outside her comfort zone, Blackburn has spent…
Matt Treglia
We learned in science class that we should use the scientific method to evaluate hypotheses. Yet somehow, once we enter industry we throw that early learning out the window and fall prey to several pitfalls in experimentation and data interpretation.
In the first two pitfalls that we discussed…
ASQ
Strengthening communication between caregivers and patients should be a top priority for reducing healthcare costs and improving patient experience, according to a new poll of U.S. healthcare quality improvement professionals conducted by ASQ, the world’s largest network of quality resources and…
