All Features
Jack Dunigan
On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall found gold in Sutter’s Creek next to John Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California. By 1849, the gold rush was reaching full steam. Some 300,000 gold seekers (called 49ers because of the year in which they travelled) made the journey across the continent or around…
Michelle LaBrosse
Think about success: How do you define career success, and how do you know when you’ve attained it? Perhaps there’s a particular salary level you’d like to reach, or maybe achieving success means working in your dream job. But think a little deeper. Say you get that dream job; imagine what would…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Pitch interval (Ip) can be thought of in two ways: as a unit of time representing the (usually) smallest common pitch shared among a range of products, services, or transactions that are being produced, conveyed, performed, or executed by a given resource(s); and as a count of the number of…
Arun Hariharan
Irecently received a letter from my bank asking me to submit certain documents, apparently required by “know your customer” (KYC) regulations. I was a little surprised to receive this letter, for just a few months earlier, I had already submitted these documents in response to a different request…
Kevin Meyer
Mindfulness has become all the rage in personal and professional leadership these days, which is good and bad. Understood and done right, it’s a powerful concept. As with most concepts, however, it’s also often misunderstood, and therefore sometimes maligned and even misapplied. In this way,…
Rob Harrison
A recent survey conducted by LNS Research revealed that 43 percent of manufacturing professionals don’t understand the Internet of Things (IoT). Although this may be cause for some concern, it’s not entirely surprising. There is something important lurking behind the fact that although most have…
Michael Causey
The folks at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) released their sometimes optimistic, but always enlightening guidance wish list and overall priorities for 2015. Let’s take a look.
CDER director Janet Woodcock recently said these are her agencies “front burner” priorities: •…
Mark Rosenthal
The title of this article is a search term that recently hit The Lean Thinker site. It’s an interesting question—and interesting that it gets asked.
“Kaizen” is now an English word—it’s in the OED—and defined as such: “Noun. A Japanese business philosophy of continuous improvement of working…
Mike Figliuolo
Leading a balanced life is a critical aspect of performing well as a leader. There are two types of balance. We always think about work/life balance in terms of “how much time do I spend away from the office?” You probably spend more hours at the office than you do away from it with your friends…
Matthew Barsalou
There are many tools available for investigating quality problems. One useful and easy-to-use set of statistical tools is John W. Tukey’s exploratory data analysis (EDA), which quality engineers can use for generating hypotheses. Tukey’s EDA provides many different methods for looking at data, and…
Arun Hariharan
Have you encountered the following situation? A company has no time for quality, and therefore has more and more business problems. So they spend even more time fire-fighting, and as a result has even less time for quality, and so on.
I call this the quality paradox.
Figure 1: The vicious cycle…
Joe Humm
Many hands and companies touch the materials required to get a finished product to market. With the growth of supplier networks and contract suppliers, much of the quality process is out of the manufacturer’s control. If materials shipped from any vendor aren’t up to spec and a faulty product…
NIST
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers and their industrial partners aim to add a new dimension to manufacturing capabilities. In a new project, they will demonstrate the feasibility—and benchmark the advantages—of using standardized 3D models for electronically…
Harry Hertz
Call it semantics, but I think there is benefit in distinguishing among change management, continuous improvement, and innovation. By understanding the purpose of each, as well as management’s responsibilities for them, organizations have a richer set of tools for becoming better.
My comments are…
Mike Micklewright
Should an organization’s design engineers step foot on the production floor, or would this be too much of a distraction from what they get paid to do—cranking out new designs? For most progressive and forward-looking organizations, this is a no-brainer. Of course product engineers would be, and…
Matthew E. May
As I contemplate the year ahead and the changes I’d like to bring about, I hereby by dub 2015 the “Year of the Question.” If I know anything after a half-century on this planet, it’s that we all live our lives in constant and continuous pursuit of answers to questions that occupy our minds—…
Akhilesh Gulati
Design of experiments (DOE) is a term familiar to most quality professionals. Some use it on a regular basis and others try their best to avoid it. Most of those who employ this problem-solving tool have done so mainly on behalf of quality improvement projects. Limiting DOE to just these areas or…
Michael Causey
The next time you want a cheeseburger, you might consider hopping a plane and flying to Germany. Or France. Or New Zealand. Basically, anywhere but the United States of America.
Almost across the board, the United States ranks at the bottom (“regressive”) for produce traceability programs as…
Joel Smith
On a recent vacation, I was unsuccessfully trying to reunite with my family outside a busy shopping mall and starting to get a little stressed. I was on a crowded sidewalk, in a busy city known for crime, and it was raining. I thought there was no way things could get more aggravating when…
Jim Benson
Our work should provide value to someone or something, otherwise why do it? When we build our personal kanbans, we’re building a board that drives us toward completing our work. But is that work worth doing?
Webster’s defines value as a noun as well as a verb. The noun is defined as “the regard…
Rich Thomas
Manufacturers may be able to produce their products more cheaply overseas, but that option has its pitfalls, including supply-chain logistics and security issues. When deciding how and where to manufacture your product, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons carefully. Particularly for small…
Jack Dunigan
Thinking about what life has brought to me thus far, I remember just how tentative and uncertain everything seemed when I first began my career. What would I do? Where would I do it? What was really required to succeed? Fortunately, I found mentors very early on who were—and are—deeply invested in…
Jordan Katz
For suppliers, one question comes up again and again in their distributor relationships: Should you treat your distributors like employees, or should you treat them more like customers? The answer isn’t always clear.
Distributors seem like employees because they sell and deliver a supplier’s…
Jeffrey Phillips
A post by Jeff DeGraff prompted me to write this. His post was titled, “What Are You Willing to Give Up for Innovation?” although on a closer read he’s not really suggesting that you give up anything. However, most executives believe that “doing” innovation involves a ratio of tradeoffs, …
Stotz Gaging Co.
It’s a fact that air gauges are typically not in use approximately 90 percent (or more) of the time they’re in your shop or QC department. Because these gauges function by using clean and dry compressed air in a highly controlled flow, this relatively expensive commodity can cost your operation…