All Features
Bruce Hamilton
An engineering manager who I worked with 25 years ago challenged me one day. “You know, Bruce, if all employees were engineers, you wouldn’t need mistake-proofing,” he said. At the time, I was too stunned by his comment to even respond. But happily, the memory provides good fodder for another…
Eston Martz
In part one, I shared a case study of how a small bicycle-chain manufacturing company in India used Six Sigma’s DMAIC approach to reverse declining productivity. After completing the define, measure, and analysis phases, the team had identified the important factors in the bushing creation process…
Mike Figliuolo
PowerPoint is the devil’s instrument, and when you use it, you risk becoming a musician in his demonic orchestra. All of us are required to give presentations in some form or fashion at various points in our careers. If you’d like to succeed in those efforts, there are three things you should never…
Tom Kadala
O
ne can just imagine the frustration that Greece’s vice president and foreign minister, Evangelos Venizelos, must feel every time he notifies European Central Bank (ECB) officials about Greece’s economic progress or lack thereof.
At a recent ECB review meeting, Venizelos, a burly looking…
Denise Robitaille
Every once in a while we hear of a company that claims to have a self-certification to ISO 9001—or some other management system standard. The company “certifies” that its organization conforms to the requirements of ISO 9001. It sounds pretty good until you start to ask what this self-…
Eston Martz
Using data analysis and statistics to improve business quality has a long history. But it often seems like most of that history involves huge operations. After all, Six Sigma originated with Motorola, and was embraced by thousands of other businesses after it was adopted by a little-known outfit…
Jack Dunigan
Does your right hand know what your left hand is doing and why it is doing it? When assisting businesses and CEOs in improvement efforts, one of my first questions is, “What is your vision for this company?” After hearing their definition, I will ask department heads, associates, and assistants the…
Ted Gorski
Leaders need near-perfect communication skills, and knowing a person’s communication style can make the difference between getting your message out and getting it heard.
Here are four communication styles and tips to effectively communicate with people who’ve made these styles their own.
The…
MIT News
Searching for a job is tough, and the hiring process in the United States makes matters far tougher and more emotionally fraught than it needs to be. That is the central assertion of MIT’s Ofer Sharone in a new book based on his in-depth study of U.S. and Israeli white-collar labor markets, which…
Akhilesh Gulati
Editor’s note: This article continues the series exploring structured innovation using the TRIZ methodology, a problem solving, analysis, and forecasting tool derived from studying patterns of invention found in global patent data.
Belinda started the My Executive Council (MEC) meeting on an upbeat…
Davis Balestracci
The various improvement approaches are, in essence, all pretty much the same. Any competent practitioner would neither want to be called a “guru” nor have any problems dealing with another competent practitioner of another improvement philosophy.
In my opinion, any approach should also involve the…
Dave K. Banerjea
Like so many other business software applications, calibration management software has evolved from simple beginnings as a digital index-card system that reminded operators when their instrument and tool calibrations were due. During the past 25 years, these systems have matured and are more…
Jim Benson
Does your kanban Ready column look like a junk drawer? Do you have tasks in the Ready column from six months ago that say “Urgent!” (and have since the day they were created)? Guess what? You’re learning something about your work.
We have a lot of urgent tasks that strangely don’t get done and no…
Mike Richman
The recently released book, Value Stream Mapping, by Karen Martin and Mike Osterling (McGraw-Hill, 2013), necessarily emphasizes using a tool, in this case the value stream map, to unlock enterprisewide performance improvement. As good lean practitioners, however, Martin and Osterling understand…
NIST
Piezoelectrics—materials that can change mechanical stress to electricity and back again—are everywhere in modern life: computer hard drives, loud speakers, medical ultrasound, sonar. Although piezoelectrics are a widely used technology, there are major gaps in our understanding of how they work…
NIST
The next time you drive over a bone-jarring pothole, remember this: Since 2008, 73 million tax dollars have been invested in monitoring and inspection technologies for the nation’s aging infrastructure. Here’s the good part: They’re making a difference.
The innovative technologies include: • Tiny…
John Ayers
Selection of key subcontractors on a program can often make the difference between program success and failure. One approach that I have used to ensure the selected subcontractor is a good choice is a best-value assessment (BVA) process. It starts with a request for proposal (RFP) that is sent to…
Mark Schmit
Waiting for me in my inbox one morning was an email from a longtime friend who works in the financial industry (that fact is sort of important later). The email’s subject line was, “Stuff you should know about.” That kind of histrionic title could have meant anything from, “I’m using code words to…
Sarah Jacobson
What will the commercial office building of the future look like? To answer that question, we can focus on cutting-edge cladding systems or an updated core layout, but we shouldn’t overlook the possibility that the office building of the future might not be a new building at all.
Mobility,…
Umberto Tunesi
If we accept the definitions of prolific (producing fruit, offspring, etc. in abundance, or producing constant or successful results) and prolix (so unnecessarily long as to be boring), then we must recognize that, based on present publications, quality as a concept is looking more prolix than…
Jim Benson
Your backlog is hope. Your backlog is pain. Your backlog holds all the projects, tasks, demands, desires, and expectations that you and the world have for you. The problem is, today’s apparent emergencies are tomorrow’s waste of time.
If we are focused on completion, we don’t want to complete…
Tripp Babbitt
After WWII, W. Edwards Deming provided the spark that ignited Japan into making quality products. I like to refer to it as the greatest upset in economic history. How did such a small country with few economic and natural resources build a manufacturing juggernaut that could overcome the great…
Donald J. Wheeler
Last month in “The Analysis of Experimental Data,” I presented a method for analyzing experimental data that was built on the use of the range statistic as a measure of dispersion. In this day of computers and software, why should we even consider using ranges in our analysis of experimental data…
Siemens PLM Software
Wood Stone Corp. captured American’s love for high-quality pizza and many other dishes when it started its stone-hearth cooking equipment business, eventually becoming world-renowned and the leading manufacturer in the industry. The company is especially popular for its wood-fired oven used by…
Michael Causey
Those of us in and around Washington D.C. like to tell folks in the days leading up to a president’s State of the Union (SOTU) address that the speeches rarely matter and are generally forgotten while the teleprompter’s still warm.
Then we analyze them to death for a few days. I don’t mean to…
