All Features
Paul Naysmith
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… well, 10 years ago in The Midlands of England, I was introduced to the “Hawthorne Effect.” I remember sitting in the Black Belt class being taught about improvement projects. The course tutor, a wise old man with absolutely no physical resemblance to Obi-…
Quality Digest
Some of the [ISO 9001: 2015] requirements are relatively clear; others are more “euphemisms,” and you don’t know how to react… —James Lamprecht, author of ISO 9000: Preparing for Certification (CRC Press, 1992) and former member of ISO/TC 176
During an Aug, 16, 2013, interview on Quality Digest’s…
Alan Nicol
Recently I took a day to volunteer at my children’s elementary school. It was their annual field day where students get to spend half of the school day outdoors, on the game field, participating in a rotation of team-building and fitness events. It’s a great deal of fun.
I was one of a great many…
Knowledge at Wharton
In the “flying geese paradigm,” Japanese economist Kaname Akamatsu explains that companies restructure to find the cheapest labor costs by moving low-value activities to nearby less-developed countries. Today that story rings truer than ever as global value chains (GVCs) reach a critical turning…
Louis Columbus
From metal-fitting factories that keep machinery calibrated manually to high-tech companies whose production systems use self-diagnosing analytics, every manufacturer is continually working to improve shop-floor performance using analytics.
The best manufacturers I’ve worked with continually…
Matthew E. May
Scene: corporate retreat for senior leaders of a Fortune 100 company. Theme: creativity. Agenda item: purpose. I have placed a solitary Zen stone in the center of each table.
The group members eye the rocks suspiciously. “Speak your mind, one and all,” I urge.
“Why is there a rock here?” pipes up…
NIST
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a novel method for measuring laser power by reflecting the light off a mirrored scale, which behaves as a force detector.
Although it may sound odd, the technique is promising as a simpler, faster, less…
Gallup
I
met with a client yesterday who had an all-too-common complaint. She asked for Gallup’s ideas on creating a stronger leadership development program, and we obliged by sharing some practices we’ve seen work well in other organizations.
Our client gave us a wry smile and said that her company has…
Toni Gilpin
During Manufacturing Day on Oct. 4, 2013, our Evanston, Illinois, legislators endorsed the theory that there are many good factory jobs left unfilled for want of qualified applicants.
But, as I indicated in a previous column, there’s not much evidence that this “skills gap” exists. Accepting the…
Kevin Meyer
Last week I started a discussion post in the lean Six Sigma LinkedIn group about Gemba Academy’s latest featured video showing a morning stand-up meeting at my old company, Specialty Silicone Fabricators. I had started the morning meetings years ago. My successor has added some really interesting…
MIT News
It was a result so unexpected that MIT researchers initially thought it must be a mistake: Under certain conditions, putting a cracked piece of metal under tension—that is, exerting a force that would be expected to pull it apart—has the reverse effect, causing the crack to close and its edges to…
Arun Hariharan
I was once in a room full of people to whom a presentation was being made. The findings of a root cause analysis that had been done on a recent defect in the company’s product were being presented. A couple of young people were enthusiastically presenting how they had identified the root cause of…
Jorge A. Correa
Organizations today face unprecedented challenges to increase productivity and performance. Having an effective internal audit system is an important tool that allows organizations to determine where key strengths and weaknesses exist within their processes. Once identified they can build on their…
Toni Gilpin
The second annual Manufacturing Day took place in Evanston, Illinois, last week. Although I attended last year, I skipped it this time around.
Manufacturing Day, I’d discovered, isn’t long on nuts-and-bolts realities or objective facts. Rather, it promotes a specific corporate agenda, with…
Stephen Josephs
You've heard the expressions: "He lost his nerve," "He doesn't have the stomach for it," and "No guts." As it turns out, those expressions are anatomically accurate.
The nerve that you lose when you're afraid is the vagus nerve, which runs from the belly to the brain. It transmits messages about…
Larry Goldman
Ibex is another company that clearly understands its customers, or “tribe,” as Seth Godin would say. I discovered this Vermont-based wool clothing company a few years ago when I was looking for a better quality vest than the ones on display at REI.
My older brother put me onto Ibex. I not only…
Jack Dunigan
Leadership is the ability to establish standards and manage a creative climate where people are self-motivated toward the mastery of long-term constructive goals, in a participatory environment of mutual respect, compatible with personal values. —Michael Vance
The four teenagers sat around the…
Mark Davidson
It’s often said that what gets measured gets done. Part of this is human nature. Everyone has more piled on their plates than ever, and many workers find themselves constantly reprioritizing their work activities. Therefore, metrics that have the attention of business and manufacturing leaders…
Davis Balestracci
As many of you know, I hate bar graphs. They are ubiquitous, and most of them are worthless. I'll make maybe two exceptions: 1) a Pareto analysis; 2) a comparative set of stratified histograms disaggregating a stable period of performance (a Pareto analysis proxy for continuous data). Displaying…
Cody Steele
Capability statistics are wonderful things. They tell you how well your process is meeting the specifications that you have. But there are so many capability statistics that it’s worth taking some time to understand how they’re useful together.
Two capability statistics that are hard to keep…
Siemens PLM Software
Kimball International Inc. offers a variety of products from two business segments. The Kimball Electronics Group provides engineering and manufacturing services, which use common production and support capabilities globally, to automotive, industrial, medical, and public-safety markets. The…
Matthew Barsalou
Recently, a friend from my undergraduate days complained that he was written up at work for low productivity. He operates a forklift in a warehouse and was informed that he only reached 97 percent of the previous week’s productivity.
I asked for details, but there was not a lot he could tell me;…
Jack Dunigan
The hour was late, quite late, in fact, somewhere around 8 p.m. The office had technically been closed since 5 p.m., but I was still there working with two volunteers. I was tasked with the job of preparing registration packets for the 1,300 or so incoming guests at a conference. The sponsoring…
Mike Richman
For those working in quality or regulatory environments, waste is a mortal enemy. The Japanese call it muda, which in my own oddly mnemonic fashion I’ve always associated with mud slung into high-speed gearing or splattered all over clean rooms. It’s the opposite of smooth, efficient operations.…
Paul Naysmith
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs,” Rudyard Kipling begins in “If,” his beautifully written poem for his son. It’s a poem of advice and guidance for becoming a well-rounded adult, and dealing with the crises that life will throw at you. Kipling’s son John went on to…
