All Features
Jack Dunigan
Editor’s note: This continues Jack Dunigan’s series about unsung heroes in the workplace, and the 16 traits they all share.
With nothing to do but wait while we stood patiently in line at the local post office, we happened to see that there was but one “If It Fits It Ships” box in the rack. For…
Michael Causey
The shell game called the federal budget added another nut recently as media reports revealed that during the last 20 years, approximately $1 billion in fees paid by patent applicants has been diverted from its proper use at the United States Patent Office (USPTO).
Critics argue that, as a self-…
Eston Martz
A while back my colleague Jim Frost wrote about applying statistics to decisions typically left to expert judgment; I was reminded of his post this week when I came across a new research study that takes a statistical technique commonly used in one discipline, and applies it in a new way.
The…
MIT News
It’s a dream of many hobbyists: turning their leisure pursuits into a lucrative business. That’s what happened for MIT graduate Limor Fried, whose pastime—tinkering with electronics—not only gave rise to a profitable company, but also positioned her as a leader of a technology revolution.
Since…
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The chemical secrets of a concrete Roman breakwater that has spent the last 2,000 years submerged in the Mediterranean Sea have been uncovered by an international team of researchers. The team has pinpointed why the best Roman concrete was superior to most modern concrete in durability, why its…
Mandy Mallott
You may not believe this, but economic development has something to learn from Iron Man. When Tony Stark and his “super suit” enter a combat zone, his technology scans the environment: inhabitants, structural deficiencies, assets, and potential pitfalls. This evaluation, although quick, provides…
Donald J. Wheeler
All data are historical. All analyses of data are historical. Yet all of the interesting questions about our data have to do with using the past to predict the future. In this article I shall look at the way this is commonly done and examine the assumptions behind this approach.
A few years ago a…
Jack Dunigan
Editor’s note: This continues Jack Dunigan’s series about unsung heroes in the workplace, and the 16 traits they all share.
I went through 26 employees. 26 employees hired and fired over the course of five years. In that time I was approached by the Job Corps people with candidates for work, by…
Bruce Hamilton
I’ve been doing a lot of speaking at conferences this spring, and I’m always warmly greeted as the “Toast Guy”: the person who produced and starred in the Toast Kaizen video.
Earlier this year, I spoke to a large gathering from a metropolitan healthcare system. When I jokingly asked them, “Who…
Davis Balestracci
When improvement initiatives don’t yield the results promised, it’s very tempting to have the knee-jerk reaction of blaming the workers for their poor attitudes and lack of work ethic. But what if one took a counterintuitive approach: looking within one’s business systems for the true causes for…
Davis Balestracci
How true are the following statements as you perceive things in your work environment?
1 = Not true at all 2 = True to a small extent 3 = True to some extent 4 = Mostly true 5 = Completely true
1. Employees in this organization are energetic and enthusiastic. 2. Employees are highly productive…
Stosh Walsh
Measuring employee engagement is essential for companies that want to perform at their peak. But let’s be clear about one thing: Measurement doesn’t cause engagement. Top-down solutions may produce clarity, but they don’t inspire buy-in or practicality.
Many companies use Gallup’s Q12 employee…
Bill Kalmar
June 3, 2013, marked the retirement of one of the legends in the quality arena, namely Harry Hertz, director of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. Harry has been director since 1995 and during his tenure the Baldrige Program has become the premier program for quality and performance…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Machine cycle time (Tcm) represents the actual time it takes for one machine to complete all of its operations on one piece, product, patient, file, etc. It is applicable for both single-piece and batch processing. Unlike effective machine cycle time, Tcm excludes load and unload time as well as…
Dawn Keller
I spend the majority of my time entrenched in statistics. Using statistics. Studying statistics. Developing and testing statistical software. Statistics guide many of my decisions at work and in life. That’s the world of an engineer.
For this reason, you can imagine my surprise when my husband…
Chip Bell
My granddaughter recently asked the inevitable birds-and-bees question: “I know a baby comes from inside the Mommy’s stomach, but how did the baby get there in the first place?” I deflected the question with, “That’s a great question. Why don’t you ask your mother?”
I was more than willing to…
Keyence Corp.
Timex is the United State’s leading watchmaker and is present in more than 80 countries. Fralsen, its French entity, makes watch movements using three technologies: plastic-injection moulding of small parts with very fine details; turning and cutting of parts such as wheels, pinions, arbors and…
NIST
For the first time, scientists working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a new type of lens that bends and focuses ultraviolet (UV) light in such an unusual way that it can create ghostly, 3D images of objects that float in free space.
The easy-to-…
Donald Cohen
The measurement of a component’s surface texture may be described by many texture parameters. The question often arises: How many measurements do I need to make for a given parameter to obtain a particular level of confidence in the result? This article will give some basic guidelines for…
Bill Kalmar
Not a day goes by that we don’t hear about the quality of our nation’s educational system. Test scores are lower. Enrollment in the sciences is not up to expectations. Our students are lagging behind students in other nations. Some schools are crumbling, while others have had their funding reduced…
University of Michigan
The type of sensors that pick up the rhythm of a beating heart in implanted cardiac defibrillators and pacemakers are vulnerable to tampering, according to a new study conducted in controlled laboratory conditions.
Implantable defibrillators monitor the heart for irregular beating and, when…
University at Buffalo
Despite the awareness of workplace bullying and the resistance to it by employers and employees, many workplace bullies achieve high levels of career success, according to a new study from the University at Buffalo (UB) School of Management.
Published in the Journal of Managerial Psychology, the…
Kyle Toppazzini
One of the recurring sentiments I hear from business executives is that lean Six Sigma (LSS) simply takes too long to implement. Without senior management buy-in, implementing it is not only difficult, it’s also nearly impossible. What if there were an easier way that resulted in faster…
Alan Nicol
I write a great deal about the difference between lean, Six Sigma, and kaizen on the production floor and in the office. Despite the fact that many of us have figured out that the same tools can be used in those very different environments with some translation for context, the training in the…
Mike Richman
If you call any of us at Quality Digest today, you are going to go straight to voicemail. That’s because the entire team is taking a day away from our regular work to gather, plan, debate, eat, and strategize during the company retreat. This day—today—we step away from the phones, the emails, the…
