All Features
Tim McMahon
A management system is the framework of processes and procedures used to ensure that an organization can fulfill all tasks required to achieve its objectives. A lean management system consists of the discipline, daily practices, and tools that you need to establish and maintain a persistent,…
Steve Moore
The following words of an anonymous poet as he (or she) immortalized the lessons from Deming’s funnel experiment.
“Tamper, tamper is the game, try to make all the same. Squeak and tweak it every day, off we go to the Milky Way.”
—Anonymous
I offer a corollary that may help…
GKS Global Services
A mechanical engineering firm was contracted to install new cooling equipment in a municipal ice rink’s mechanical room. The challenge was to design the equipment installation without tearing out the old equipment first, and to install some elements and piping that housed the refrigerant around…
R. Eric Reidenbach Ph.D.
“Our corporate mission is to deliver the ‘Best Value in Energy and Related Services,’” according to a large Midwestern electric and gas utility company. This is a mission statement, which after a minor modification (just change the industry), could be posted on any boardroom wall and inserted into…
Stewart Anderson
Organizations can be considered as systems of processes whose aim is to achieve customer satisfaction by meeting and filling the needs of customers. The famous flow diagram of W. Edwards Deming, illustrated in figure 1, shows an organization as a system and illustrates how certain key processes…
Georgia Institute of Technology
The cross-functional team at Piedmont Newnan was made up of employees that deal with the process daily. For this process improvement project, they focused on case carts, which are used for pulling together all supplies needed for surgical procedures.
Pam Murphy, a…
Louis Sirico
Aerospace and other manufacturing industries have accelerated outsourcing of manufacturing operations to increase efficiencies and reduce costs. However, moving some of the operations outside of the traditional four walls of the factory has created “dark areas” in the manufacturing visibility…
H. James Harrington
With the onset of Six Sigma methodology, many organizations have spent large sums of money to make all of their products and processes as close to six sigma as they can. I agree that the higher the level of sigma value, the better the quality of the output is if it’s not screened. But is that the…
Robert Parsons
The AS9100C standard (also referred to as AS9100:2009 and AS9100 Rev C) has been published since January 2009. You are not alone if you are confused about the delay in being audited to this standard. Like you, most companies seeking registration to AS9100 are in the process of trying to figure out…
Donald J. Wheeler
In the 1940s the War Production Board trained approximately 50,000 individuals in how to use process behavior charts (also known as control charts). At that time the computations were done by hand, and the emphasis was on making things as easy as possible for those doing these computations. As a…
David C. Crosby
A major part of the zero defects concept is to recognize outstanding performance on the part of employees by presenting them with an award. After all, you asked for zero defects performance, so let people know when you get it.
Recognition can be a tricky business. Done right, it’s full of…
Mike Richman
As you can see, and as I tend to do in these occasional column entries, I’m freely mixing metaphors above. My point, or points, as it were, are that, first, times are tough. Well… duh. OK, point number two is that in tough times, change, which is always inevitable, seems inevitabler. Yup, I…
BMGi
On July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, signaling the attainment of President John F. Kennedy’s vision to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth. The accomplishment required nearly a decade of research and experimentation by NASA as it worked to overcome one…
Max Kalehoff
The science of harnessing customer loyalty and satisfaction is getting very trendy in business. And perhaps nothing has been more responsible for driving excitement than Net Promoter.
Developed by Fred Reichheld, Net Promoter is a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to…
James Wells
How many times has this happened to you? You’re leading a Six Sigma project on a transactional process of some kind, something not directly tied to manufacturing or measurement of product quality. You get to the measure phase of your Six Sigma project and struggle to figure out how to satisfy the…
Coordinate Measuring Machines (CMMs) are used in practically every industry that requires precise dimensional inspection of manufactured parts. In today’s competitive environment, manufacturers demand CMMs that are accurate, reliable, fast, economical, and provide maximum flexibility with respect…
Knowledge at Wharton
Toyota’s legendary lean processes didn’t come out of nowhere. They were forged by the fire of urgency in post-World War II Japan when resources were scarce. Toyota innovated—and continued to innovate. Today, the Toyota Production System is the most respected manufacturing and inventory control…
Vigneshwaran Chandran
Testing times for the automotive industry continues as uncertainty looms over an anticipated sales rebound in developed markets in 2010. While some forecasters expect demand contraction owed to scrappage incentives in 2009, most expect full year sales in Western Europe and North America to grow…
Bill Kalmar
Have you noticed that the world is getting crazier by the minute? Every day we hear about someone in search of his or her 15 minutes of fame or someone who operates on a different wave length than the rest of the civilized world, and in some instances, quality and performance excellence have taken…
redOrbit
With a silicone rubber “stick on” sheet containing dozens of miniature, powerful lenses, engineers at Harvard are one step closer to putting the capacity of a large laboratory into a microsized package.
The marriage of high-performance optics with microfluidics could prove the perfect match for…
A spring-loaded guided core AC-LVDT is an air-extended, spring retracted LVDT offering consistent measurement for dimensional gauging, factory automation, and similar position measurement applications.
Linear variable…
Paul Scicchitano
Some experts could barely hide their disappointment when the total number of ISO 9001 certificates recently failed to break the long-awaited million-certificate mark—as if it isn’t enough to have the world’s most widely used voluntary quality standard of all time.
With 982,832 third-party…
R. Eric Reidenbach Ph.D.
One of my clients, a wireless business-to-business (B2B) telecom company, was experiencing a significant problem in their call center. They were absolutely inundated with calls—most of them problems. They were spending a significant amount of money trying to manage the call center—adding new call…
Mark Graban
When I was in Sweden recently, we had a lot of good discussion about the lean concept of “standardized work.”
There was much agreement from different presenters at the lean laboratories conference, and from the hospital people we visited, concerning standardized work—that it isn’t a robotic…
National Standards Authority of Ireland NSAI
(NSAI: Nashua, New Hampshire) — Even though no firm action was taken during the 2009 Climate Conference in Copenhagen, the U.S. administration has still pledged that the country will tighten carbon emission regulations. The most plausible possibility is what is referred to as a “cap and trade”…
