All Features
Direct Dimensions Inc.
In 2009, Direct Dimensions Inc. was approached by Texas A&M University’s Flight Research Laboratory (FRL) with a challenging yet typical 3-D problem. The FRL, while primarily an active teaching facility, also offers both flight and wind tunnel test services. This particular project was for a…
Anantha Kollengode
T
he check sheet is a simple and effective tool useful in lean Six Sigma projects. It is sometimes referred to as a concentration diagram or location plot. It is a handy tool for qualitative and quantitative data gathering and analysis. Check sheets help to systematically collect and organize…
Paul Leavoy
Courtesy of another controversy surrounding hazardous substances in children’s toys, China’s massive manufacturing sector is reliving a public relations disaster.
Four years ago, a nationwide recall on children’s toys containing lead paint—and manufactured in China—cast a pall on the integrity…
Rip Stauffer
It’s better to measure things when we can; that’s been well-established in the quality literature over the years. The use of go/no-go gauges will always provide much less information for improvement than measuring the pieces themselves. However, we don’t always have the luxury of using continuous…
Thomas R. Cutler
Supply chain organizations face significant pressures resulting from global competition, shorter product life cycles, and lean economic conditions. The escalating requirements of large customers create painful challenges for those companies still tied to conventional supply-chain processes.
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Imagine an automobile owner who goes to the service desk at the dealership and reports a problem, describing the symptoms in detail to the customer service representative. If the service desk employee sees the same or similar symptoms in the dealer’s or manufacturer’s database, she knows what to…
Imagine an automobile owner who goes to the service desk at the dealership and reports a problem, describing the symptoms in detail to the customer service representative. If the service desk employee sees the same or similar symptoms in the dealer’s or manufacturer’s database, she knows what to…
Jim Benson
Making mochi naturally in Ecotopia.
Noticing waste serves no purpose. Understanding it does. Whether we seek to manage waste or attempt to eliminate it entirely, we need to know how much of it exists and what form it takes—what is its volume, its shape,…
Paul Scicchitano
There’s an important tool for quality professionals that you may have overlooked in your effort to retain customers in this difficult economy. And unlike Six Sigma, ISO 9001 or 9004, lean, and total quality management (TQM), this tool won’t cost you anything.
“Imagine you are a customer. You’…
Consider the most fundamental of measurements: the measurement of physical distances, as when we use feet and yards, or meters. Once upon a time, a foot must have been thought of as the size of, well, a human foot, without worrying whose foot exactly. These days, we are no longer satisfied with…
Mike Richman
If you’re like me, the point at which “work” most closely approximates “play” is when you get to fire up the right side of your brain and do some out-of-the-box thinking about new projects. What’s exciting, I find, is the opportunity to build something from scratch that has the potential to carry…
Jeff Liker
I recently spoke to an executive from a Canadian manufacturing company that supplies Toyota and has several years of experience implementing the Toyota Production System (TPS). He said his biggest disappointment was that their corporate culture still doesn’t support surfacing problems. People are…
Leslie Parady
Despite double-digit unemployment, advanced manufacturing firms are still searching for highly skilled people to fill open positions. Critical skills are scarce and about to become much scarcer as the skills gap grows and the “Baby Boomers” retire.
Manufacturing is one of four industries…
Tripp Babbitt
Springtime. Birds, sun, warmer weather, and a chance to get the “Z” out for a spin. I drove it at every opportunity during this winter, of which there weren't many (rough winter). As I sat in the cockpit of my machine and turned the key in the ignition, I heard an unfamiliar click and dying of…
Arizona MEP
Vantage Mobility International (VMI) is well on its way to achieving its goal: to become the No. 1 provider of personal mobility transportation solutions by the end of 2010.
“We’re transforming our business from soup to nuts,” says Doug Eaton, president and CEO of VMI. “Our company is growing…
Steven Ouellette
A
hh, measurement system analysis—the basis for all our jobs because, as Lord Kelvin said, “… When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” How interesting it is then, that we who thrive on data so frequently don't…
Environmental Quality Corner with Ken Appel
No quality control system is perfect. Just think “Toyota” in the context of today’s headlines and that should be abundantly clear.
Taking Toyota’s predicament to heart—for any quality manager in any industry—means thinking through where the inherent weaknesses are in production processes and…
Jon Miller
A recent problem-solving team activity made me aware of the importance of knowing when to shift the conversation from “why?” to “how?” To be honest, it’s sometimes hard to know where to draw the line in the “5 Whys” analysis, especially when the root cause approaches the murky territory of human…
Lean Six Sigma methodologies have been around since Henry Ford’s creation of the assembly line in the early 1900s. Yet, companies that turn to lean Six Sigma often find themselves defending against the stigma that it stifles creativity, turns people into robots, or is just another way to get more…
Greg Hutchins
Toyota is in the news daily for its safety-related recalls. It’s sad… no, tragic. How could a company’s quality reputation be diluted so quickly? The pundits are saying that it will take many years to regain its lost quality reputation.
For Toyota, its reputation was its most important asset—…
The powder metallurgy (PM) process offers manufacturers the ability to produce high volumes of complex parts in a cost effective manner. Many powder metallurgy components go through heat-treat processes producing parts with increased strength or wear resistance. To ensure the quality of the heat…
Raissa Carey
Clothing items from world-renowned fashion brands such as Versace, Hermés, Dolce&Gabbana, Hugo Boss, and Trussardi were recently found substandard during a quality check performed by the government of China’s Zhejiang province, a wealthy part of the country on the eastern coast, near Shanghai…
Jon Miller
I received pair of questions about lean logistics over the past few weeks that prompted this article. The questions were “What is the milk run method?” and “What is the role of the water spider?”
The milk run
The milk run is an example of time-fixed, quantity-variable replenishment of…
Eric Clower
In July of 2008, I stepped out of an engineering leadership role and into an operational role. The transition was exciting and overwhelming. While I had been in and around manufacturing for a little more than a decade, I had never operated as a part of supply chain or production management. The…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
I was leaving my last class for the day when I saw my friend, Ken Frankel, working out in the hallway with one of those pistol-grip label makers. I stopped and asked what he was doing.
“The dean asked me to put the room numbers up in Braille so the blind students can find their classrooms…
