All Features
Stacey Corbin
You just finished your audit, and your registrar has handed you a brand-new certificate. Now, what do you do to make sure everyone knows about it? Most likely you’ll send an e-mail out to the entire company, prepare a press release, post an announcement on your web site, and so on. But sometimes,…
Michelle LaBrosse
We all have one hiding over there in the groan zone. It’s the unfinished project that lives in a strange sort of limbo. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us in The Black Swan (Random House, 2007), the longer a project goes unfinished, there is an exponential increase in the time to finish the…
Chet Marchwinski
Ihave had a big smile on my face for much of the last month because I’ve had the opportunity to visit progressive organizations on three continents to look at their efforts to create lean value streams.
Walking through any process, good or bad, seems to put a smile on my face for one of two…
Denise Robitaille
T
was the night before Christmas and all through the plant
Not a technician was stirring, no quality rants.
Performance charts were pinned to the cork board with care,
In hopes that, their progress, people would share.
The micrometers were nestled, all snug and encased
Protected from…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
After a meal at a local Chinese restaurant, my fortune cookie said, “If you keep too busy learning the tricks of the trade, you may never learn the trade.” When I think about how this applies to Six Sigma, it seems obvious that far too much Six Sigma training is dedicated to the tricks of the…
Cathy Sunshine
The only thing worse for companies than making bad decisions is having a deeply flawed decision-making process. Every business leader faces stressful situations that require immediate action, but the final choices can often by tainted by a destructive trio of hubris, arrogance, and denial. …
Eric Clower
The economic downturn has caused heartache, sleepless nights, fatigue, and excessive stress for many people at all levels of most companies this past year. It was no different for me. The company I work for (an aerospace component manufacturing and repair company) started seeing the downturn in…
Michael Raphael
The year 2009 contains two significant anniversaries within the scientific community: the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his groundbreaking book On the Origin of Species. To honor these milestones, the National…
Davis Balestracci
The economy has become a convenient excuse on which to pin the blame for everything—especially job losses. Well, in the case of quality positions, yes… and no.
A sobering thought: Will the Pareto principle (the 80/20 rule) inevitably apply to the quality profession? I think so. It’s time to “…
BSI
With security breaches on the rise, protecting your organization’s confidential and valuable information assets is one of the most important safety measures your organization can take. The issues surrounding information security involve more than just hackers and malicious software; they can…
Bruce Rosenstein
In a legendary 70-year career, Peter Drucker, “the father of modern management,” revolutionized modern business practices, transforming management theory into a serious discipline. His influence was far-reaching, extending to developments that included decentralization, privatization, and…
Capture 3D
Because of their size, wind turbines are transported in individual parts to their offshore setup destination. Because individual components are manufactured at different sites, they are often put together for the first time at the mounting site on high seas. Therefore, it is necessary to verify…
Jonathan Gilbert
As if it wasn’t difficult enough tightening up the recession ropes, many organizations will soon find themselves reeling as the tide changes, and hiring and production once again swing into full gear. So the challenge becomes how to do more with less now, while preparing for the economic…
Jon Miller
For a group of people who claim to practice management by fact, questioning the as-given condition, we in the lean community have a troubling habit of citing and accepting made-up lean enterprise statistics. In fact, I would say that at least 50 percent of statistics cited about lean have been…
Bill Kalmar
As the holiday season approaches, there are several inevitable occurrences that will try our patience. Along with people jostling in lines, especially before dawn as bargain hunters await the opening of a store, the inevitable NASCAR-like jockeying in the parking lots, out-of-stock merchandise,…
John G. Miller
Outstanding means being superior, striking, exceptional, clearly noticeable—essentially, to stand out. People are attracted to outstanding organizations. They want to buy from them, sell to them, invest in them, volunteer at them, and work for them. And as we close out the first decade of the 21st…
Benny Shaviv
The rapid pace of technological advancement in the last decade has introduced both significant benefits as well as significant challenges to medical device makers. Companies these days are faced with demands of bringing products to market faster and faster, not only to meet sales and market…
David C. Crosby
Education seems to be a never ending problem for the United States. The drop-out rate in some major cities is 50 to 60 percent, or even more. With teacher strikes, tight money, and controversial curriculum, it’s a wonder any of us can read or write, or that we made it to the moon. I just watched…
FARO
Most car drivers enjoy road tunnels without giving a second thought to the years of patient effort that go into the construction. In the case of the new 3.6 km-long, newly opened Vintebro tunnel near Oslo, Norway, in three minutes one can drive through a tunnel that took three years to finish and…
(Sensor Products Inc.: Madison, NJ) -- During tough economic times it is tempting to reduce quality control to cut costs. However Dolph Beyer, an engineer with Mohawk Fine Papers, asserts that doing this is actually counterproductive. He has determined that using pressure indicating sensor film as…
WILLIAM SCHERKENBACH
I’ve spent most of the past two years living in China where I have learned much on how enterprise is managed over there. Many people have said that this century belongs to Asia. That may be, but they have a lot to learn and change before that happens. They cannot depend on cheap rote labor to…
Donald J. Wheeler
The four questions of data analysis are the questions of description, probability, inference, and homogeneity. Any data analyst needs to know how to organize and use these four questions to be able to obtain meaningful and correct results.
The description question
Given a collection of…
Knowledge at Wharton
“Lean” has come to mean an integrated, end-to-end process viewpoint that combines the concepts of waste elimination, just-in-time inventory management, built-in quality, and worker involvement supported by a cultural focus on problem solving. Can such practical principles be applied to innovation…
David Rideout
The field of surface metrology is one of the fastest growing areas of engineering and quality management. Because what happens at the interaction between two surfaces can affect the functionality and life span of a product, understanding the places where contact and interactions occur is vital for…
Steven Ouellette
You know how sometimes you think everyone knows a secret that they haven’t let you in on? Well, I had the opposite happen to me the other day. I assumed everyone knew the purpose for measurement system analysis (MSA), a.k.a. gauge repeatability and reproducibility; but I found out that a number of…
