All Features
Jon Miller
I was flipping through some Japanese books on sayings and speeches given by Taiichi Ohno looking for inspiration for a new article when I found the following passage:
“Within the Toyota Production System, a lack of ability to do kaizen becomes a critical flaw. Does this mean that if you do…
Scott Paton
There’s been much ado about this brave new digital world. Newspapers, magazines, and books are fast becoming mere electrons flickering before our eyes on computer monitors, smart phones, and e-book readers. It’s an exciting time in human history—truly a revolution in how information is gathered,…
Tom Gaskell
If you are buying two or three complex assemblies per month from a contract manufacturer, it would be reasonable to check every one carefully; there’s a lot that could go wrong. However, if you are buying 100,000 simple subassemblies per month it makes no sense for you to 100-percent check them…
Joby George
The FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) posted a notice of draft guidance that will require all medical device adverse-event reports to be submitted electronically. While the process of electronic submission of data is a more efficient and traceable means for reporting, it…
NIST
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Finally, an optical frequency comb that visibly lives up to its name.
Scientists at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the United States have built the first optical frequency comb—a tool for…
Craig Cochran
Product certifications have exploded in recent years. Products ranging from pine lumber to children’s toys carry some sort of certification, and the organizations issuing certifications are as diverse as the products themselves. What are the practical values of these certifications? What are the…
Jon Miller
I became aware of a truth about lean problem solving and kaizen yesterday while reading an article about 10 internet rules and laws, “Internet rules and laws: the top 10, from Godwin to Poe,” published on the Daily Telegraph’s web site (www.telegraph.co.uk).
4. Skitt’s Law…
Donald J. Wheeler
I
n the past there was only one criterion required to be a good supplier: you had to ship very few nonconforming items. If your proportion of nonconforming items took a turn for the worse then you would be “in trouble,” and you would stay in trouble until your fraction nonconforming dropped…
Jack Healy
Recently released labor market, manufacturing, and consumer data indicate an economy steadily emerging from the long recession. One of the most gratifying indications of this change was the Associated Industries of Massachusetts Business Confidence index showing a continued gain of 1.8 points in…
Georgia Institute of Technology
(Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute: Atlanta) -- Debbie Guzman, laboratory director at Athens Regional Medical Center, says that implementing lean principles in a health care setting is especially challenging. Traditionally used in manufacturing, lean refers to an operational strategy…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
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ix Sigma and lean provide tools for process improvement. Most of today’s business improvement programs can trace their roots back to a lean or a Six Sigma heritage. In general, these process improvement methodologies are considered advances from total quality management (TQM) and other methods…
Rickard Lindhé
ABB of Västerås, Sweden, is a pioneer among world industrial robot manufacturers when it comes to using laser-based measuring technology to ensure robot precision. ABB, with an installed base of 125,000 robots, stands out as the world’s largest in the arena of industrial automation. And Leica…
Bill Kalmar
In ice hockey parlance a hat trick is when a player scores three goals in a single game. A perfect hat trick is when a player scores three goals in succession—a rare feat. But of course being from Detroit, the home of our renowned Red Wings, we are accustomed to these feats of talent.
A hotel…
Metris
As Europe sets ambitious targets for energy that is clean and inexhaustible, wind energy is predicted to meet approximately 25 percent of Europe’s power demand within 25 years. Today’s wind turbines measure 70–150 meters and feature bladed rotor diameters of 100 meters or more, translating into a…
When I started Productivity Inc. Press in 1979, quality of work life (QWL) was a very popular symbol for American unionism. Unions wanted workers to have a quality of work life, however, I don’t believe they understood what quality of work life really meant. The unions wanted workers to have a…
Mike Micklewright
In one of my recent Quality Digest published articles, “Why Root Cause Analysis Sucks in America,” I provided a list of 10 reasons why root cause analysis (RCA) in the United States is so awful. Number 2 on the list of 10 is: 2. We don’t practice it at home. Why should we do it at work?
More…
National Committee for Quality Assurance
(NCQA: Washington) -- “The State of Health Care Quality 2009,” an annual report, now in its 13th year, provided by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), finds that the quality of U.S. health care was virtually stagnant in 2008, a disturbing slowdown after a decade of improvements.…
Dave Maxham
A joint project of NCMS called Volumetric Accuracy for Large Machine Tools (VALMT), partnering Automated Precision, Boeing, Siemens and Mag Cincinnati, has pioneered an innovative process and established new methodology in volumetric error compensation for large machine tools. Volumetric error…
Michelle LaBrosse
A couple of years ago, I was featured on CNN pouring out the contents of my backpack. The story was about how I ran my business, virtually, from wherever I was with the trusty items carried on my back.
As you might imagine, there were all the usual suspects: my laptop, iPhone, digital camera,…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
The financials of an enterprise are a result of the integration and interaction of its processes, not of individual procedures in isolation. Using a whole-system perspective, one realizes that the output of a system is a function of its weakest link or constraint. If you're not careful, you can be…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
At the 2009 National Association for Healthcare Quality conference, I gave a speech on lean Six Sigma simplified. At the end of the session, one of the attendees asked, "If Six Sigma is so easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?" My answer: Because we’ve made it too complicated, expensive, and hard…
Jim Jubelirer
Story update 10/23/2009: The link to the prerecorded webinar mentioned at the end of the article has been corrected.
The U.S. economy runs on service. From front-line service in transactional industries such as retail, banking, hospitality and food service, to technical support for high-tech…
Joe Calloway
The Acme Widget Co. needed to increase revenue and profits, so they undertook an initiative to attract new customers: They launched a new advertising campaign and offered special deals to first-time buyers. They were initially delighted to see a significant and immediate increase in new customers…
Paul Scicchitano
There’s one class trip that stands out in my mind to this day. It wasn’t so much the thrill of missing a day in our suburban Philadelphia all-boys school—although that was definitely high on my list for wanting to visit Pennsylvania’s state capital in the first place.
No, it was really the…
Steve Arbogast
A quality management system is a framework of processes and procedures that are used to ensure that an organization can fulfill all tasks required to achieve its goals, strategies, and objectives.
The majority of businesses around the world have some sort of well-defined quality management…
