All Features
Belinda Jones
Robert James had what it takes to start a manufacturing company focused on oil-free air and gas compressors—history, expertise, and the willingness to take a second chance on a business he knows well. Nearly 40 years ago, his father William James, began producing oil-free air compressors under the…
Steven Ouellette
Over the past couple of articles, we have explored how an incomplete understanding of how SPC limits are calculated can lead to constructing control charts that look strange. But using some of the things I mentioned, hopefully you can see that these “strange” control charts actually reveal quite…
Miriam Boudreaux
Story update 8/21/2009: We corrected an error regarding the function of the accreditation body.
I’ve worked with several companies over the years and dealt with different individuals, different processes, and different levels of ISO 9001 understanding. However, when an organization is…
David C. Crosby
If you are not actively selling quality, you’re missing the boat. Quality (both goodness and conformance), should be sold inside and outside of your company. A song from an old Broadway musical says, “How are you going to conquer the world if nobody knows you’re there?” Good question.
Selling…
IBS America
Madico, the world’s preeminent manufacturer of metalized, coated, and laminated films, has been producing high quality manufactured film systems since 1903. Located in Woburn, Massachusetts, the hi-tech ISO 9001-certified firm has more than 170 employees.
A quality and compliance management…
Stewart Anderson
Today, more than ever, the quest for productivity, quality, and speed has spawned a significant number of techniques and tools: lean manufacturing or service, business process improvement; Six Sigma, total quality management, and so forth. Although the operational improvements resulting from these…
Geoff Bilau
Mario Angeles was stuck. His family-operated machine shop, Angeles Precision Engineering LLC, was busy enough with work farmed out to it by larger shops, but Angeles had been repeatedly rebuffed in his attempts to secure a long-term contract on his own; especially one from the “Big Four” aerospace…
Barry Johnson
You see it all the time. After an initial flurry of excitement and support, an organization’s operational excellence effort bogs down. Regardless of the tools or methodologies used, passion dies down and focus gets diverted to other issues. It doesn’t matter if a company utilizes lean, Six Sigma,…
Davis Balestracci
W. Edwards Deming has been dead for almost 16 years. In my opinion, he and Joseph Juran were the true quality giants of the 20th century. No one seems to talk about Deming much any more except to relate stories from the past and pine for the “good ol’ Deming 4-day seminar days.” (I don’t. Nor do I…
David Boghossian
As the founder of PowerSteering and a practitioner in strategic management and continuous improvement for more than 25 years, I have seen my share of management fads come and go, and even been in the room when some of them were created.
There were quality circles and total quality management…
Esteve Garriga
Real estate bubble, subprime mortgages, financial system, stock markets, and finally, Main Street. The deepest crisis in decades is here, monopolizing media’s headlines, freezing our economies and strongly affecting us not only as citizens (or should I say consumers?) but also as quality…
Li Zongming
Design of experiments (DOE) is a crucial tool in Six Sigma quality management and its application is widespread in Japan; nevertheless, many manufacturing companies in other countries have not formally adopted it because of its complex concepts and costs. As a matter of fact, the essence of the…
Andreas Eberhard
Modern equipment can be sensitive to brief disturbances on utility power mains. Electrical systems are subject to a wide variety of power quality problems that can interrupt production processes, affect sensitive equipment, and cause downtime, scrap, and capacity losses. The most common…
William Tandler
Formatting constraints prevent us from formatting this article in a way that might make it easier for the reader to understand. If you have problems understanding the web version of this article, download a pdf by clicking here.
--Editor
1. Introduction
In March 2009 the ASME released a new…
Raissa Carey
I
f you’ve been to Starbucks lately, you probably noticed the fast-paced employees working their java magic as they take orders from customers in line, not at the register, so that baristas can start the order, and sometimes finish it, before the customer even pays for it.
Yes, I’m all for…
Bill Kalmar
T
hose of us who were fortunate enough to avoid the swine flu or so-called pandemic several months ago, may have another opportunity this autumn. Reports are that another strain of the dreaded flu will emerge and the drums of fear and persuasion are already beating—fear that thousands of people…
Davis Balestracci
Do top managers still view financial performance as the sole indicator of success, despite mouthing platitudes about dazzled customers and fulfilled employees? Is there a point when reductions are done excessively in the name of squeezing out a few more percentage points of profit, moving…
Miriam Boudreaux
Well, a simple answer is no, you don’t need a consultant to achieve ISO 9001 certification. In fact, many companies achieve ISO 9001 on their own, by appointing key employees to the task. The implications, however, of trying to implement a system on your own can be a set back to your business if…
Donald J. Wheeler
The symptoms of leptokurtophobia are (1) routinely asking if your data are normally distributed and (2) transforming your data to make them appear to be less leptokurtic and more “mound shaped.” If you have exhibited either of these symptoms then you need to read this article.
The origins of…
Samar Azmashly
(Eurojar: Damascus, Al-Hayat) -- Syria has decided to open its economy to the world after long years of centralized economy and to broaden its economic options east and west. Despite the opposition of the United States, it is also striving to join the World Trade Organization (WTO), which includes…
As quality professionals, we find ourselves in a never-ending search for breakdowns in systems, targeting opportunities for improvement with a relentless eye on the ever-out-of-reach but always-in-sight goal of total quality. Today, quality has multiple roles from assuring product quality,…
What does an innovator do when existing methods of calibrating a critical environment pressure sensor are cumbersome and produce shoddy results? Richard Deyoe and Stephen Stout, ASRC Aerospace meteorologists based at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, decided to design and build their own calibration…
Bill Kalmar
Sometimes in our attempt to correct a quality oversight we end up creating more havoc than if we had done just nothing. Looking for problems in an otherwise smooth running operation can result in confusion and, in the case I am about to describe, can have adverse consequences on hundreds of people…
It was her first flight. Her parents had finally settled a bitter divorce resulting in her dad moving three states away. The 10-year-old was nervous about pretty much everything. As soon as she was settled in her seat, after being handed off to a flight attendant, the pilot announced there would…
David C. Crosby
When I say quality manager, of course I’m talking about the department he or she manages as well.
I’ve been in the “quality business” for fifty years now. That’s right, fifty years. Much of my career—from source inspector to quality engineer, to corporate director of quality—was spent in other…
