All Features
Peter J. Sherman
It is widely known among quality and process improvement practitioners that the lack of a clearly defined scope or charter is perhaps the leading cause for projects not getting started or completed on time and within budget. What are other causes? From my experience, the No. 2 cause for restarting…
Davis Balestracci
Click here to read part 1 of this series.
Analytic statistical methods are in very strong contrast with what is normally taught in most statistics textbooks, which describe the problem as one of “accepting” or “rejecting” hypotheses. In the real world of quality improvement, we must look for…
David C. Crosby
Long before Six Sigma; long before SPC; long before ISO, TQM, TQC, ZD, and Mil-Q-9858A there were quality products. Quality meaning both goodness and defect-free. Look at furniture made around the time of the America Revolution. It was excellent. Fine inlay, precision joints, superior finishing.…
James Odom
In “The Power of Observation—Part 1,” we learned that a good portion of problem solving should be devoted to a thorough understanding of what’s going on before any corrective action steps are taken.
In many cases, too much time is spent on proposing various solutions before the problem has been…
The New Yorker magazine featured a cartoon showing a discussion between a salesman and his sales manager. The despondent salesman asked, “I know you’re always telling us to sell the sizzle and not the steak, Mr. Bollinger, but just what is the sizzle of a 90º elbow, flexible-copper fitting?”…
Larry Carlberg
You have a carefully crafted clay prototype made by a top design artist. Each detail is exquisite and you want to make sure every last one is molded into the finished article. Contact measurement isn't an option, because the piece is too complex and too malleable for touch probes. You need…
Steve Arbogast
It can be extremely difficult if not impossible to have an antiquated, document or paper-based quality management system (QMS) work for a company. To possess, build, and support this type of management system burdens the organization.
On the other hand, a QMS that is electronic, linked, or…
Mike Micklewright
Mike Micklewright's pun of the month (we can only hope there is just one)
Question: When Potsie and Fonzie tried to trick Richie into handing over his date to Ralph Malph in exchange for a better looking girl, what did they call the deal?
Answer: A Ponzie scheme.
Training within industry…
Bill Kalmar
As I listened to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford struggle through tears and sobs as he described his sordid, illicit affair with a woman from Argentina, I concluded that he must have been listening to the new Kenny Chesney song “Out Last Night” with these opening words:
We went out last…
Donald J. Wheeler
Some authors recommend that you have to wait until you have the range chart “in control” before you can compute the limits for the average chart or the X chart. Why this is not true will be the subject of this column.
To illustrate the issues we will once again use the NB10 data. The 100 values are…
Laurence Finley
One of the earliest quotes I remember from a general manager: “If my manufacturing manager and quality manager weren’t at each other’s throats, then I would be concerned.” At the time, as a young graduate mechanical engineer acting a quality control manager for a small aerospace firm, I thought…
H. James Harrington
I often get assignments at organizations where I am required to take aside a group of people, either within the building facility or off campus, to focus on issues or problems. Typically these groups spend a considerable amount of time to summarize and present a well-defined problem. The next step…
Niagara Transformer is a supplier of transformers that meet the most demanding applications. It has a tradition of supplying transformers for unique applications with unusual specifications and requirements. As an industry leader, Niagara Transformer has successfully completed several quality…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
Organizations have gained much in process improvement from implementing lean practices and Six Sigma projects. However, these efforts did not prevent our financial crisis from occurring. Lean Six Sigma, total quality management, and other process improvement methods have helped organizations…
Davis Balestracci
This is an expanded version of an article that Balestracci wrote for Quality Digest in December 2007.
--Editor
I discovered a wonderful unpublished paper by David and Sarah Kerridge several years ago (Click here to get a pdf). Its influence on my thinking has been nothing short of profound. As…
William A. Kappele
US Synthetic manufactures high quality polycrystalline diamond compacts (PDCs) used in drilling for oil and natural gas. PDCs are manufactured with a sintering process that fuses premium saw-grade industrial diamond crystals under a heat of approximately 3,000 degrees Farenheit and a pressure of…
Geomagic
Besides the fact that it flies, an airship—better known as a blimp—has about as much in common with other aircraft as a whale has with fellow sea creatures.
Among a blimp’s unique design elements are custom fan blades used to cool its engine. The fan blades were especially problematic for…
Bob Bridges Ph.D.
Many industries, including the automotive and aerospace industries, must precisely measure the three-dimensional features of large objects. An increasingly popular way to do this is with the laser tracker, a device first introduced in the late 1980s. As its name suggests, the laser tracker…
David C. Crosby
The most important element in producing a quality product or service is the attitude of the people doing the work—not only the worker—but the attitude of all levels of management. Employee attitude about the product, about the work, about the boss, and about the company will pretty well determine…
Ben Marguglio
Human error is behavior that is wholly expected to achieve a desired result (in accordance with some standard) but that does not. A causal factor is anything that yields an occurrence resulting in an undesired effect or anything that exacerbates the level of severity of the undesired effect.
Why is…
Bill Kalmar
June 21 marked the beginning of summer, also known as the summer solstice. As a major celestial event, the summer solstice results in the longest day and the shortest night of the year. From here on out, we will have less daylight. It’s over folks, and frankly I haven’t even donned my bathing suit…
Minitab LLC
A $1 billion annual budget may sound ample, but a few years ago, the costs of services ranging from law enforcement to cleaning county buildings had squeezed the government of Erie County, New York, to its limit. Residents faced a painful choice: raise taxes or slash services. But Chris Collins,…
The emergence of green technology and increased environmental awareness has prompted a paradigm shift in the way companies think about the design of their products. Because robust designs mean creating products to meet customer and societal needs, it is important that all enterprises rethink these…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
In his book Data Sanity: A Quantum Leap to Unprecedented Results (Medical Group Management Association, 2009) author Davis Balestracci passionately teaches a new way of thinking about improvement and integrating quality into the fabric of your organization.
How often do you find an expert who has…
Steven Ouellette
One of the most useful diagnostic tools for understanding what is going on in a process is the statistical process control chart (SPC). This is also a frequently misunderstood tool, and these misunderstandings lead to misdirected effort during a Six Sigma process, resulting in lost time and money…
