All Features
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…
H. James Harrington
World War III has begun. This time it’s not a war of battleships, bullets and bombs—this is an economic war. The weapons are televisions, steel, cars, and clothes. This is a war where we have no allies. Every nation is out to capture more of its share of the U.S. and world’s market. We are being…
R. Eric Reidenbach Ph.D.
Pick up any article or book, attend any conference on Six Sigma, or talk with any Black Belt or Master Black Belt and you will hear the Six Sigma gospel about the importance of the voice of the customer. For example, in their book Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management Strategy Revolutionizing the…
Julia M. Rahn Ph.D.
A
debate exists as to whether making an error is the same as making a mistake. In baseball, it's an error if a fielder misplays a ball in a way that allows a batter or base runner to reach one or more additional bases, when such an advance should have been prevented given ordinary effort by the…
Alex Lucas
For decades, traditional touch probes on coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) have been the gold standard by which parts have been inspected and verified. However, this time-consuming process becomes an even bigger drain on a quality department’s valuable resources as the parts it is charged with…
Tom Pyzdek
Today I received a sales call from a person interested in becoming a certified Six Sigma Black Belt. He had what I call a "can't do" personality. This is the diametric opposite of the "can do" person. This type of individual looks for reasons why a particular thing can't be done. How about a…
Tracy Willis
Do you hear Six Sigma professionals express frustration that the organization does not support their efforts?
Are there department heads in your life who have complained that their Six Sigma professionals are not delivering the needed results? And that each project is too time-consuming?…
Aaron Sabino
The aerospace sector has the most stringent quality standards in the world. The big name manufacturers and their suppliers are constantly adapting new technologies to speed up inspection while maintaining tolerances that are tighter than most other businesses. With laser trackers becoming smaller…
Georgia Institute of Technology
In 2008, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta saw more than 170,000 patients across all three of its three emergency departments. That kind of volume demands an effective and efficient process, and staff spent the past three years developing a master facility plan to do just that. However, moving into…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
When I started at General Motors (GM) in the 1960s, we were the biggest and best company in the United States and most of the world. As a matter of fact, I believe that only a couple of state industries in Russia surpassed the number of people that GM employed. Many of us, observing the poor…
Bill Kalmar
Before some of you fact checkers write me to explain that locoism is a disease cattle contract by eating loco weed and a malady not inflicted on humans, let me assure you that there are some in our society who dine on this delicacy every day, based on their actions. There are a lot of loco service…
Tom Pyzdek
In a recent post on the Evolving Excellence blog, Bill Waddell tackles one of my pet peeves: activity-based costing, or ABC. Few things do more harm to lean Six Sigma than this method of accounting. In fact, it is my opinion that the accounting systems used by U.S. businesses are responsible for a…
Stewart Anderson
Just the other week, I had the privilege of visiting with three or four companies that were doing lean process improvement. In every visit, each company invited me into their “war room” where they took great pride in showing me their process and value-stream maps and the other trappings of their…
Imagine a soldier's uniform made of a special fabric that allows him to look in all directions and identify threats that are to his side or even behind him. In work that could turn such science fiction into reality, MIT researchers have developed light-detecting fibers that, when woven into a web…
Stacey Corbin
Joyalukkas Jewellery is one of the world’s favorite jewelers, with a retail chain of more than 70 showrooms across the Middle East, India, and Europe. The company has grown over the past two decades to become a household name for the wide range of contemporary, ethnic, and traditional jewelry it…
Matt Edison
"Innovate at all costs!" This is the exhortation from innumerable business articles and best-selling business books. These authors describe how to innovate but fail to include how to find the time to innovate. What's needed is a tool to help find the time to think about and act on innovation. The…
