All Features
Douglas C. Fair
I don’t believe in ghosts. Yet quality professionals chase them every day. Why? Because erroneous control limits tell them to. Control limits should be statistically based, 100-percent reliable, and reveal natural process variability. Hence, they should help to uncover unnatural events. Yet when I…
Peter A. Quinter
The recent rash of highly publicized recalls and alerts on Chinese-made toothpaste, tires, and toys has shaken confidence in the safety of Chinese imports, with the media calling for consumer boycotts and stricter trade regulations to discourage U.S. businesses from dealing with China.
The danger…
Bill Kalmar
Sitting in my home office contemplating the upcoming holidays reminds me that I have yet to submit my wish list to Santa. It’s a long list, crammed with lots of items for me, and I have included some requests for you, the readers. Of course it’s also an opportunity for me to rant about some…
Mike Micklewright
Question: How is lean like making whoopee?
Answer: I don’t know. I just wanted you to open the article. However …
Send me your funny answer. I’ll choose the best answer, that’s not too dirty or offensive, and perhaps it’ll be published in my next article two months from now. You’ll be famous! The…
Terry Kaytor
Quality’s commonly accepted definition along the lines of “meeting or exceeding customer expectations” falls short. A more complete definition of quality should also consider achieving our potential, which can exist at a personal level or at a business level. Our ability to achieve both potentials…
Rudolf Melik
Our spherical world has been declared flat once again, and you’ve likely found that your old way of doing business fits about as well as the suit you wore 30 pounds ago. Many operations scattered to the four corners of the globe, and the attitudes of the workforce have undergone a similar shift.…
Bill Kalmar
An old saying has guided me through the years—“Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.” A recent article in the Wall Street Journal in the Cubicle Corner section was written by a good friend of mine, Jared Sandberg. In “Bad At Complying? You Might Just Be a…
Douglas C. Fair
I’ve been privileged to work in the statistical-software industry for the last 10 years, and frequently I receive phone calls from professionals who need information or guidance on statistical methods. Overwhelmingly, they call with excellent questions. Their interest and enthusiasm are exciting,…
People in an organization usually move from one project to another, repeating the same mistakes, dealing with similar crises, despairing over underperforming team members, and more. Over and over. Some people learn informally what made one project successful and another unsuccessful, but knowledge…
Juana Bordas
Not only is the world getting flatter, it’s becoming more colorful. As globalization becomes a reality, more and more companies will employ people of every race, nationality, religious background, and age group. These people will work side by side in the same office building, others a hemisphere…
Stephen C. Welch
Many companies view production maintenance as a necessary evil, and through the years, manufacturers have simply accepted maintenance as-is and made little little or no effort to improve it. But some forward-thinking manufacturers, committed to lean processes, and their outsourced maintenance…
Bill Kalmar
Since 1994, the American Customer Satisfaction Index, under the auspices of the National Quality Resource Center at the University of Michigan, has been the standard for measuring consumer satisfaction. The index measures satisfaction with 200 companies in 43 industries and is the most…
Mike Micklewright
Question: What kind of dishes are made out of lead?
Answer: China
Many of us in U.S. industry have forgotten the principles of our dearly departed quality guru, W. Edwards Deming, since his passing in 1993. Since then our quality levels as a country have grown only slightly. At the Society of Anti-…
Fred L. Eargle
It probably started when my favorite diner served my coffee cold three visits in a row. “Why can’t I get a hot cup of coffee?” I thought. “This is the Quality Diner.” After all, I always left a nice tip. In fact, I had become so accustomed to leaving the suggested tip, that I didn’t connect it with…
David Blanchard
Not long ago, the economic outlook for small- and medium-size manufacturers in the United States looked problematic. The latest China-U.S. trade talks had ended with little progress on the key issue of the undervalued Yuan, and slow economic growth had led to a decrease in optimism among…
Bill Kalmar
Being confined to a hospital bed can bring more discomfort than the malady that prompted the admission. Crowded rooms with other patients in various stages of illness, tasteless meals delivered with apathy, loud announcements for lost doctors, and a staff more concerned about planning their next…
Bill Kalmar
Being confined to a hospital bed can bring more discomfort than the malady that prompted the admission. Crowded rooms with other patients in various stages of illness, tasteless meals delivered with apathy, loud announcements for lost doctors, and a staff more concerned about planning their next…
Scott Deming
Today’s world is filled with savvy consumers. They know how to find the best deals. They’re up on all the latest trends. If there’s a hot new product on the market, they don’t want to miss it. (Remember those iPhone lines!). A remarkable blend of exuberance and skepticism leaves many business…
Douglas C. Fair
Just weeks after earning my industrial statistics degree, I hired on with a major aerospace company. My first “real” job entailed working with engineers and operators to deploy statistical process control (SPC) in a large machine shop. I quickly found out that the warm, coddling confines of a…
Anthony V. Fasolo
As a regional director for loss prevention for the Marriott Corp. in the 1980s, I attended an “Insight To Time Management” seminar conducted by Charles Hobbs of Salt Lake City. The ideas in this article I got from that seminar and from more than 40 years of personal experience, with Marriott and…
Fred L. Eargle
Meet Chet, industrial engineer and manager of a small manufacturing department. He just came to this company a few months ago. This is his second job since graduation. He was a line supervisor for about a year at his previous company. He felt that job was too confining and prevented him from using…
Dan Coughlin
If you have only $10,000 to improve your business, should you pour it into a marketing initiative or a performance initiative? I vote for improving performance every time. The long-term payback will be extraordinary.
The quality you provide to customers is the value that they receive from the…
David Weldon
This article is reprinted with permission from the July 2007 issue of ExecDigital. At age 160, the New England Confectionery Co. is the oldest multiline candy company in the United States and one of the newest. Four years ago, the popular candy manufacturer embraced lean manufacturing practices,…
Bill Kalmar
How many times have you viewed a compelling story on TV, or read a newspaper or magazine account of an investigation of wrongdoing and then never discovered the outcome? Mass media tantalize us with sensational reports, and after the hoopla the stories just fade away.As I lay here recently in my…
Paul Midler
Numerous news stories this past month have focused on concerns about the quality and safety of certain Chinese exports. In this opinion piece, Paul Midler discusses “quality fade” in China, which he defines as “the deliberate and secretive habit of widening profit margins through a reduction in…
