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I’m Thinking Quality
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…
Small-Scale Manufacturing
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…
Nurse, I’m Ready for My Cappuccino!
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…
Nurse, I’m Ready for My Cappuccino!
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…
A Dose of Reality
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…
8 Ways to Wow Your Customers
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…
Quickly, While You Have Time
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…
Performance Evaluations
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…
The Equity in Quality
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…
Have You Heard the One About . . .?
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…
Sweet Surroundings
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,…
Quality Fade
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…
Quality Hypocrisy
Mike Micklewright
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways.”by Michael Jackson Question: What did the registrar auditor do after informing his client that he wasn’t allowed to give advice? Answer: He gave them advice. I like to listen to Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.”…
IT Governance and Compliance
Bipin Roy
Story update 11/1/2010: We had the incorrect author shown for this story. The author is Bipin Roy.   Welcome to the information technology world of governance boards, compliance councils, Sarbanes Oxley, and audit committees that continually invent stringent rules and regulations to make the…
Telling the Truth
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
We recently lost two great American authors, Kurt Vonnegut and David Halberstam. I liked them because they told the truth. At least their truth agreed with my truth, and it seems like the truth of a great many other people.I first became aware of Kurt Vonnegut in my late teens, a time when I…
Aspects of Baldrige
For nearly 20 years, the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence have proven themselves time and again to be a path to exceptional organizational performance. Used in more than 70 countries around the world, the seven categories of the criteria are often seen as essential for excellence. What’…
The Ritz-Carlton Mystique
Bill Kalmar
Whenever I enter a Ritz-Carlton hotel, I know “I’m not in Mediocreville anymore!”  Walking through those doors transports me to a world unparalleled in service, with guest amenities and services consistently beyond my expectations. Unlike the Wizard of Oz, the hotel is everything it purports to be…
Process Capability
Douglas C. Fair
I frequently hear discussions among engineers, managers, and higher-ups concerning process capability, an alphabet soup of indexes and three-letter designations. The indexes are bandied about as though a single number communicates knowledge, understanding, and certainty. My experience is that this…
A Quality Lesson from Hopeulikit
Craig Cochran
A few years ago, I had the good fortune of doing some consulting with B&C Specialty Products in Hopeulikit, Georgia. B&C does light manufacturing, primarily plastic molding and assembly, and they also distribute imported products produced by companies in the Far East. They have…
Eight Petals of a Quality Flower
Prasad Nair
Quality and customer focus have always been topmost strategic weapons in the arsenal of successful corporations, which nurture strategic initiatives like a gardener looks after a garden. It’s quite an imaginative thought to see the resemblance of the deployment of a quality system to…
Forget SAP, Run Down to Staples
I recently got a call from the owner of a local manufacturing company asking my advice on whether to implement SAP.  This is a single-site, $5 million operation with one nice, big, contiguous manufacturing floor, making rather uncomplicated widgets that have a raw material lead time of a couple…
Can You Hear Me Now?
Bill Kalmar
Organizations that provide spectacular customer service always keep their line people informed of new developments or offers that will improve a process, and of glitches in the system that may have an adverse effect on customers. Similarly, great customer service means being flexible to the needs…
The Mother of (5S) Invention
Mike Micklewright
Question:Why was the son of an accountant for a U.S. manufacturing company forbidden to name his dog Fifo? Answer: His Dad told him that all four-letter words starting with F are bad. Last Tuesday, I performed another long, exhausting, internal audit with a client near my hometown in Chicago…
Customer Relationship Management and ISO 9001
Thomas R. Cutler
Customer relationship management (CRM) usually refers to sales activities, and CRM software is commonly purchased, and occasionally used, to track potential customers, existing customers and sales activities. “Contract manufacturing is unquestionably a relationship business. CRM must manage the…
Customer Relationship Management and ISO 9001
Thomas R. Cutler
Customer relationship management (CRM) usually refers to sales activities, and CRM software is commonly purchased, and occasionally used, to track potential customers, existing customers and sales activities. “Contract manufacturing is unquestionably a relationship business. CRM must manage the…

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