All Features
Fred Mason
Using the eye is visual. The use of magnified imaging by eye or with a camera is a common part of manufacturing. Some of that use is for inspection. Some is for measurement. Some is online. Some is offline. There are vision-inspection systems. There are video-inspection systems. There…
Dennis Bradley
Previous columns have addressed some of the topics that provide a foundation for understanding the scope and complexity of the worldwide movement to achieve hazardous-substance free (HSF) products and production processes. This month, let’s take a look at how people have been behaving and why they’…
Denise Robitaille
Auditing clause 7.3 of the design and development section of ISO 9001 can be a challenge for the auditor and the auditee. Unlike purchasing, manufacturing, shipping or order processing, it’s rarely carried out on a regular or consistent schedule. The level of activity ranges from the…
Craig Cochran
Last year 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 about…
Since “Sick Sigma” was published in April 2006, the public has become much more aware of Six Sigma’s failings. There is little risk today of being burnt at the stake for pointing out Six Sigma’s many faults. Last fall, even Dilbert discredited Six Sigma, pointing out that Six Sigma…
Praveen Gupta
A few years ago, lean thinking came to light. It sounded similar to what I had learned about the “pull” system. I wondered why we renamed cycle time reduction, or just in time (JIT), “lean.” Cycle time reduction was easy to understand and related to responsiveness to customer demands and waste…
Bill Kalmar
Have you noticed that the airwaves no longer carry informative, unadulterated news anymore? “Breaking News” has become the standard, thus all news is presented in an excited, almost breathless, tone. We at home now question the urgency of any segment, particularly when we discover that a cat…
Thomas R. Cutler
The hiring practices of manufacturing companies have become increasingly lean. The old processes of advertising, screening, interviewing, hiring and training are riddled with waste; it’s both too expensive and extremely time-consuming. The hiring shift to staffing companies has become increasingly…
Thomas R. Cutler
The hiring practices of manufacturing companies have become increasingly lean. The old processes of advertising, screening, interviewing, hiring and training are riddled with waste; it’s both too expensive and extremely time-consuming. The hiring shift to staffing companies has become increasingly…
John Toon
Georgia Tech professor Zhong Lin Wang holds a sample nanowire array that can be used to power nanometer scale devices. Georgia Tech Photo: Gary Meek Researchers have developed a new technique for powering nanometer-scale devices…
Rick Ringlespaugh
A tier-two automotive supplier faces the challenge of interacting with customers and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) on many different programs. For each of more than 100 programs the company is involved in, it must submit a detailed quality plan and then be prepared to change the plan as…
An introduction to Six Sigma for direct marketing Six Sigma methods, used correctly and thoroughly for continuous improvement of direct marketing sales, can produce remarkable results:1. At a university work-force education program, total registrations doubled in three years through…
Steven Ouellette
Today marks a milestone in our countdown of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks. A subjective and unimportant milestone to be sure, but a milestone nonetheless—we have now reached the halfway point. Forget the New Year, this is cause for celebration.
To commemorate this trivial event, let us turn…
Nicholas Muthuri
Lean was initially started in manufacturing and production departments, and various efforts are being made to apply its principles in service industries. In a highly industrialized world spurred by high technological changes, businesses are forced to change their strategies to a more lean way…
Fred Mason
It’s New Year’s resolution time. Many of the things we resolve to do in the New Year are measurable—lose weight, run farther or faster, quit smoking, do more of some things and less of other things. All can be measured. But how do you measure success (or failure)? What do you measure…
Denise Robitaille
Years ago, when my kids were in middle school, I volunteered as a coach for the Future Problem Solvers, a competitive academic program designed to help young people develop the creative thinking skills they will need as tomorrow’s leaders.While the bulk of the time was spent teaching…
QC 080000 IECQ HSPM calls for a process management approach to the management and reduction of hazardous substances in products and processes. It utilizes familiar conventions from the ISO standards world, while calling for a full review and understanding of the technical issues that…
Mike Micklewright
In the past several months, registrar auditors strongly recommended to three former or current clients that they develop and install turtle diagrams for each of their processes. Two auditors from one registrar actually taught a former client how to develop a turtle diagram during a surveillance…
Praveen Gupta
Six Sigma was officially launched January 1, 1987, at Motorola, and it took more than nine months to make Six Sigma real. Twenty years later, Six Sigma has grown from a good baby methodology into a mature system that affects thousands of corporations and millions of people and that saves billions…
Bill Kalmar
Those of us in the acting profession hear those words regularly at the end of a particularly grueling day from a director attempting to extract perfection from a group of actors. (I’ll discuss my own celluloid exploits later).It’s appropriate to utter similar words at the end of 2006—a grueling,…
T. J. Becker
In our increasingly wireless world, the air is chock-full of electromagnetic signals carrying data from one place to another. Yet, while new wireless technologies advance our options in security, commerce and entertainment, they also produce interference that may cause problems for…
Steven Ouellette
In this installment of my arbitrary and capricious list of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks (SSST), let’s talk about an error that is perhaps less frequently made now than it has been, but is still common. I call this error SSST No.6, constraining your improvement activities to…
Douglas C. Fair
If you read my previous two columns, you’re well educated on the top 10 mistakes that manufacturers make when implementing statistical process control (SPC). Several of these mistakes are indicative of what I call the “check-box mentality.” This mentality is typically the result of an…
Fred Mason
Continuing last month’s topic of temperature effects on measurements, what about temperature compensation? Some measuring systems claim increased accuracy with the usually optional temperature compensation. What’s that? What’s it supposed to do? And does it do what it claims to do?
Remember that…
Last month’s column provided background on the International Electrotechnical Commission, one of only three standards-setting bodies recognized by the World Trade Organization. Readers may have asked, “So what?” The answer is that one of the three “schemes” within the IEC has provided…