All Features
Sara Harrison
If you’ve watched Grey’s Anatomy, then you’ve gotten a peek into the complex hierarchies that rule a hospital. Over 17 seasons, the show’s eponymous heroine, Meredith Grey, ascends from a lowly intern to chief of general surgery, learning from the presiding residents and older surgeons along the…
Bryan Christiansen
Many techniques can be used to find the root causes of asset failures and other important events we want to analyze. Fault tree analysis is one of those techniques, and it is being utilized by many different companies to improve system reliability.
This guide aims to give a basic to intermediate…
Harry Hertz
Each year after the Quest for Excellence Conference, I sift through my notes and try to identify themes I have heard in the presentations of the new Baldrige Award recipients. The most recent summary was after the 2019 conference (the 2021 conference included recipients from the last two years).…
Nate Burke
In recent years, the focus and surge in e-commerce has been undeniable. There has been clear evidence of how a lack of online consideration can ultimately result in a brand’s demise, with Debenhams and Topshop just two recent examples. However, the latest moves by online giants, including Amazon,…
Borka Hajdin
It is safe to say that we can drop the word “digital” from digital marketing and just call it marketing. Because we are now officially living in a digital world. In 2020, worldwide online transactions in some sectors increased by 135 percent.
B2B companies that were previously dabbling in digital…
Del Williams
To meet increasingly strict compliance standards, such as the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) and Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), food processors now regularly use adenosine triphosphate (ATP) testing to monitor equipment surfaces for microbial growth. Add to this the need to minimize…
Joseph Near, David Darais
In previous articles we have explored what differential privacy is, how it works, and how to answer questions about data in ways that protect privacy. All of the algorithms we’ve discussed have been demonstrated via mathematical proof to be effective for protecting privacy. However, when…
Gleb Tsipursky
Quality professionals are often told that “failing to plan is planning to fail.” You might be surprised to learn that this phrase is a misleading myth at best and actively dangerous at worst. Making plans is important, but our gut reaction is to plan for the best-case outcomes, ignoring the high…
Knowledge at Wharton
When Wharton management professor Adam Grant sat down to write his new book, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know (Virgin Digital, 2021), he wanted to make the case for why executives should reconsider their approaches to how to manage people in a modern workplace and embrace new…
Nate Burke
It has been more than a year since retailers were forced to temporarily shut their doors or put in place restrictions to limit the in-store experience. Now, as we return to some semblance of normality, it’s essential that trust and brand value are retained for those operating a digital-only…
Isaac Maw
In 2017, in response to a Boston Dynamics video, billionaire Elon Musk infamously tweeted, “This is nothing. In a few years, that bot will move so fast you’ll need a strobe light to see it. Sweet dreams....”
Whether or not Musk’s ominous prediction comes true for Atlas (the robot in the video), he…
NIST
Aresearch team has found that a method commonly used to skirt one of metal 3D printing’s biggest problems may be far from a silver bullet.
For manufacturers, 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, provides a means of building complex-shaped parts that are more durable, lighter and more…
Lee Seok Hwai
As a young man of 20 in his first job at a state-owned enterprise in China, Guoli Chen found senior management fascinating, but not in a good way. His boss’s boss did very little—unless one counts reading newspapers, drinking tea, and gossiping as work. “I wondered whether anyone could replace him…
Adam J. Fleisher
In an essay titled “The end of artefacts,” Nobel laureate and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) fellow William D. Phillips details how scientists came to realize the original vision of the metric system, or the International System of Units (SI)—a system of units “for all times…
Ryan E. Day
Automation in the fresh produce sector is standard fare these days. What may not be so standard are the containers that get the produce from farm to market. The quality of produce containers has a direct impact on the quality of the produce—and maximizing profit margins for produce distributors and…
Ryan McKenna
To date, this series focused on relatively simple data analyses, such as learning one summary statistic about our data at a time. In reality, we’re often interested in a slightly more sophisticated analysis, so we can learn multiple trends and takeaways at once and paint a richer picture of our…
Arron Angle
Iwas talking to a friend recently, and the subject of organizational health came up. With my quality background my ears perked up, and I asked him to explain what he thought organizational health meant.
The friend went on for several minutes explaining that organizational health was all about six…
Chip Bell
We live in an era of statue removal. Meanwhile the largest mountain carving in the world is under construction in the Black Hills of South Dakota just 17 miles from Mount Rushmore. The final carving will be 640 feet long and more than 50 stories high. The subject of that carving? Crazy Horse.…
Christopher Allan Smith
This series is about planning for the worst that can face us.
It’s jumping-off point is the National Institute of Standards and Technology publication, “A Case Study of the Camp Fire—Fire Progression Timeline,” an epic and thorough study about the wildfire that changed the lives of my family,…
Gleb Tsipursky
When the Covid pandemic swept through the country last year, companies rapidly transitioned employees to working from home (WFH). However, this shift led to growing challenges of WFH burnout and Zoom fatigue.
Unfortunately, organizations treat these issues as day-to-day challenges, instead of…
Jason Spera
In a customer-centered world, meeting customers’ needs is more demanding and business-critical than ever. Simultaneously, manufacturers struggle to reduce operating costs as margins compress and the competitive landscape intensifies. This dichotomy and a pressure to “choose” between reducing costs…
Jim Benson
No matter who you are or what you do, you create systems and live in the systems of others every day. But for some reason, we’re never actually taught lean systems thinking. We think it is natural, that we just sort of “get it.”
On a personal level, we are most often governed by cognitive biases…
Jon Speer
Demonstrating identification and traceability in all quality system processes is a must for medical device companies to comply with FDA regulations. To satisfy this compliance need, companies will need to connect related processes within their quality system to close the loop between related pre-…
Donald J. Wheeler
For more than 40 years it has been common to use the precision to tolerance ratio (P/T ratio) to compare the standard deviation of measurement error with the specified tolerance for a particular product. The purpose of this comparison being an assessment of the utility of the measurement process.…
Caroline Zimmerman
With big data and artificial intelligence (AI) transforming business, it’s almost certain that every executive will need to leverage these technologies at some point to advance their organization—and their career. However, doing so carries a heavy intimidation factor for most leaders, and this is…