All Features
jeffdewar, Mike Richman
Just as the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award program was defunded by the federal government during the Obama Administration, President Trump and Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), are now contemplating the eventual demise of several long-standing…
Edmund Andrews
It’s an article of faith that technological innovation is crucial to prosperity and is currently changing our lives at an unprecedented rate, but how do we know if the pace of pioneering breakthroughs is any faster today than it was during Thomas Edison’s era? In fact, some economists argue that…
Mike McDonald
Fear. Anxiety. Stress. Anger. Not exactly the emotions we’re hoping to invoke in our employees, right? Not exactly the key to motivational management, anyway.
Unfortunately, those are the emotions many people feel when it’s time to discuss their work metrics. Employees dread the idea of their…
Paul Foster
What sets the top 20 percent of innovation leaders apart from their competitors? According to LNS Research, one key difference is that a majority (52%) of the top tier has real-time visibility into manufacturing quality metrics, compared to just 9 percent of the competition.
Organizations collect…
Jason Furness
In a previous article I wrote about the reasons why so many lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, and other improvement programs fail. In this article I’m going to expand on reason No. 1: the Academy Award Syndrome.
Academy Award Syndrome
The Academy Award Syndrome is where a program or project is…
Violet Masoud
Imagine going to work, motivated to meet all your goals and deadlines, only to find you need a different computer for each of the applications you use: Microsoft Word on the laptop in your office; the customer database solution on the tower PC in the conference room; and email on the desktop in…
Bruce Bolger
Many quality professionals remain unaware that a systematic approach to human resources is now a requirement in ISO 9001:2015. These new requirements are based on the principles considered by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to be essential to quality management success.…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
In our Feb. 23, 2018, episode of QDL, we considered if writing a novel makes you a better CEO, patents and innovation, and if should you blindly trust academic studies. Plus, we threw in cost of quality... just because.
“Five Things I Learned Writing a Novel That I Wished I Knew When I Was a CEO”…
Mike Brandt
At the heart of the Fourth Industrial Revolution are two critical words you will see in almost every article and write-up where Industry 4.0 is mentioned. Those two words are “digital” and “smart,” and they represent a complete shift in enablement and employee productivity in the modern…
Mary Beth O’Leary
Matt Bianchi had a problem. As chief of the division of sleep medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, he needed a better way to diagnose sleep disorders. Typically, a patient seeking a diagnosis needs to come into a sleep lab and be attached to a number of devices. This setting is hardly…
Harry Hertz
The Baldrige Excellence Framework encourages organizations to create an environment for innovation by pursuing intelligent risks. How do you know whether a new idea is an intelligent risk, and therefore worth pursuing? How do you know if the resulting change is an innovation? An experience from my…
Davis Balestracci
The Individuals chart is the “Swiss Army knife” of control charts. It usually approximates the supposedly “correct” chart under most conditions, and its use is much easier to understand and explain. It can also save you a major side trip into the swamp of unnecessary calculation minutiae,…
Curt Redden
We all seem to get it by now—more engaged employees perform at a higher level. The organizations that get their strategy right in this area provide a superior customer experience, have lower levels of employee churn, higher morale, and ultimately much higher financial performance. Their customers…
NIST
On February 14, 1929, gunmen working for Al Capone disguised themselves as police officers, entered the warehouse of a competing gang, and shot seven of their rivals dead. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is famous not only in the annals of gangland history, but also in the history of forensic…
Visual Workplace Inc.
(Visual Workplace: Byron Center, MI) -- Visual Workplace Inc. offers an extensive line of both standard and customizable personal protection equipment (PPE) signage to communicate safety requirements to visitors and new employees, and to reinforce safety standards to existing personnel.
Common…
Mike Richman
The XXIII Olympic Winter Games are wrapping up this weekend (Feb. 25, 2018) in PyeongChang, South Korea. During the past two weeks, thousands of athletes competed on mountains, rinks, and tracks; the best of the best emerged with precious medals that they will cherish for the rest of their lives…
Jim Benson
Tonianne DeMaria and I run the Personal Kanban, Modus Institute, and Modus Cooperandi Corp-o-plex pretty much duo-handed. There’s a lot of work. The rules of Personal Kanban apply to us, too. We are constantly experimenting with new ways to visualize our work and limit our work-in-process (WIP).…
Jennifer Lauren Lee
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is home to one of the most sensitive machines in the world for measuring objects’ dimensions. Customers who rely on the instrument include the military, academia, instrument manufacturers, private industry calibration labs, and more.…
Ryan E. Day
Manufacturing activities have strong ties to economic prosperity. Deloitte’s 2016 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index states, “Nations and companies are striving to advance to the next technology frontier and raise their economic well-being.” It’s no surprise that the manufacturing sector is…
Willie L. Carter
What differentiates a lean-thinking organization from a traditional one? Basically, the lean-thinking organization is grounded in the answers to two simple questions: “What do my customers value?” And, “What organization and work processes inside my company will most directly deliver that value?”…
John Toon
Can companies rely on the results of one or two scientific studies to design a new industrial process or launch a new product? In at least one area of materials chemistry, the answer may be yes—but only 80 percent of the time.
The replicability of results from scientific studies has become a…
ICEE
(ICEE: Galveston, TX) -- A new conference, titled “ISO 9001 and ISO 10018: Enterprise Engagement in Action,” will be held May 7–8, 2018, in Galveston, Texas, and will provide the first formal education program for professionals and organizations committed to implementing the quality management…
Sameer Hasija
Let’s assume you’re a company scouting for vendors for a variety of business-critical IT projects. Every candidate you approach wants to scoop up as much of your business as possible. Should you try to find the best partner for each task, or look for a one-stop shop?
The theoretical advantages of…
Dan Chalk
Although many manufacturing organizations have held firm to traditional operational processes for generations, the time has come for transformational change. There is an ongoing shift in cultural expectations of how, when, and where work happens, and it is driven by consumer choice. Industry…
Stephen McCarthy
Cost of quality (CoQ) is certainly not a new topic. It was first described in 1956 by American quality control expert Armand V. Feigenbaum in a Harvard Business Review article. As you likely already know, CoQ consists of four categories: internal and external failures, and appraisal and prevention…
