All Features
Ian Setliff, Amyn Murji
The current 2017–2018 flu season is a bad one. Hospitalization rates are now higher than in recent years at the same point, and infection rates are still rising. The best line of defense is the seasonal influenza vaccine. But H3N2 viruses, like the one that’s infecting many people this year, are…
Scott Shackelford
While some countries struggle with air safety, U.S. airplane travel has lately had a remarkable safety record. In fact, from 2014 through 2017, there were no fatal commercial airline crashes in the United States.
But those years were fraught with other kinds of trouble: security breaches and…
Ephy Torenberg
The evolving trends of automation are affecting quality management business processes for manufacturing organizations of all sizes. In this article, we’ll look at the business case for automation; consider the basic opportunities and challenges found at the start of a quality automation project;…
Andrew Simon
In the 2015 movie The Intern, Robert De Niro starred as a 70-year-old widower who returns to the workforce as an underappreciated and seemingly out-of-step intern working for a young boss played by Anne Hathaway.
Initially, Hathaway’s character can’t quite relate to this baby boomer who ditched…
Dan Jacob
Developing high-quality products is more important today than ever before. Market visibility to product quality has never been higher, and competitive pressures continue to squeeze margins and time to market. Manufacturers must consistently deliver better, faster, cheaper. It’s easy to deliver on…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Deb asked me, “Would you like to come over to my house tonight and learn about a business opportunity?” I’d met Deb on a church trip, and had been crushing on her for weeks. She could have ended her question with, “and scrub dirty toilets?” and I would’ve been there, because all I heard was “come…
Thomas Kochan
More than 200 CEOs have said they will raise wages or give bonuses as a result of the large corporate income tax cut passed late last year by Congress.
Some view their plans as simply a public relations move, others as a response to tighter labor markets or worker pressures. Pretty much everyone…
Robert Napoletano
‘Don’t thank them for anything. They’re the ones who caused this problem.” When I got that message, I thought, “This is all wrong, and there must be something somewhere that says so.” After some searching around, I didn’t find anything to support that assumption. What I did find were many…
Donald J. Wheeler
How can we use descriptive statistics to characterize our data? When I was teaching at the University of Tennessee I found a curious statement in a textbook that offered a practical answer to this question. This statement was labeled as “the Empirical Rule,” and it is the subject of what follows.…
Mike Figliuolo
To effectively solve problems, you must first understand the question being asked and why it’s important to your stakeholder. Without clarity on why your stakeholder cares, the recommendation you generate might be useless.
The first step for generating a clear and compelling recommendation using…
Eric Stoop
If you had your AS9100 transition audit tomorrow, could you say right now whether you would pass? More important, do you know where the gaps are in your processes that could trigger nonconformities?
AS9100 is the leading standard for aerospace management systems, required by original equipment…
Jeff Dewar, 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…
