All Features
Joby George
Driven by market expansion, financial pressures, and the need to accelerate innovation, today’s manufacturers have expanded their global operations and supply partners. This evolution has only amplified the manufacturer and supply-chain relationship, which is often characterized by a delicate…
GBMP
Hub Pen Co., located in Braintree, Massachusetts, imports specialty writing instruments and imprints them with company logos and other customized inscriptions. In 2013, the company received a grant for training in lean and continuous improvement, which was delivered by the Greater Boston…
Jill Hartzler Warner, Thinh Nguyen
Combination products represent an important and growing category of therapeutic and diagnostic products under the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) regulatory authority. These products, which combine a drug, device, and/or biological product (referred to as “constituent parts”) with one…
Davis Balestracci
In part one yesterday, we looked at stats of the Boston Red Sox bullpen, a typical example of baseball’s tendency to find special cause in just about anything. The Boston Globe article on which these two columns are based has been a gold mine for teaching many useful, basic concepts about…
Davis Balestracci
In honor of baseball season, I’m going to apply some simple statistical thinking to my favorite sport in a two-part series today and tomorrow. I want anyone to be able to enjoy this, so I’ll mark any technical statistics as optional reading. For those of you interested only in the interpretations…
Giles Hutchins
Globalization, disruptive technologies, pressure on finite resources, increasing social disparity, and demand for business transparency: Enter the age of uncertainty. These transformative times are reshaping the workplace in profound ways, demanding the crossing of thresholds at myriad levels. …
Lillian Erickson
The updated version of ISO 9001, published in September 2015, generated much anxiety among companies fearing a bumpy transition to the updated and significantly changed international standard. Admittedly, we at MasterControl were not immune to those worries.
Despite having quality experts…
FDA
One of the vivid images that sticks with me from my tenure at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is of the port of entry at Nogales, Arizona. There, I saw large trucks from Mexico lined up as far as the eye could see, awaiting entry into the United States, many loaded full with fresh produce…
SAE International
(SAE International: Warrendale, PA) -- SAE International has published two new technical standards that standardize the data message sets used in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications and establish the parameters for a vehicle communication system to receive and transmit the message sets. These…
Tonianne DeMaria
I recognize that the title of this column might stir up some controversy, especially among fellow coffee enthusiasts. Not to mention it puts me at risk of getting exiled from my beloved adopted home, Seattle. And yes, perhaps “Clarity > Coffee” even seems a tad hypocritical, considering that I’…
MIT News
In March 2011, Leonardo Bonanni was preparing to defend his Ph.D. thesis about Sourcemap, software that lets consumers map every connection of a product supply chain on a digital map, when tragedy struck in Japan. Although the deadly earthquake and tsunami occurred half a world away, the events…
Jim Frost
P -values have been around for nearly a century, and they’ve been the subject of criticism since their origin. In recent years, the debate over p-values has risen to a fever pitch. In particular, there are serious fears that p-values are misused to such an extent that it has actually damaged…
Niranjan Deodhar
Previously in this series, we looked at applying the principles of process improvement (PI) to itself. We identified metrics that help define effective and efficient PI, and then analyzed some work practices that help drive these metrics. Here, we move on to analyze more work practices, this time…
S-T Industries
(S-T Industries: Mankato, MN) -- S-T Industries, based in St. James, Minnesota, recently donated a video measurement system to Minnesota State University at Mankato’s Department of Automotive and Manufacturing Engineering Technology. The system will enhance students’ study of metrology, the…
Knowledge at Wharton
A trained mechanical engineer, Mark Chang found himself “totally uncertain and unprepared” the first time he was called on to hire someone else.
“I didn’t even know why I was hired in the first place—what did they like about me?” Chang recalls. “So, how do I go out and look for the next person?”…
NIST
I
n the age-old struggle between humans and microbes, bacteria seem to be regaining the offensive. Only about a dozen classes of chemicals protect us from the myriad pathogens that populate our environment. Numerous agencies have warned that evolved resistance could soon render common antibiotics…
John Nolan
The ultimate aim of ISO 9001:2015 is to enable businesses to satisfy their customers effectively. You could say that all the standard’s clauses help to provide your customer with a consistent and rewarding experience from your goods or services, but ISO 9001:2015 actually deals with “customer…
William A. Levinson
Experiments that might require a handful of real-number measurements (variables data) could need hundreds or more attribute data for comparable power, i.e., the ability to determine whether an experiment improves performance over that of a control. Sample sizes needed for ANSI/ASQ Z1.4 (for…
Donald J. Wheeler
Context involves both the background for the data and how the data behave. This behavior of the data is most easily seen by using two complementary graphs—the running record and the histogram. Here I address the secrets of creating useful histograms.
The first graph mentioned above—the running…
Gilles Hilary
Phil used to be a very senior financial executive. When asked for a number, he would typically provide with a rough ballpark answer, such as, “It’s about 5 percent.” He’d then be peppered with questions about how he had arrived at that figure.
After a while, he got tired of this questioning and…
Gallup
Increasingly dynamic workplaces have made organizational change an everyday reality. Demands for workforce agility require a step up from those commanding—particularly in ongoing measurement and making use of feedback during this breakneck pace of change.
There is a definite need for continuous…
Davis Balestracci
April Fool’s Day (today) and the opening of baseball season (this Sunday) are upon us. To mark the first event, I’ll let my distinguished colleague Donald Wheeler make some eloquent and crucial statistical points that turn out to be, well, laughably simple. (No fooling!) Regarding the baseball…
Joelle K. Jay
Do you have a regular support group of leaders, or, as I call them, a “mastermind?” Being a member of a mastermind is a powerful strategy used by high-achieving leaders to move ahead quickly and reach their goals.
A mastermind is a small group of dedicated peers who share and support each other…
Dan Jacob
Airbags, ignition switches, and even emissions software; although large recalls make the news at a regular pace, these are surrounded by scandal. News reports include claims of illegal or unethical activity executed by individuals or larger groups of people. Unfortunately, as new reports expose…
InnovMetric Software
(InnovMetric: Quebec, QC, Canada) -- InnovMetric Software Inc., the leading provider of universal 3D metrology solutions, has announced the launch of PolyWorks 2016, the latest release of the company’s universal 3D metrology software platform. PolyWorks 2016 fully supports probing and laser…
