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Quality Digest
(Quality Digest: Chico, CA) -- In January 2017 Richard Schonberger, researcher and author of Best Practices in Lean Six Sigma Process Improvement (Wiley, 2009) issued an open letter to Motorola published in ISE magazine asking the company to withdraw Six Sigma as a copyrighted term.
Six Sigma is…
Mike Richman
It’s easy to sit here aghast at the big, attention-getting customer service missteps that have recently blown up into public relation nightmares for United Airlines and American Airlines. These issues aren’t limited to airlines, however. During the past few years, companies in the automotive, life…
Mark Bartholomew
Ethics lawyers and historians have argued that Donald Trump has blurred the line between his public office and private business interests in an unprecedented fashion. In another sense, it’s part of a much larger social trend.
Commercial entreaties, whether in the form of magazine ads, radio…
Knowledge at Wharton
The world of high-tech innovation can change the destiny of industries seemingly overnight. Now we are on the cusp of a new grand leap, thanks to the democratization of machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence that enables computers to learn without being explicitly programmed. This…
Anna Nagurney
The American economy is underpinned by networks. Road networks carry traffic and freight; the internet and telecommunications networks carry our voices and digital information; the electricity grid is a network carrying energy; financial networks transfer money from bank accounts to merchants.…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
This column is primarily about human motivation, particularly being motivated by envy, a subject I’ve wanted to write about for years. It is a negative emotion that has been condemned by all cultures throughout history, yet it is a powerful motivator. Envy can be terribly destructive, and…
Sameer Kadam, Mickey Shah
The importance of quality management cannot be overstated. It enables companies to increase efficiency, lower risks, achieve compliance, and build better and safer products. Yet many quality management teams struggle to communicate the value of their operations to other departments and executive…
BYK-Gardner
(BYK-Gardner: Geretsried, Germany) -- BYK-Gardner, a worldwide partner of the paint and plastic industries for quality control of color, appearance, and physical properties, is introducing the new light booth byko-spectra lite. In addition to the well-proven BYK-Gardner light booth range, the lite…
Georgia Tech News Center
(Georgia Tech: Atlanta) -- The traditional interface for remotely operating robots works just fine for roboticists. They use a computer screen and mouse to independently control six degrees of freedom, turning three virtual rings and adjusting arrows to get the robot into position to grab items or…
Harish Jose
I have been reading a lot these days about Western philosophy. The most recent book, All Life is Problem Solving (Routledge, 2001), is by Karl Popper, one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. This is a collection of Popper’s writings. One of the great teachings from Popper is the concept…
Joel Smith
‘You take 10 parts and have three operators measure each two times.”
This standard approach to a gage repeatability and reproducibility (GR&R) experiment is so common, so accepted, so ubiquitous, that few people ever question whether it is effective. Obviously, one could look at whether three…
Patrick Nugent
Sponsored Content
Joe Gibbs Racing, a family business founded by former three-time Super Bowl champion Washington Redskins head coach Joe Gibbs, is one of today’s most successful racing teams. In its 25-year history, it has earned four NASCAR Cup Series championships, five NASCAR XFINITY Series…
Innovalia Metrology
(Innovalia Metrology: Charlotte, NC) – The M3 Hybrid, Innovalia Metrology’s star product, combines software and hardware to offer a complete measuring solution for both production lines and laboratories.
The NIST-certified M3 Hybrid has simplified the point-acquisition process by combining an…
Fred Faltin
All of us draw conclusions based on what we see happening around us. Often what we’re observing is a sample from some larger population of events, and we draw inferences based on the sample without even realizing it. If the sample we observe is not a representative one, our resulting judgments can…
Inderjit Arora
Certifications often drive the implementation of a system approach, based on ISO standards. The primary implementation demand is for ISO 9001. Certifications do have initial costs and then recurring costs for surveillance and recertification visits. This is a responsive approach to business…
Nirmalya Kumar
Although many large companies are multinational, most of the top management teams (TMTs) in these companies are not. They tend to be dominated by executives with a connection to the home country of the company. Attention is paid to gender diversity, but cultural diversity is often ignored.
One…
Mike Richman
Oh, the places you’ll go! Our latest episode of QDL from this past Fri., May 5, 2017, truly spanned the wide world of quality. Here’s a recap of the topics and locations we visited together:
“Why Japan’s Rail Workers Can’t Stop Pointing at Things” It’s not your imagination: If you find yourself…
Christopher Martin
In 1996, former Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington formed Washington-based video-game development studio Valve Corp. Two years later, they released a PC game called Half-Life to universal critical acclaim; it was a watershed moment in gaming history, and nearly 20 years later the…
Andy Molinsky
If you play tennis, you’re probably familiar with the concept of a “second serve.” In tennis, you have two chances to serve the ball, so on the first you can really put everything into it, with little risk, since you always have that second one to fall back on. The key is how you approach the…
Nick Butch
One of my favorite things about being a condensed matter physicist is how broadly defined the subject is. There are lots of interesting phenomena begging for scientific attention, so it’s never boring. One of my favorite topics lies at the crossroads of magnetism and superconductivity.
Magnets…
Brooke Pierce
As high deductibles and escalating costs drive patients to take a more active role in their healthcare, providers are waking up to the fact that they need to pay attention to what buyers want. But uncovering those consumer insights and using them to drive organizational strategy remains a…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Coaching is not just for problems. Coaching helps you avoid problems by providing space to think and be more intentional about your goals and actions. And coaching is especially helpful for getting clarity on where you want to go.
Working with a coach gives you: • Space for self-reflection •…
Shobhendu Prabhakar
Whenever the term “nonconformance report” (NCR) comes into project home offices or construction and fabrication sites, it is often seen as a negative, and personnel are typically reluctant to accept it as a positive and powerful tool to improve. Perhaps, the “non” in nonconformance is the reason…
Annette Franz
In May 2016, I spoke at CallidusCloud Connections (C3); if you’ve never been to this event, be sure to check it out this year. The topic of my session was “The Seven Deadly Sins of Customer Experience.” Given the topic of today’s post, I seem to be on a bit of a spiritual customer-experience…
John Valachovic
So often business owners make decisions based on intuition, luck, or the Magic 8-Ball. As a small or midsized manufacturer, there are so many factors that can affect your company’s profitability, both inside and outside of your control. How do you make proactive decisions for the betterment of…
