All Features
Tamar June
The landmark Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) just keeps getting more and more important. Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) unveiled four proposed amendments that will likely make a tough law even tougher.
The FSMA, signed into law in January 2011, is designed to…
Mehul Shah
Over the past several years, the LNS Research analyst team has been enjoying front-row seats to the quality management arena. We’ve collected data from more than 1,000 different quality management leaders, and have personally spoken to a good portion of them. Our analysis is showing many different…
New Electronics
(newelectronics: Dartford, UK) -- According to the team from the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, molybdenum di-sulphide (MoS2) shares many of graphene’s favorable properties, including excellent electrical conductivity and mechanical stability.
However, unlike…
Donald J. Wheeler
Much of modern statistics is concerned with creating models which contain parameters that need to be estimated. In many cases these estimates can be severely affected by unusual or extreme values in the data. For this reason students are often taught to polish up the data by removing the outliers…
Mike Micklewright
You and your spouse go out to dinner to your favorite restaurant, on a “date” no less, to celebrate a big anniversary. You have been looking forward to this evening all week, and after a long, hard day at work, you’re famished and excited to eat your favorite meal. As you order dinner, the waiter…
DENSO ADC
(DENSO: Long Beach, CA) -- DENSO ADC, the Americas sales arm of DENSO Wave Inc., inventor of the QR Code, recently announced a new SE1-QB Bluetooth wireless 2D barcode scanner. The lightweight yet durably built SE1-QB measures only 3.9 in. long, 1.6 in. wide and 1.1 in. thick, and weighs only 2.1…
Bruce Hamilton
A lthough I don’t wish to rub salt in the wounds of my beleaguered Red Sox, their meteoric rise from last place in 2012 to a World Series title in 2013 and subsequent plummet back to the cellar in 2014 underscores the problems with speculative production. Last week, celebrating a birthday, I was…
Annette Franz
What’s the difference between a customer experience life-cycle map and a customer journey map?
I thought it was worthwhile to clarify because the difference is in the details—literally.
The customer experience life-cycle map
The life-cycle map shows the phases of the customer’s relationship with…
Teresa Tarwater
In sports, an unforced error is a mistake or blunder that is entirely self-inflicted and occurs on an easy shot or in a non-pressure situation. Examples include dropping the ball on an easy toss to first base and letting the opposing team score, or tumbling and falling two feet from the end zone—…
Jack Dunigan
Chesley Burnett Sullenberger was born Jan. 23, 1951, in Dennison, Texas, to a dentist father and a schoolteacher mother. An exceptional student with a brilliant mind, he joined Mensa at the age of 12.
After graduating from high school, he entered the U.S. Air Force Academy. Already a competent…
Alexandra Brown
As a physician, I enjoy listening to nonphysicians tell me how to motivate doctors. I don’t mean this in a totally snarky way (well, maybe just a little). These conversations often highlight the chasm that exists between physicians and administration.
What’s the most common motivator people throw…
Glen Fraser
No matter what industry you’re in, you’re probably hearing about risk management. It’s in compliance, governance, quality management—it’s everywhere. It’s also a broad-reaching topic. In quality and compliance management, we see risk as a function of operations. We’re being told to manage our…
Renishaw
(Renishaw: Wotten-under-Edge, UK)) -- Renishaw’s Equator shop-floor comparative gauge gets a significant speed boost for single-point probing applications with its touch-trigger probing capability via the TP20 probe, which can now be used in addition to the scanning SP25 probe. The two probing…
Harry Hertz
I am of course talking about feedback; you needn’t admit that you were thinking a different word.
Soon the first set of feedback reports will be sent to 2014 Baldrige Award applicants. So I thought this might be a good time to reflect on Baldrige feedback, and feedback in general.
I have always…
Davis Balestracci
My last article demonstrated a common incorrect technique—based in “traditional” statistics—for comparing performances based on percentage rates. This article will use the same data to show what should be done instead.
To quickly review the scenario: In an effort to reduce unnecessary expensive…
Georgia Manufacturing Extension Program
Justin and Michael Seibert knew that Athens, Georgia, was a place they wanted to lay down roots. After talking with a family friend who owned a sign manufacturing business, they determined their skill set and business outlook was a good match for the industry. So seven years ago they opened The…
ITAMCO
(ITAMCO: Plymouth, IN) -- Indiana Technology and Manufacturing Companies (ITAMCO), provider of open gearing and precision machining services, has donated a Zeiss coordinate measuring machine (CMM) to the Precision Tool Manufacturing Training Program for high-school students.
The new machine is…
Tamar June
In a previous column, Michael Causey looked at the FDA’s relatively ho-hum guidance on social media. Since then, the agency has issued an interesting warning letter to a Utah-based dietary supplement maker for, among other alleged infractions, “liking” off-label claims made about its product on…
Paula Oddy
Organizations pursue registration to international standards for a variety of reasons, but in the broadest possible sense most agree that the goal is to improve business operations and reap financial rewards, either by saving money through increased efficiencies or in making money by getting or…
Steve Moore
Up until a few years ago, I wasn’t a big fan of run charts. Why not just go ahead and construct a process behavior chart and move on? Well, sometimes a run chart is more appropriate for certain data structures.
For example, some data are “chunky”—see Donald Wheeler’s treatment of chunky data in…
The LMT Group
(LMT: Caro, MI) -- Laser Marking Technologies LLC, a division of The LMT Group, featured its newest edition to the COBALT product line at IMTS 2014. The eCobalt is the lowest cost and highest quality fiber laser-marking system on the market today. This laser can be used for direct part marking,…
William A. Levinson
Provision 4.2 of ISO 9001:2015 cites “Needs and Expectations of Interested Parties.” Interested parties include not only obvious stakeholders (customers, suppliers, employees, and owners), but also anybody who is affected, or perceives himself as being affected, by the product or service.
Not all…
Patrick Runkel
The word “kurtosis” sounds like a painful, festering disease of the gums. But the term actually describes the shape of a data distribution.
Frequently, you’ll see kurtosis defined as how sharply “peaked” the data are. The three main types of kurtosis are shown below.
Lepto means “thin” or “…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
Shortly after the death of the brilliant comedian and actor Robin Williams, his daughter Zelda quit Twitter and Instagram following online harassment over his death. How sad. We seem to somehow like to see the dark side of the world.
Even my three tennis buddies seem unable to keep from trash…
Mark Murphy
Employees want feedback that is meaningful and relevant to them, but often what they hear sounds like it’s been taken verbatim from one of those phrase books using stock comments like, “Mary is a team player and consistently thinks of others.”
That statement could apply to Mary, or it could apply…
