All Features
Patrick Runkel
My Uncle Joe is always fantasizing about ways to outsmart Father Time. “Suppose you could reverse your aging process at some fixed point in your life,” he says to me, a crazed gleam in his eye. “So you could pick any age to turn the clock backwards and start aging in reverse. What age would you…
Mike Richman
It’s been said that supply chain risk today is riskier than ever before. Why? Well, there are several reasons.
Supply chains are lengthier. Almost everyone manufacturing anything today must deal with a wild proliferation of suppliers, many of which reside in nations scattered across the globe. Of…
Gallup
While the world was waiting out the Great Recession, managers and executives in the United States were gunning their engines. More than one-third (36%) of them were engaged in their jobs in 2012, up 10 percentage points from 2009. There’s no one right way to engage everyone—no one-size-fits-all…
Knowledge at Wharton
Global companies struggle with decisions about how much to outsource. Too little means an organization may lose the pricing advantages that can come with using competitive providers worldwide. Too much—or the wrong kind of outsourcing—and quality and knowledge management can suffer.
A panel at a…
Denise Robitaille
What’s Happening With ISO 9001? Stakeholders have offered suggestions for the upcoming revision
Committee Draft of ISO 9001 Is OutChanges include genuine improvement; some will make implementation more difficult
Knowledge at Wharton
Microsoft’s recent reorganization of its operating structure is a big move. CEO Steve Ballmer says he wants to make the company more nimble and collaborative, and make it function as a single, cohesive entity rather than a collection of fragmented divisions.
Although Wharton experts acknowledge…
Jack Dunigan
Editor’s note: This continues Jack Dunigan’s series about unsung heroes in the workplace, and the 16 traits they all share.
Life teaches us a lot of lessons. Some people learn slowly. Some not at all. It’s a sad fact that most of us never learn much of anything new after leaving the structure of…
Bruce Hamilton
Too often when corrective action is taken, the communication loop is not closed, turning containment into a frustrating, permanent practice.
Here are a few examples: • A production employee demonstrated for me how he searched for burrs on a ceramic bushing. “The part drawing had a note that we…
Denise Robitaille
Editor’s note: Denise Robitaille is a member of the U.S. TAG to ISO/TC 176, the committee responsible for updating the ISO 9000 family of standards. She will be reporting on the revision progress to ISO 9001, which will be completed in 2015. Read other articles in the series here.
The first…
Davis Balestracci
I’m in the middle of a hot, humid stretch of weather, as are many of the U.S. readers. I can hardly think straight, so I’ve decided to lighten things up a bit today.
Many of you have seen me present and know that I try to inject healthy doses of humor to make key points. As my mentor and dear…
Stanley H. Salot Jr., Julia Kocs
Every time a missile misses its target, a train derails, or a faulty airbag fails to save a life, we wonder whether these failures, which can sometimes reach catastrophic proportions, are caused by a counterfeit part that may have infiltrated the supply chain.
Every time we buy a fake Rolex watch…
The QA Pharm
Editor's note: This is the first in a five-part series exploring issues that affect management’s ability to detect the warning signals of current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) compliance problems in the pharmaceutical industry.
Compliance to current good manufacturing practice (cGMP)…
Kevin Meyer
It’s time to clear out some thoughts on an eclectic mix of articles I've been reading, so please pardon the potential mental whiplash. What does your company do to keep an eye on competitors? Perhaps it’s an informal process handled by the sales department, or perhaps there’s a database of some…
NIST
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) authors and CRC Press have arranged to give all attendees at the 2013 North American Coordinate Metrology Association (NACMA) conference a 20-percent discount on the definitive coordinate metrology book, Coordinate…
NETL
New products and new processes do not appear full-grown. They are founded on new principles, which in turn are painstakingly developed by research in the realms of science.
—Vannevar Bush
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, laid out his vision for…
Umberto Tunesi
There’s no such a thing as a linear decision-making process. Some so-called quality gurus will pretend there is a one-to-one relationship between a decision and the time needed to make it. I mean no criticism to them, although I think they pay scant attention to the reality of human cognitive…
Patrick Stone
How often do we see Health Insurance Portability and Accountability (HIPAA) violations issued because a regulated entity did not secure the electronic records at the hospital and small clinics? Large-scale security breaches and, sometimes, reports of illegal sales of electronic medical records by…
Lucien G. Canton
W
hy do so many businesses fail after surviving a disaster? Because the true costs of the disaster are misunderstood.
After the 1994 earthquake in the Northridge neighborhood of Los Angeles, many businesses that had survived relatively unscathed found their revenues declining. Prior to the quake…
Phys.org
A bright future beckons for a University of Huddersfield metrology instrumentation designer who has recently completed his doctorate, won a national award, and will now embark on a project to bring a patented product to the market.
It was a master of science in control systems and instrumentation…
Gallup
Only 30 percent of U.S. employees are engaged in their jobs—a figure that hasn’t moved much in more than a decade. Given the proven links between employee engagement and financial outcomes, this low level of engagement is a drag on an already sluggish U.S. economy. Imagine the positive, even…
Mike Roberts
Gone are the days of carts carrying reams of paper documentation and checklists from station to station on the shop floor. Fortunately, with enterprise content management, document management, collaboration tools, and other digital services, paper is on its way out of the office. But that doesn’t…
Michelle LaBrosse
The fifth edition of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (Project Management Institute, 2013) is out, and I’m here to welcome it with a huge bear hug. Call me nerdy, but I think this is the best edition yet. Why? Because stakeholder management has been put in a corner for far too…
Brookhaven National Laboratory
The U.S. LHC Accelerator Program (LARP) has successfully tested a powerful superconducting quadrupole magnet that will play a key role in developing a new beam focusing system for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This advanced system, together with other major upgrades to be implemented during…
David S. Buckles, Lawrence Romanell
Disagreements are inevitable in science, medicine—and even life. As part of a regulatory agency committed to public health, the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) medical devices center occasionally confronts scientific and policy disagreements among its staff and with the various stakeholders…
Jim Benson
When we think about limiting work in process (WIP), we have to realize that there are many types of work. Simply limiting work is not enough; we must know what we are limiting. We have to see what we’re really completing.
A real danger is that we tend to limit our WIP and then say, “What’s the…
