All Features
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
We tied up last year in a neat little bow, talking about how stories define ourselves and our work; waste is waste, no matter your political leanings; and putting numbers from the news in context.
“The Gift of Being Small” This article by Quality Digest’s Taran March wonderfully illustrates how we…
Anthony D. Burns, Michael McLean
The control chart is at the heart of the very definition of quality. It is central to building, maintaining, and predicting quality into the future. However, control charts today, more often than not, are misused and misunderstood. The aim of this article is to show not only how control charts are…
Kelsey Rzepecki
As the global economy grows, it’s more necessary than ever to stay on top of efficiency. Keep up with increasing production demands by implementing a continuous improvement method to streamline the workflow.
Continuous improvement is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, and processes.…
Bruce Hamilton
Last week I joined the New England Idea Generation Consortium (NEIGC) on a tour of the Stone Zoo where we had the opportunity to see how continuous improvement is expressed in an animal-care function.
In the open area for black bears, Senior Keeper Dayle Sullivan-Taylor explained to us the…
Kevin Meyer
Iam not really sure how it started, but one day a couple months ago, I found myself diving down an internet rabbit hole in search of more information on a guy named Alfred Adler. Adler was an Austrian psychotherapist in the early 1900s who, although a good friend of Sigmund Freud, developed a…
Nicole Radziwill
Even though most businesses have invested in quality management and performance improvement, each organization is unique. People, processes, and machines must be coordinated to achieve desired outcomes. This is not easy.
Whether you’re in discrete manufacturing, a process industry, or a service…
Eric Stoop
The frequently referenced learning pyramid asserts than an average student retains 75 percent of information learned through practice, compared to just 5 percent of what he hears in a lecture. Although experts may dispute the relevance of these figures when applied to modern society, all of us can…
Paul Foster
Next to defining a problem accurately, root cause analysis is one of the most important elements of problem-solving in quality management. That’s because if you’re not aiming at the right target, you’ll never be able to eliminate the real problem that’s hurting quality.
So which type of root cause…
Anthony Chirico
Perhaps the reader recognizes d2 as slang for “designated driver,” but quality professionals will recognize it as a control chart constant used to estimate short-term variation of a process. The basic formula shown below is widely used in control charting for estimating the short-term variation…
Mike Richman
Our industry embodies many aspects, but “Big Q” quality generally involves issues affecting management, measurement, and methodologies. This week on QDL, we covered all of them, and more. Let’s look closer:
“Ripped from the Headlines: Tariff Fallout” U.S. manufacturers are currently dealing with…
Kevin Meyer
During the late 1990s, I was working in the Silicon Valley for a medical device company, responsible for a drug-infusion pump manufacturing operation. I had just completed a crazy period where I had also “temporarily” (months and months...) led the advanced engineering department after that manager…
Harish Jose
I am writing today about “bootstrap kaizen.” This is something I have been thinking about for a while. Wikipedia describes bootstrapping as “a self-starting process that is supposed to proceed without external input.” The term was developed from a 19th-century figure of speech—“pull oneself over a…
Brian Maskell
If you are a CEO of a manufacturing company with many value streams, it’s impractical to think that you have the time to review all the performance measures of every value stream in your company. Yet you need to know the operational impact of lean on your entire organization.
The traditional…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Have you heard this? “Just because this department is a bit dingy—and it’s sometimes harder than heck to get the scoop on things—doesn’t mean it’s a bad place. Good work happens here. In fact, we’ve been doing darn good work in this area long before you showed up with a bucket of hope called…
Sylvie Couture
In 2012, CMP Advanced Mechanical Solutions, a leader in the design and manufacture of sheet metal enclosures, mechanical assemblies, and machined systems, burst onto the Industry 4.0 scene with its avant-garde use of the visual work instruction software VKS. This software allowed the company to…
Mike Richman
One of the highlights on our calendar each year is the first Friday in October, which is Manufacturing Day here in the United States. This event offers us the perfect opportunity to celebrate the centrality of manufacturing as a driver of the economy, innovation, automation, education, and lots…
Carrie Van Daele
Karen is skinny. For almost 15 years, one of my personal goals was to join her in running three times a week. That never happened because I was skinny, too. I was able to eat as much as I wanted without gaining weight. And then, I turned 50. My clothes were not loose on me anymore, and guessing my…
Dan Jacob
LNS Research published its research, “Driving Operational Performance With Digital Innovation: Connecting Risk, Quality, and Safety for Superior Results” to address fundamental challenges quality and safety leaders face today.
If quality and safety are separate functions in your organization (…
Alison Hawke
Historically, quality in a process was something that was done at the end of the line. You inspected your widget once it was made, and if it had flaws, you fixed it or threw it out.
As in many modern manufacturing environments, quality in software has become a process you do from start to finish.…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
In the foreword of Mark Graban’s book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More (Constancy Inc., 2018), renowned statistician, Donald J. Wheeler, writes about Graban: “He has created a guide for using and understanding the data that surround us every day.
“These numbers are…
Rip Stauffer
I must admit, right up front, that this is not a totally unbiased review. I first became aware of Davis Balestracci in 1998, when I received the American Society for Quality (ASQ) Statistics Division Special Publication, Data “Sanity”: Statistical Thinking Applied to Everyday Data. At the time, I…
Mike Richman
With more than 110,000 expected attendees, IMTS is Chicago’s hottest suburb this week. (I like to refer to it as “Manufactureville.”) Here’s what we covered during our second show of the week, from the booth of today’s sponsor, Q-Mark Manufacturing:
“Tapping Your Employee’s Knowledge”
It’s no…
Bruce Hamilton
Bob C. was a frontline employee with 25 years of experience. His day was spent operating a machine that stripped and terminated leadwire assemblies. Problem was, there were more than 1,000 different assemblies, and it seemed that, while the machine was always busy, it was always behind schedule.…
Mark Rosenthal
During a TED talk, Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, talks about “How to turn a group of strangers into a team.” Although long-standing teams are able to perform, our workplaces today require ad-hoc collaboration between diverse groups.…
Jared Evans
Implementing 6S, the lean strategy for reducing waste and optimizing efficiency in a manufacturing environment, is more than just creating work protocols that people must follow. Because that’s the thing about people: If they don’t know the “why,” they are less likely to buy in to any initiative,…
