All Features
Festo Didactic
Manufacturing in the United States and Canada is marked by negative stereotypes left behind from 1955. Repetitive and simplistic duties in grimy workplaces, without a chance to change or advance a career, are the images most people see when they imagine what it means to work in a factory. But, a…
GBMP
Ellis Medicine is a 438-bed community and teaching healthcare system serving New York’s capital region. With four main campuses, five additional service locations, more than 3,300 employees, and more than 700 medical staff, Ellis Medicine offers an extensive array of inpatient and outpatient…
NQA
For companies that are registered to more than one management system, integrating them makes a lot of sense. Combining your management systems provides greater benefit than running separate management systems in parallel. An integrated management system (IMS) can help reduce duplication and…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
I hate banks. I’ve hated them since I was a drifty teenager who had a volatile relationship with math and trouble coming up with the required documents proving my adultness. My first checking account had less to do with the paltry sum I owned than it did with running head-on into the vast and…
Paul Smith
It’s hard to turn the pages of any business or leadership magazine these days without coming across something about the value of storytelling. Whether it’s for leadership, marketing, sales, or some other purpose, the benefits of telling stories in business is well documented.
What’s more often…
Annette Franz
How are you getting to the root cause of any issue you or your customers are having? What types of root cause analyses are you conducting? Are you even thinking about root cause analysis?
Conducting some sort of root cause analysis (and there are many different types) any time you experience an…
Garry Oswald
If your company ships anything on a regular basis, you should know about freight invoice auditing. This is the method that shippers have used for 60 years to cut the costs charged by carriers and to make deliveries more efficiently to their end users.
Auditing does more than save on shipping…
Frank Armstrong
In manufacturing facilities many employees view the quality personnel as cops. “Their whole job is to come out and beat us up when processes don’t produce quality products,” they complain. “We can’t help it. Why are they always on our backs?”
There’s some truth to that mindset. If a process is…
Fred Schenkelberg
We establish reliability goals and measure reliability performance. Goals and measures can be related; however, they’re not the same, and neither do they serve the same purpose.
Recently, I’ve seen a few statements that seem to confuse the role of statistical confidence when establishing a goal.…
RED FLAG. This was the text I received from a woman I’d been mentoring for a year or so. She had recently been promoted to a senior management position in the software division of a large technology company. We had developed our own language for when she had a serious professional problem. Texting…
There was a time when manufacturers thought that “hot test”—a test at the end of the assembly line of a fully functional engine—was the only way to ensure that each unit had been assembled to perform as expected.
A lot has changed during the past 20 years. Manufacturers, from automotive to…
By 2020, research shows that the number of connected industrial devices will grow 285 percent from 2015. If you’re like some industrial leaders who feel the industrial internet of things (IIoT) is more hype than real, you’re taking a wait-and-see approach. But if you’re like many of the leaders we…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Summer with its balmy evenings and long talks with good friends, lemonades in hand, is over. Let’s set the groundwork for this new season and get our definitions in place, once again—the difference between visual and lean.
What is lean?
Technically speaking, lean is a predetermined set of…
American Customer Satisfaction Index ACSI
(ASCI: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Customer satisfaction with personal computers halts a three-year slide, according to new data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The ACSI Household Appliance and Electronics Report 2016 includes desktops, laptops, and tablet computers, as well as…
Donald J. Wheeler
While we may tweak things in production, we rarely get permission to conduct formal experiments with an operating production line. Production’s job is to make product, whereas experiments are what they do in R&D. So how can we learn about an existing production process without rocking the boat…
Chad Kymal
Deadlines for ISO 9001:2015 and ISO 14001:2015 registration have appeared on the horizon. Although we have 24 months to get registered to these new standards, some related timelines are looming even closer, notably scheduling a recertification or surveillance audit.
Some organizations have…
Numerous industries need to measure the weight of goods at different stages of production and distribution. Accuracy, speed, and throughput rank high on their list. If you use outdated weighing systems, a number of challenges crop up that threaten safety, performance, and compliance with local…
While commanding four vessels sailing between England and India in 1601, Capt. James Lancaster performed one of the great experiments in medical history. Each of the seamen on just one ship—his own, of course—was required to sip three teaspoons of lemon juice per day. By the midpoint of the voyage…
Harish Jose
Kaizen is often translated as “continuous improvement” and identified as one of the core themes in lean. Today I’m pondering the question: Can kaizen ever be bad for an organization?
In order to go deeper on this question, first we have to define kaizen as a focused improvement activity. The…
Dawn Bailey
Public schools across the country are facing significant challenges. Lisa Muller, assistant superintendent for Baldrige Award recipient Jenks Public Schools, says schools are dealing with an increase in student needs, while at the same time managing declining revenues and attempting to prepare…
Bruno Scibilia
There may be huge potential benefits waiting in the data in your servers. These data may be used for many different purposes. Better data allow better decisions, of course. For instance, banks, insurance firms, and telecom companies already own a large amount of data about their customers. These…
Chip Bell
Francie Johnsen is my very favorite pharmacist. When the petite, redheaded bundle of energy first came to work at the Eckerd Pharmacy (now CVS) near my home, she encountered a store spirit painted plain vanilla. Employees were creating a completely memory-less experience. Nothing was wrong, mind…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
We recently had dinner with a wonderful friend and colleague, Michelle Guenther. During our meal, Michelle mentioned a conversation at work when she responded to a question with, “What I believe to be true is....” She said she frequently prefaces her answers to questions with that phrase and that…
Michelle LaBrosse
According to well-known business executive Don Tapscott, the technological development that will most affect the way we live in the next few decades is not the newest iPhone, or flying drones, or self-driving cars. It’s something many of us may not have heard of: blockchain technology.
Blockchain…
Joby George
Manufacturing has changed dramatically during the past several years. Where once original equipment manufacturers made products primarily within their own four walls, now those companies must manage a complex global supply chain. In an effort to support innovation, reach new markets, and reduce…
