All Features
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Does lean have a clearly delineated limit? When a company starts out on that path, should it expect an endpoint, a completion, an arrival? Is it a forever commitment, or is it a bounded outcome that companies can achieve and then move on? In short, is lean a destination or a process?
These aren't…
Mark Whitworth
Quality is, for every organization and across all industries, a key competitive differentiator. This is especially true in the highly competitive automotive industry, where cost pressures have pushed automakers and their suppliers toward global sourcing and distributed supply-chain operations.…
Evan Miller
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The CIO for a multiplant packaging company was in an uncomfortable spot. Bringing six newly acquired plants under the corporate umbrella was going smoothly, but he saw that at least in quality systems, there would have to be an unpopular change. The plants were using two…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Has your team’s performance fallen off lately? Was it once exciting to be part of the team, and lately you find you’re not having fun?
Perhaps your team has succumbed to team drift. In my Harvard Business Review article, “Diagnose and Cure Team Drift,” I explain how to revitalize a formerly high-…
William A. Levinson
Masaaki Imai, author of Gemba Kaizen (McGraw-Hill Education, 1997), introduced the concept of the value-adding “bang,” the exact moment at which a process adds value for the customer. He meant the moment at which an official stamped a document, but the same concept applies when a stamping or…
Adam Day
There was a time, not long ago, when employers could rely on new hires to possess rudimentary knowledge of basic assembly methods, schematic diagrams, and the proper use of hand tools. These skills were the result of individuals who grew up maintaining their cars. Yet that way of life is largely a…
Mark Graban
Given all of the problems that exist in our American healthcare system, it’s encouraging that most healthcare organizations are endorsing or practicing some form of process improvement or operational excellence strategy. Under the banner of different labels and using different combinations of…
Michelle LaBrosse
Having more independence requires taking on more responsibility: It’s a lesson teenagers hear again and again from their parents, and yet it rarely seems to result in teenagers actually bearing the burden of more responsibility. Fast forward to these imagined teenagers’ adult lives. As their…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
I carefully filled the cake cone from the frozen custard machine, pushing it up at just the right moment to create a perfect ball. Then as I shut off the machine, I pulled the cone away with a circular motion to give it the company’s signature curl on top. It was beautiful, and I was proud of the…
Harish Jose
There is a concept in lean known as a “monument.” It refers to a large machine, piece of equipment, or something similar that can’t be changed right away, and so you have to plan your processes around it. This generally impedes the flow and frequently becomes a hindrance to lean initiatives. A…
Davis Balestracci
Today I want to concentrate on the foundation of what is most commonly taught as design of experiments (DOE)—factorial designs.
Elsewhere I’ve mentioned three of C.M. Hendrix’s “ways to mess up an experiment.” After 35 years of teaching DOE, I’ve concluded that he pretty much captures the…
Jonathan Jacobi
When I first entered the safety profession, older, more experienced professionals recommended that I consider OSHA as a potential employer. The innuendo I sensed in this advice was that if I worked for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), got to know influential people, and…
Erika Darics
Poking fun at corporate jargon is a current trend. Newspapers and online publications get a kick out of compiling extensive lists of the most egregious examples, and the overarching narrative is that we should puncture the pomposity that this “management speak” is deemed to represent.
To its…
Patrick Runkel
It’s been called a “demographic watershed.” During the next 15 years alone, the worldwide population of individuals aged 65 and older is projected to increase more than 60 percent, from 617 million to about 1 billion, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report.
Increasingly, countries are asking…
Loic Sadoulet, Thomas Hinterseer
It’s a tragic irony that the day before the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster, executives from BP and the rig’s operators, Transocean, visited the platform on a “management tour” that included a number of specific safety-related purposes.
During the tour, there were already signs that all…
Bruce Hamilton
I wrote a piece a little more than five years ago about a variety reduction program (VRP), an amazing but little-known product-design optimization tool. At the time I referred to VRP as an idea whose “time had not yet come.” Last week, as I gave a short presentation on VRP, I realized that five…
Donald J. Wheeler
Story update 10/9/2023: This article is a corrected version. The earlier version suffered from a programming error that affected all of the PID results.
Many articles and some textbooks describe process behavior charts as a manual technique for keeping a process on target. For example, in Norway…
Frank Townsend
World shipping changed forever when the Panama Canal opened on Aug. 15, 1914. It was an engineering marvel of its day, cutting the distance required to get from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic by as much as 8,000 nautical miles.
The shipping industry is changing once again as 70 heads of state…
Gillian Groom
You often hear the data being blamed when an analysis does not deliver the expected answers. I was recently reminded that the data chosen or collected for a specific analysis is determined by the analyst, so there is no such thing as bad data—only bad analysis.
This made me think about the steps…
Henry Zumbrun
There has been some misunderstanding about the intent of ASTM E74—“Standard practice of calibration of force-measuring instruments for verifying the force indication of testing machines.” When it was written back in 1974, the standard’s intent was to establish calibration traceability back to…
Stanford News Service
For Melissa Valentine and her colleagues at Stanford, the future of work is here: “flash teams” of skilled professionals who have probably never met before and may work on different continents, but who can turn a napkin sketch into a product within days or weeks.
Valentine, assistant professor of…
Knowledge at Wharton
I t wasn’t that long ago that GM ran commercials advertising that its Oldsmobile division didn’t just produce cars for your grandfather, but also for everyone else. It was an attempt to reinvent the brand’s staid image—and it didn’t work.
Now, the Oldsmobile division and its iconic vehicles are…
Jon Speer
Design controls and risk management processes should be tools to ensure that medical devices are designed, developed, and manufactured to be safe and effective, and to address indications for use, too.
All too often, however, design controls and risk management are viewed as a pile of “stuff”…
Ken Levine
How do you determine the “worst case” scenario for a process? Is it by assuming the worst case for each process task or step? No. The reason is that the probability of every step having its worst case at the same time is practically zero. What we’re looking for is a value that will occur a very…
Fred Schenkelberg
A fault tree analysis (FTA) is a logical, graphical diagram that starts with an unwanted, undesirable, or anomalous state of a system. The diagram then lays out the many possible faults, and combinations of faults, within the subsystems, components, assemblies, software, and parts comprising the…
