All Features
MIT News
Although data scientists can gain great insights from large data sets—and can ultimately use these insights to tackle major challenges—accomplishing this is much easier said than done. Many such efforts are stymied from the outset, as privacy concerns make it difficult for scientists to access the…
Mika Javanainen
The September 2018 certification deadline for ISO 9001:2015 is looming. The updated standard promises to further streamline mission-critical tasks and information flows as well as better align quality management with overall business management. But to earn certification, organizations must first…
Lynne Oates
Internationally mobile employees play an increasingly important role in a globalized world. As technology develops and businesses expand into new markets, complex employment arrangements are in place to move directors, executives, and employees between different geographical locations. These…
NIST
Providing wireless communications in a factory, plant, or other industrial environment these days means more than just helping employees talk with each other while they work. By eliminating physical connections such as wires and cables from a facility’s communication network, wireless technology…
Dan Jacob
This time last year, we identified what we felt were the three most important developing trends in quality management. We identified that these were the industrial internet of things (IIoT), pilots focused on quality improvements, increased adoption of risk management automation, and substantial…
Khatera Sahibzada
Giving feedback is unquestionably one of the most challenging tasks for any leader, as it can be painful to both the giver and receiver. It is nonetheless invaluable: Research has shown that employees recognize the importance of feedback—whether positive or negative—to their career development.…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
One of my favorite sayings is, “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” The reverse is also true: If nothing changes, nothing changes. Perfect! So I was more than a little surprised recently when I visited a company that had made a sizeable investment in bringing continuous improvement into the…
Bruce Hamilton
Most often when we think of a wheel, it’s in the context of transportation, one of the more obvious and ever-present of the 7 wastes in lean. In fact, the first likely use of a wheel and axle was not for transport but for processing—actual work.
According to the Smithsonian, the potter’s wheel…
Bruno Scibilia
Genichi Taguchi is famous for his pioneering methods of robust quality engineering. One of the major contributions that he made to quality improvement methods is Taguchi designs.
Designed experiments were first used by agronomists during the last century. This method seemed highly theoretical at…
William A. Levinson
‘Sitting is the new smoking” is a common new adage. James Levin, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic explains, “Too much sitting also seems to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer.” He adds that sitting for four rather than two hours a day in front of a TV screen increases the…
NIST
To any of his sports-fan colleagues, NIST mathematician and computer programmer Vernon Dantzler might have been somewhat of a celebrity. Dantzler had been a professional baseball player, and a star shortstop in the Texas circuit of the Negro Baseball League during the early 1940s, before the…
Harish Jose
The world of systems is very wide and deep, and this column can’t be perfect and all-encompassing. My goal here is to emphasize that solutions based on incomplete models lead to incomplete solutions. I’m not calling them incorrect solutions, just incomplete solutions.
Every problem model is a…
Thomas Kochan
Politicians have traditionally paid lip service to the plight of the worker, but with working class struggles at the top of the new administration’s fix-it list, we will likely hear them talking more than usual about the steps they will take to reduce income inequality or end three decades of wage…
Christine Schaefer
Last month, 2001 Baldrige Award-winning University of Wisconsin-Stout hosted a lively campus engagement session. (See for yourself via this video of the live-streamed event, which kicked off with dancing.) The university holds the “You Said... We Did” sessions each January to demonstrate its…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Before my bosses get wind of the artificial intelligence (AI) platform Quill (“perfectly written, meaningful narratives indistinguishable from a human-written one”) and decide its 18-month ROI would be a great exchange for my pay and complaining, I’d like to present this human-centric survey of…
Jeffrey Phillips
The attempt to eliminate noise from an operating system or a business process is an interesting and perhaps worthwhile challenge, until one considers the question: What is the real signal? What is creating the noise?
In many businesses today, there are several signals, what we might call noise…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
In a TED Talk, Geordie Rose, co-creator of the D-WAVE quantum computer, said, “Humans use tools to do things. If you give humans a new kind of tool, they can do things they couldn’t otherwise do—imagine the possibilities.”
Rose was, of course, speaking of quantum computers, but…
Roger Jensen
For several decades, manufacturers have been pursuing lean on their shop floors to reduce costs and improve lead times through waste elimination and process improvement. They have been less successful, however, in reaping lean’s potential benefits in their purchasing, planning, and supply chain…
Christopher Martin
Recently, during one of my many adventures across the internet, I stumbled across a photo that struck me. It depicts an aisle of a U.S. drugstore, where nearly every single product facing has a tag on it announcing a price and a limited-time promotion. The entire row is covered with bright yellow…
Jean-Noel Barrot
Operating a small business, the backbone of the U.S. economy, has always been tough. But small businesses have been disproportionately hurt by the Great Recession, losing 40 percent more jobs than the rest of the private sector combined. Interestingly, as my research with Harvard’s Ramana Nanda…
Mark Whitworth
Layered process auditing (LPA) is a quality management approach increasingly used by manufacturing and service companies alike to address a gap in traditional product-oriented approaches. When properly implemented, layered auditing is the most effective way to ensure that processes consistently…
Eston Martz
The language of statistics is a funny thing, but there usually isn’t much to laugh at in the consequences that can follow when misunderstandings occur between statisticians and nonstatisticians. We see these consequences frequently in the media, when new studies—that usually contradict previous…
Stefan Geib
While the fallout of the United Kingdom’s decision to exit the European Union has sent shockwaves throughout the political and economic world, Brexit is merely a footnote in the global supply chain risk story. According to the latest risk index from the Chartered Institute of Procurement &…
Chip Bell
When the circus ringmaster wails, “...and children of all ages,” he is speaking to me. I love the circus. When it came to my rural hometown when I was a boy, it was an all-consuming experience that embedded “circus” in my heart before it appeared and well beyond its departure.
Long before the…
Bruce Hamilton
Here is an article I wrote 10 years ago, recently resurrected from the lost letter file. I can’t remember why I wrote it or for whom. Originally titled, “What is Kaizen?” the article still resonates with me as I hope it will with you.
My study of TPS has been guided by book learning, tacit…
