All Features
Ryan E. Day
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Building airplanes and spaceships poses some of the most unique engineering and manufacturing challenges mankind has ever encountered. Fortunately, you don’t have to build rockets to benefit from rocket science. Manufacturers of most any product can improve their efficiency and…
Bonnie Stone
During the mid-1940s, Taiichi Ohno established the Toyota Production System, which is primarily based on eliminating nonvalue-added waste. He discovered that by reducing waste and inventory levels, problems get exposed and that forces employees to address these problems. To engage the workers and…
Laurel Thoennes @ QD
You can be known as a hard worker and counted on to tie up loose ends, but fall behind when co-workers’ tasks are on hold until yours are complete, and you’re perceived as needing an attitude adjustment. What would you want to do? Place blame or work on a remedy? There is a solution: Personal…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Sometimes leaders make bad decisions or harm team morale by making autocratic decisions without involving others. And other times they waste their team’s time by unnecessarily involving them.
How do you know when and how much to involve your team in decisions? Sometimes the answer is pretty…
Mark Whitworth
Reading the Automotive Industry Action Group’s CQI-8 Layered Process Audit (LPA) Guideline, you might notice a line saying LPAs are “completed on site ‘where the work is done.’”
For lean manufacturing experts, this specific quote might bring to mind gemba walks, a method where leaders observe and…
Mike Richman
F unny I should be writing this op-ed at this time, as our friend and colleague, Quality Digest’s editorial director Taran March, is currently traipsing around Paris and its surrounding environs, no doubt enjoying a baguette or brioche or some other culinary delight. Gratefully, that’s about the…
Kevin Meyer
A few months ago I told you how my wife and I had found a midcentury remodel project only a couple blocks away from where we currently live. We wanted to create a “lean home”—smaller with a simple layout, less storage space, and as few walls and doors as possible to optimize flow. The remodel has…
Lolly Daskal
After decades of coaching powerful executives around the world, I have observed that leaders rise to their positions relying on a specific set of values and traits. But in time, every executive reaches a point when his performance suffers and failure persists. Very few understand why or how to…
Bruce Hamilton
For me, Taiichi Ohno and Shigeo Shingo are a bit like the Lennon and McCartney of waste elimination. Together they frame the technical and social sciences of what we call lean today.
Taiichi Ohno tells us there are seven wastes that account for 95 percent of the elapsed time between “paying and…
Olympus
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Digital microscopes combine high-quality optical systems with the ease of use of a digital device for the efficient management of industrial quality control workflows.
Accurate inspection and measurement no longer depend on in-depth microscopy knowledge. Digital microscopes…
Ryan E. Day
I remember my first trip to Michigan in 2012. I was covering the Ford Motor Co.’s annual Trend Conference and had the opportunity to meet Alan Mulally, who gave a compelling presentation explaining the vision, strategy, and implementation of the One Ford plan. I was impressed more with the man…
Jonathan O’Hare
The execution of an inspection plan is critical for ensuring the continuous production of quality products. The purpose of this article is to explain how software tools can be used to maximize utilization of the inspection system within the main control loop once the inspection plan has been…
Mark Rosenthal
It was September 1901, in Dayton, Ohio, and Wilbur Wright was frustrated. The previous year, 1900, he had built and tested, with his brother Orville’s help, their first full-size glider. It was designed using the most up-to-date information about wing design available. His plan had been to “kite”…
Ryan E. Day
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Founded in 1927 to produce aluminum splints—cutting edge at the time—Zimmer Biomet is a medical device company commanding second place in the entire world’s overall orthopedic market share. The organization’s stated purpose is to “Restore mobility, alleviate pain, and improve the…
Winnie Ip
You may have heard that it takes 21 days to form a new habit. Well, it turns out that’s just a myth. Researchers found that, on average, it takes people more than two months before a new behavior becomes automatic. So what does that have to do with your office ergonomics process? A lot, especially…
John Bell
Do Less Better is the name of my book (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Do less better is also a culture and a strategy of organizations and their leaders. Do-less-better practitioners are fanatical about focus and simplification; herein lies the secret of their success. Yet, do less better isn’t…
Ellen Kominars
While Hank Matousek Sr. was perfectly content in his position as quality control manager at a bearing company during the late 1960s and early 1970s, he had no idea that his employer’s growing financial woes and a pending layoff would become his surprise catalysts to found Grind All Inc. Not…
Joel Smith
In parts one and two of “Gauging Gage,” we looked at the numbers of parts, operators, and replicates used in a gage repeatability and reproducibility (GR&R) study and how accurately we could estimate %Contribution based on the choice for each. In doing so, I hoped to provide you with valuable…
AssurX
A common pitfall in quality management system (QMS) process automation occurs with a poorly planned process automation strategy. Too often, the temptation is to automate all quality processes at once and streamline the entire eQMS process in one giant undertaking. However, real-world experience…
Rob Mitchum
People have touted the potential of big data and computation in medicine for what feels like decades, promising more effective and personalized treatments, new research discoveries, and smarter clinical predictions. But only recently have these technologies made it to the clinic, where they can…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
There is an enemy in your company, and it’s invisible. You can’t see it because it literally is not there. Yet its impact is massive on every level of the enterprise, from boardroom to marketing to operations to the field staff. And the only way we have even the smallest chance of destroying it is…
Ryan E. Day
During the 1950s, W. Edwards Deming championed quality management philosophies that helped Japan develop into a world-class industrial center. In 1954, Joseph M. Juran was invited to lecture by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers. His visit marked a turning point in Japan’s quality…
Ryan E. Day
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Everyone in manufacturing has heard about the fantastic properties of composite materials, but if you’re not involved in satellite communications (SATCOM), you’ve probably never heard of Eclipse Composites. If you are into SATCOM and particularly SATCOM antennas, you know the…
Anna Nagurney
The American economy is underpinned by networks. Road networks carry traffic and freight; the internet and telecommunications networks carry our voices and digital information; the electricity grid is a network carrying energy; financial networks transfer money from bank accounts to merchants.…
Sameer Kadam, Mickey Shah
The importance of quality management cannot be overstated. It enables companies to increase efficiency, lower risks, achieve compliance, and build better and safer products. Yet many quality management teams struggle to communicate the value of their operations to other departments and executive…
