All Features
Taran March @ Quality Digest
What is quality intelligence, exactly? It’s more than marketing spin. More, even, than the sum of its many control charts. It’s not collecting data simply to further go/no-go actions. And it doesn’t mean turning the cognitive wheel entirely over to artificial intelligence, either—far from it.
We…
Ryan E. Day
An organization can achieve great results when everyone is working together, looking at the same information generated from the same data, and using the same rules. Changes can be made that affect a company’s bottom line through operational improvements, product quality, and process optimization.…
Ken Levine
Lean Six Sigma (LSS) professionals have an enormous opportunity to add value to organizations and to our communities during this coronavirus pandemic. We have the objective orientation, methods, and tools to help. Process improvement is currently more important than ever in this “new normal”…
Gleb Tsipursky
So many companies are shifting their employees to working from home to address the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Yet they’re not considering the potential quality disasters that can occur as a result of this transition.
An example of this is what one of my coaching clients experienced more than a…
Celia Paulsen
Nobody likes business to be slow. If you’re in a fast-paced world like manufacturing, seeing your machines or employees idle can drive a person insane. If you’re used to your production line working to capacity and suddenly business slows down, it can be a frustrating time.
When I was in the U.S.…
Donald J. Wheeler, Al Pfadt
Each day we receive data that seek to quantify the Covid-19 pandemic. These daily values tell us how things have changed from yesterday, and give us the current totals, but they are difficult to understand simply because they are only a small piece of the puzzle. And like pieces of a puzzle, data…
Ken Maynard
When educational and public sectors consider applying a proven method like lean Six Sigma, the perception persists that this “manufacturing program” will not work in a nonmanufacturing environment. Along with that limiting assumption, there is an underlying expectation within the service industry…
Jody Muelaner
The seven basic tools of quality are a standard set of graphical methods for improving quality. They can help with understanding variation and determining the root cause of errors in processes. The seven basic tools are most commonly used within lean manufacturing. All of the tools are graphical…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Government bureaucracies are inefficient. They waste taxpayer dollars, and they have no incentive to improve. We’ve all heard and probably repeated these axioms about wasteful government spending.
And it’s often true; you don’t have to look far to find examples of government overpaying for products…
Ryan E. Day
Lean: an employee-championed method of waste reduction. Six Sigma: a robust method of defect reduction. Embracing both methods provides organizations with multiple tools for continuous improvement. Developed for manufacturing, lean Six Sigma has now been recognized by government agencies as a…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
At the University of California at San Diego, lean concepts have taken hold. Along with its process improvement curriculum, the university applies what it teaches through initiatives around campus. Projects both complex and simple tackle the snags, waste, and bottlenecks of academic life. Students…
Ryan E. Day
Lean looks at ways to reduce waste and improve flow. The principles are relevant to virtually every organizational sector and vertical. It’s no surprise, then, that so many organizations tout lean and devote resources to lean initiatives. But, too often, there is a tendency for a company to promote…
Harish Jose
In today’s column, I’m looking at Weber’s Law. It’s named after Ernst Heinrich Weber (born June 24, 1795, died Jan. 26, 1878), a German physician who was one of the pioneers of experimental psychology. I highly recommend the Numberphile YouTube video that explains this in detail.
A simple…
William A. Levinson
The Automotive Industry Action Group’s (AIAG’s) and German Association of the Automotive Industry’s (VDA’s) new Failure Mode and Effects Analysis Handbook (AIAG, 2019) offers significant advances over FMEA as practiced 15 or 20 years ago.1 The publication is definitely worth buying because the new…
Paul Foster
If you’re new to layered process audits, it’s critical to make sure everyone on your team is on the same page with basic terms. Here we provide a guide of 16 essential terms to know when launching your LPA program and getting your team up to speed. Don’t forget to directly download your own copy of…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
What a year.
No matter your job, your industry, or your political beliefs, this year has been a heck of a ride. The (still ongoing) trade war with China, manufacturing gains (and losses), the 737 MAX, Hong Kong riots, North Korea, Brexit, impeachment. What a mixed bag of ups and downs that has…
As usual with Quality Digest’s diverse audience, this year’s top stories covered a wide range of topics applicable to quality professionals. From hardware to software, from standards to risk management, from China trade to FDA regulations. It’s always fun to see what readers gravitate to, and this…
Harish Jose
It has been a while since I have written about statistics, and I get asked a lot about a way to calculate sample sizes based on reliability and confidence levels. So today I am sharing a spreadsheet that generates an operating characteristic (OC) curve based on your sample size and the number of…
Frances Brunelle
Just as baby boomers on the manufacturing plant floor are getting ready to retire, so are the owners. More than 5,000 small manufacturing operations (with annual revenues between $2 and $20 million) will either close their doors or find new owners during the next five years.
Some of these owners…
Donald J. Wheeler
In the past two months we have looked at how three-sigma limits work with skewed data. This column finds the power functions for the probability limits of phase two charts with skewed probability models, and compares the trade-offs made by three-sigma limits with the trade-offs made by the…
Anthony D. Burns
You’ve set aside Sunday afternoon to bake some cookies, but you discover you have run out of eggs. Your partner in marital bliss has gone out and taken the car. You call a couple of mates, and they tell you to try bananas, vegetable oil, or applesauce as egg substitutes. You decide to have some fun…
Harish Jose
Today I’m looking at design from a cybernetics viewpoint. My inspirations come from cybernetics and design theorists Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Klaus Krippendorff, Paul Pangaro, and Ranulph Glanville. I was curious about how the interface of a device conveys the message to the user on how to…
Harish Jose
One of my favorite equations from Factory Physics, by Wallace Hopp and Mark Spearman (Waveland Press, third edition, 2011) is Kingman’s formula, usually represented as “VUT.”
The VUT equation is named after Sir John Kingman, a British mathematician:
The first factor represents variability and is…
Steve Moore
Pickleball is arguably the fastest-growing sport in the United States, especially among baby-boomer retirees. This game is similar to tennis, but is played on a smaller court (44 ft × 20 ft) with a solid paddle and a perforated polymer ball much like a wiffle ball.
Pickleball’s popularity may be…
Harish Jose
After reviewing Mark Graban’s wonderful book, Measures of Success (Constancy, 2018), I started rereading Walter Shewhart’s books, Statistical Method From the Viewpoint of Quality Control (Dover reprint 1986, originally edited by W. Edwards. Deming), and Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured…
