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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…
Picture this: Your coordinate measuring machine (CMM) has crashed for the umpteenth time, and now it’s out of commission because you need to replace the probe head. Does this sound familiar? Across the world, manufacturers are facing the same problem: A situation occurs, you have to call the CMM’s…
Over the years, I’ve beaten myself up over business breakdowns, lost relationships, and countless other failures. I would only look at what I’d done wrong and where I was at fault. And, of course, this would only make me feel worse.
People would tell me, “Rob, you need to love yourself.” Wow,…
Every year a new cohort of Baldrige Executive Fellows gains intensive knowledge about leading organizations to excellence through cross-sector, peer-to-peer learning hosted at the sites of Baldrige Award recipients. Every Baldrige Fellow completes a capstone project as part of the executive…
(Dynamic Metrology Solutions: Duncan, SC) -- MAP stands for Metrology Annotation Pro, a software tool for rapid “ballooning” of drawings for manufacturing that can save substantial time over manual ballooning or other methods of annotating drawings. MAP opens most 2D drawing files, including Adobe…
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…
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…
The proliferation of Accountable Care Organizations (ACO), spurred by the healthcare industry’s shift from fee-for-service to pay-for-performance, has focused healthcare executives’ attention on clinical outcome metrics. Yet the greatest barriers—individual clinician practices—remain difficult to…
(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…
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…
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…
(Tech Soft 3D: Bend) -- Tech Soft 3D, a leading provider of software development tools and 3D PDF solutions to the engineering industry, has announced the Beyond 3D podcast channel, where guests will explore all things 3D related.
The monthly podcast is intended to provide meaningful and relevant…
If you’ve ever used a device that picks up signals over the air, you know that sometimes you just can’t get the signal to come in clearly. You point the device every which way, move it all around the room, do a little dance, but nothing seems to work. There doesn’t seem to be any explanation.…
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…
Sponsored Content
You might say what Henry Ford did for the automobile, GE, Siemens, and Mitsubishi have done for the gas and steam turbine industry. Naturally, the tools and technicians of both sectors have had to evolve right along with the challenges of new technology and the ever-increasing…
(FDA: Washington, D.C.) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has awarded a total of $21.8 million to support 42 states to help implement the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) produce-safety rule. The rule, which the FDA finalized in November 2015, establishes science-based minimum…
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…
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…
Steve Klasko, president of Thomas Jefferson University and CEO of Jefferson Health, is the co-author of We Can Fix Healthcare (Mary Ann Lieber Inc., 2016) with Wharton adjunct professor Gregory P. Shea and Michael Hoad. In the book, the authors propose 12 disruptive transformations to the…
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…
