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Big news in the business world: Walmart is famous for keeping costs down, including employee-related costs. In Joplin, Missouri, the company is testing a new approach: investing in workers through higher wages and training, on the theory that this will pay off all around—for customers, the company…
During the early days, late 1970s to late 1980s, there existed just a few small organizations to help people learn about and implement Toyota’s production system (TPS). They were led by people with decades of hand-on practice at Toyota and its affiliated companies. Some organizations, however,…
As a sort of character-building exercise, I recently opened an unsolicited email from my health insurance provider. I was intent on doing a quick purge of sham, spam, and flimflam, and I figured this one would be no different. But I also know I’m biased against health insurers, so I decided to set…
Learning to effectively use and troubleshoot geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T) analysis can be a saving grace when you’re faced with the question, “Why did my check fail?”
This article will explain the fundamental principles of GD&T evaluation and provide practices to…
(SME: Dearborn, MI) -- Author and manufacturing improvement expert Gary Conner has been recognized with the Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award for his book, Lean Epiphanies: Catapult the Cow and Other Inspirational Continuous Improvement Stories (Society of Manufacturing Engineers…
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‘My small business has landed a few very lucrative contracts and we’re growing. Honestly, we’re now struggling with quality control. We have management systems in place, and that’s helping, but we’re still having issues. I don’t know where to begin to get a handle on this.” —…
Keeping every healthcare employee focused on continuous improvement, every day, is a huge challenge. It’s natural for people to lose sight of long-term goals and objectives due to the pressures of daily responsibilities. One powerful tool executives can use to keep continuous improvement at the…
(Mencom Corp: Oakwood, GA) -- Automation is a key part of almost all manufacturing today. Why? The many benefits include reduced costs, increased productivity, improved quality, and greater efficiency.
Reduced costs. What once took one or more people to do can now be accomplished with one robot,…
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The CMM, or coordinate measuring machine, has long been the standard for dimensional inspection of complex parts across a variety of industries. But has the CMM outlived its usefulness? Is this technology now obsolete in the face of new technologies such as 3D scanning?
The …
(Frost & Sullivan: San Antonio, TX) -- Various industries, including food and beverage, environmental, biopharmaceuticals, clinical research and diagnostics have been driving the global laboratory analytical instrumentation market. The food industry has been a particularly prominent end user…
Are you listening to your customers? Do you understand what they’re trying to achieve? Are you using what you learn to actually design a better experience for them?
I was thrilled to be interviewed by Leah Berry and to a be part of her 30 Experts in 30 Days series; she asked me questions about…
I recently had the opportunity to speak to a leadership team that is considering building an innovation capability in their business. I was asked a question I get infrequently, but one I always enjoy answering. The question is this: “What keeps businesses from innovating effectively?”
The answer…
T
he world’s worst-kept business secret is that most acquisitions fail. Depending on what metric you use to evaluate success, mergers miss their intended goals by as much as 85 percent of the time. With a failure rate that high, there’s no single cause, and there’s no silver bullet that will…
As most of you know, one of my mantras for change agents is, “Those darn humans! God bless ’em,” i.e., don’t be surprised by anything. People never seem to mind change... for other people or departments.
Ever heard this: “It’s about time someone did something about that. They really needed to…
The prospect of a “hydrogen economy”—in which vehicles powered by fuel cells would travel the nation’s roadways emitting nothing from their tailpipes but wisps of water vapor—was making headlines 12 years ago.
In his 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush issued a challenge to…
(Pilgrim: Tampa, FL) -- Pilgrim Quality Solutions, a global provider of enterprise quality management software and services for life sciences, has introduced SmartSolve Mobile Audit, a mobile application created specifically to improve auditor productivity, particularly when conducting audits at…
Because many types of image analyses are performed to meet the different needs of industries and applications, imaging software and microscope companies have created software that serves as a “jack of all trades,” offering a variety of tools that apparently allow you to accomplish just about…
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Once known only as the creator of the nation’s highest award for organizational performance excellence, the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program now offers executive leadership development training that is revolutionizing how leaders themselves use the Baldrige…
Time is your most precious resource. If you’re not mindful about how you invest it in your team members, you won’t be happy with the “returns” you get. Being more effective requires you to look at your time in a new light.
Do leaders work, or do they sit back and supervise others? Where you stand…
I gave a rather successful talk on communicating design of experiments (DoE) at the recent ENBIS 14 conference in Linz, Austria. Things went mostly well, but it’s also fair to say many attendees had one major criticism: I didn’t explain why one factor at a time testing (OFAT) isn’t ideal. That…
(Frost & Sullivan: Mountain View, CA) -- The complex relationship between technology proliferation and rapidly evolving social norms is going to redefine U.S. society and business over the next 10 years. Against a backdrop of the 2016 political election, the United States finds itself engaging…
The lazy days of summer are a thing of the past. Through a remarkably diverse set of summer camps and other enrichment programs, kids all over Arkansas spent the summer of 2015 participating in activities designed to spark their curiosity and teach them the joy of creating. That joy—and the 21st…
Would you market your business today the same way you were marketing it 30 years ago? Would you use the same technology? Would you lead your team the same way? I’m guessing most leaders would answer each question with a resounding “No.”
If that’s the case, why has the work culture for business…
We all know what happens when we assume. For example, traditional designed experiments assume that residuals, the differences between the actual and modeled data, follow the normal distribution (as seen in figure 1). These experiments include t tests, analysis of variance (ANOVA), factorial…
When project managers establish effective routines for their daily work as well as for managing their teams, they develop healthy project management (PM) “hygiene.” This metaphor relates to having consistent processes in place, and it’s what project management is all about. Consistent routines…
