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Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, is the United States’ premier high-energy particle accelerator facility. Fermilab collaborates with scientists from around the world to perform pioneering research and operate particle accelerators, in addition to experimenting…
I’ve never understood the fascination with selfies.
Maybe it’s because I'm over 50. After surviving the slings and arrows of a half a century on Earth, the minute or two I spend in front of the bathroom mirror each morning is more than enough selfie time for me.
Still, when I heard that Microsoft…
My son is all grown up now and studying hard at university. But when he was a small boy I remember having the same conversation with him every time he was naughty.
Me: “Reece, why did you do that?” Reece: “I don’t know.” Me: “But Reece, you know better than that.” Reece: “I know, Dad.” Me: “Well…
F ounded in 1995, Per Scholas is the largest and oldest professional IT workforce development program in New York City, providing technology education, access, training, and job placement services for people in underserved communities. Per Scholas believes that one of the most effective ways to…
A significant portion of my strategic facilitation work is with internal functions, a click or two below corporate and business-unit strategy, which includes marketing, human resources, purchasing, and even internal strategy groups.
There’s good news and bad news in this. The good news is that…
Supply chain quality is a hot topic these days. Suppliers may be considered third-party organizations, but they are also extensions of your organization. One aspect of managing supplier quality is dealing with shipments of nonconforming items, parts, or services from suppliers.
The following are…
What happens when someone with a lot of experience leaves your office? She may have many years of technical, marketing, or customer expertise. How will her accumulated knowledge and know-how be captured and transferred to her successor?
In most organizations the process is haphazard. The employee…
Editor’s note: The author, in conjunction with Quality Digest’s Professional Development Curriculum, is offering a fee-based, two-part presentation on this topic on June 16, 2015 and July 28, 2015. These presentations are offered live and on-demand, and CEU are provided to those who complete both…
As regulatory compliance expands with fast-changing, ever-growing requirements, safety and quality professionals are falling behind. Senior management, particularly among small and mid-sized manufacturers, delegates the function of safety and quality without fully comprehending the scope and…
Just when we’d all decided Washington lawmakers won’t accomplish much beyond enjoying their own excellent health insurance coverage, tasty bean soup in the Senate cafeteria, and the best parking on Capitol Hill, it turns out they might actually unite to accomplish something pretty big after all.…
Some meetings serve simply to disseminate information. One person gives a presentation, usually in PowerPoint, and others listen and absorb some of the content. In its method this meeting is really an extension of a school class or university lecture. We will not dwell on this type of meeting here…
The last few weeks for me have been all things Shingo, including a presentation at the Shingo Institute’s International Conference three weeks ago in Provo, Utah, followed by four days of Shingo Institute workshops at Vibco in Richmond, RI. Questions at both events about assessing for enterprise…
The section of the MakerBot factory where the MakerBot Replicator Z18 gets made didn’t get much overhead light, so fluorescent tubes were hung above each workstation. The assembly line workers weren’t used to the brightness, however, and some switched them off.
Scott Hraska, manufacturing…
(Renishaw: Gloucestershire, UK) -- ATOM is Renishaw’s noncontact optical linear and rotary incremental encoder system combines miniaturization with exceptional performance and reliability.
ATOM linear and rotary (angle) encoder systems feature integral set-up LEDs that are usually sufficient for…
The FDA says that investigational review boards (IRBs) aren’t required to collect a statement of investigator assurance from studies they preside over.
This is troubling. My first question: How are IRBs going to assure that clinical investigators will abide by requisite 21 code of federal…
It’s usually not a good idea to rely solely on a single statistic to draw conclusions about your process. Do that, and you could fall into the clutches of the “duck-rabbit” illusion shown below.
If you fix your eyes solely on the duck, you’ll miss the rabbit—and vice-versa.
If you’re using…
(ThomasNet: New York) -- ThomasNet today announced that it is bringing “Buy it Now on Amazon” functionality to ThomasNet.com. This e-commerce capability supports ThomasNet.com’s position as the leading platform for product sourcing and supplier discovery. Purchasing professionals and engineers can…
After the economic downturn of 2009, when many workers were phased out, subject matter experts (SMEs)—people who held the most knowledge about companies’ products and processes—found themselves assuming more job duties. Feeling overworked and underappreciated, SMEs have been biding their time…
It is vitally important for lean people to know nothing when working on improvement. This sounds like a crazy idea, but it is another 100-percent turnaround from traditional management thinking.
To do this, it’s necessary to do three things: • Understand how lean thinkers go about radically…
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are woven into almost every facet of the manufacturing world to help employees and subcontractors complete their tasks safely and in compliance with regulations and standards. It sounds simple enough: Describe the processes in SOPs and verify that they are…
(Van Daele & Associates Inc.) -- Businesses do a poor job picking managers to lead their employees, collectively costing companies billions of dollars each year, according to the recent Gallup report “State of the American Manager.”
The report is based on more than “four decades of extensive…
A simple calculation—available time divided by demand—known as takt time, is a fuzzy concept for many people in healthcare. That’s understandable when you consider a hospital is open 24 hours a day, and you never know how many people are going to show up at the door. Let’s look at two concepts…
In my last column, I wrote about leaders having AIM, which is my acronym for the key characteristics of leadership: authenticity, innovation, and motivation. Here, I’ll expand on the characteristic of authenticity.
Over the years I’ve enjoyed many leadership roles, most of them as a volunteer in…
What comes to mind when you think of “return on investment?” For most of us, our mind jumps to calculations of costs and revenues. The end goal, no matter the project, is for the last cell in the spreadsheet to be black or green—not red.
In this column, I want to encourage you to expand your…
Recently, in one of the many online discussion groups about quality, Six Sigma, and lean, this question was posed: “Can X-bar R and X-bar S be used interchangeably based on samples size (n) if the subgroup size is greater than one and less than eight?” Answers varied, of course.
In some of these…
