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As a research company, LNS Research is in the perfect position to see what is really going on behind the scenes in the manufacturing industry. On one side of the coin, we’re interviewing and surveying quality and manufacturing executives to understand their foremost challenges; on the other side,…
Value stream analysis is an effective way to identify improvement opportunities within a product or service family's value stream, envision a leaner future state, and develop an actionable value stream improvement plan to achieve the future state. It's bread-and-butter stuff for the lean…
That’s probably a silly question, but I don’t feel silly reminding anyone of the answer.
Last month, I took a different angle to this question and asked, “What’s the Cost of Listening to Customers?” In that column, I mentioned that if we don’t understand who our customers are, what jobs they are…
You know that old saying “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”? Unfortunately, that is the thought process many executives adopt around quality management. It is not necessarily that their quality management systems are broken, per se, but the challenge of having disconnected quality systems and data…
It was just an email invitation to a public relations event in the Mission District of San Francisco, but it started a long string of adjectives like: brief, cryptic, amusing, exciting, breathtaking, scary, and… well, stinky.
All those adjectives collided last week to provide an almost surreal…
Last month the quadrennial U.S. National Climate Assessment was issued. Although the report is 840 pages long, the conclusion is clear. It is stated in the very first sentence: “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present.”
Although climate…
Do you still insist on asking, “Which chart do I use for which situation?”
I’ve seen many flowcharts in books to help you answer this question. They’re all some variation of this:
I find them far too confusing for the average user and have never taught this in my work. Besides, you get no credit…
In recent years, there have been important advances to ensure that therapies for serious conditions are approved and available to patients as soon as sufficient data can show that the therapies’ benefits outweigh their risks. Despite the progress, there is much more work to be done. Many…
(Wiley: Hoboken, NJ) -- Leaders are no strangers to challenges; in recent years, businesses have experienced unprecedented layoffs, dismal sales, dwindling retirement accounts, and the bankruptcy of once-heralded institutions. While these uncertain times are difficult, they also provide the…
In most industries, maintenance and calibration management departments are separate operations that rarely, if ever cross paths. However, in some industries, such as pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing, maintenance and calibrations are often performed on the same assets. As a result,…
In college I learned about chaos theory, sometimes called the butterfly effect, in which small differences in an initial condition result in divergent outcomes in dynamic systems. In layman’s terms, my fellow students and I were fond of saying that when a butterfly flutters its wings over your…
The manufacturing industry is poised for growth in 2014. Still, the second annual BDO USA LLP analysis of risk factors listed in the most recent 10-K filings of the largest 100 publicly traded U.S. manufacturers found that they will contend with a number of challenges as they work to capitalize on…
We’ve all been there—staring down the week’s to-do list with the best of intentions, only to find, at the end of the week, that we didn’t accomplish everything that was required of us. Our tasks get carried over into the following week, and before we know it, we’re caught in the paradox of being…
One thing burned into the brains of those who survive a statistics class is that you have to specify an alpha-level before you do anything statistical. And when it comes to statistical inference, they are correct. But just what does the alpha-level represent? What does it mean in practice? Read on…
What does healthcare in the United States need? Well, according to a report released May 29, 2014, by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), U.S. healthcare organizations need “systems engineering.”
In their letter to President Obama, PCAST co-chairs John Holdren…
I recently stumbled upon the book by S.J. Scott, Habit Stacking: 97 Small Life Changes That Take Five Minutes or Less (Archangel Ink, 2014). The concept is very simple, but powerful. Instead of a classical review, this is an “in a nutshell” version.
The idea of habit stacking is this: 1. You can…
R ecently I shared five reasons why hope is not an effective strategy, but hope is, nonetheless, an essential attitude. What do you think influences that attitude? Let’s take a look.
There’s a difference between hope and hope so. The former is certain, expectant, optimistic. The latter is…
The foundations of the quality industry go back decades, centuries, even millennia. In that course of time, men and women of various backgrounds and nationalities contributed wisdom distilled from their hard-earned experiences to help develop the tools and techniques that help good organizations…
What stands between you and the more productive version of you—the person who meets personal and professional goals on a daily, monthly, and yearly basis?
Robert Pozen provides concrete answers to this question in his new course, Maximizing Your Personal Productivity, offered July 15–16, 2014, by…
While public U.S. companies were preparing to meet their first conflict minerals reporting deadline, their European counterparts were taking their first steps toward implementing a conflict minerals law.
On March 5, 2014, the European Commission proposed a draft regulation to stop the sale and…
It’s all too easy to make mistakes involving statistics. Powerful statistical software can remove a lot of the difficulty surrounding statistical calculation, reducing the risk of mathematical errors, but correctly interpreting the results of an analysis can be even more challenging.
No one knows…
The wisdom of Joseph M. Juran continues to inform and enlighten the quality industry here in the United States and around the world. Juran, who passed away at the age of 103 in 2008, stands as one of the true giants in the modern world of quality and performance excellence.
Joseph DeFeo worked…
I frequently get asked questions from clients and readers about how to handle the everyday maintenance of a useful and compliant ISO 9001 quality management system (QMS). I thought I’d address a couple of those questions that I feel many people can relate to.
Numbering schemes: would a document…
For those who have already heard of Disney’s creative strategy, you may not be aware that the romantic notion of it coming directly from Walt Disney himself is actually untrue. The first mention of the dreamer, the realist, and the critic was taken from an interview with two of Disney’s original…
Aconversation with a lean friend reminded me of a story that I shared four years ago. It dealt with the consequences of crazy measures and how lack of management oversight will allow these measures to persist indefinitely. Absentee decision makers passing down absurd directives... sound familiar…
