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A prominent politician goes before his constituents during a tough reelection campaign. He’s introduced by the local mayor, and strides to the stage, waving and smiling to enthusiastic applause.
“It’s great to be here with you tonight. I love this great state of [fill in the blank]. Erica and I…
Much has been written about the need for standardized work to maximize worker efficiency and process performance. And rightly so. Without standardized work, huge variances in efficiency and effectiveness are virtually inevitable. Studies indicate there can be as much as a 200-percent difference…
Gauge repeatability and reproducibility (gauge R&R) is mostly used in manufacturing environments to determine if you can trust your measurement system to distinguish between parts, if the measuring tool is consistent, and if measurements are consistent across operators.
In this article we…
My son, Ben, asked me last week, “How come the bacon cooks better on Grandma’s pan?” I’d just fried up some bacon using a pan handed down from my mother, and the bacon was, as Ben noted, much more consistently cooked.
I answered my son’s question: “Value engineering,” I said with private sarcasm.…
During the 1990s and early 2000s, several global apparel, sports, and toy brands hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. Large-scale protests erupted against these companies for allegedly using ‘‘sweatshops’’ with dangerous working conditions to manufacture their products.
The Fair Labor…
During the 1990s and early 2000s, several global apparel, sports, and toy brands hit the headlines for the wrong reasons. Large-scale protests erupted against these companies for allegedly using ‘‘sweatshops’’ with dangerous working conditions to manufacture their products.
The Fair Labor…
Last weekend I decided to change the oil and tune up my classic car, a 1972 Datsun 1200. (My wife has other names for it.) It sports a “four on the floor” and a simple four-cylinder engine that doesn’t even need fancy smog controls. Since I hadn’t tinkered with this car in a long while, I was…
As I join others this year in celebrating 25 years of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, the only improvement program with a prestigious presidential award, I think about the Baldrige’s history of public service, and what the future holds for the only public-private partnership that…
When discussing lean math with other folks, I often get some less-than-optimal responses. Of course, much of the time it’s probably me.
In any case, this is how I would characterize the more nonvalue-adding responses to the subject. • Apoplectic. You know, the math-anxiety-induced stroke. Some…
Everyone in the quality world is familiar with the famous 80–20 rule for corrective action project prioritization. The “rule” suggests that 20 percent of the causes result in 80 percent of the effects or in technical terms, the principal of factor sparsity. For the engineer this can be thought of…
Headlines shout the message almost every day: The U.S. healthcare delivery system is unaffordable, inefficient, and sometimes downright dangerous. It is in need of true transformation. To do this, we must tap into the wisdom of those delivering care and equip them with the means to create a new…
Headlines shout the message almost every day: The U.S. healthcare delivery system is unaffordable, inefficient, and sometimes downright dangerous. It is in need of true transformation. To do this, we must tap into the wisdom of those delivering care and equip them with the means to create a new…
Automobiles were once high-maintenance luxuries that only the wealthy could afford. Renewable energy, such as that from photovoltaic sources, also is a luxury among whose sole redeeming qualities are its uninterruptable nature—at least during the daytime. Government efforts to compel its use, e.g…
Our Lady of Lourdes Grotto—a significant Catholic pilgrimage site in Lourdes, France, visited by nearly 6 million people each year—was digitally documented on Jan. 29, 2013, by CyArk, a nonprofit organization in Oakland, California, whose mission is to preserve cultural heritage, and Organization…
Cutting waste-to-landfill at Ford Motor Co.’s Van Dyke Transmission Plant has always been important to workers there, but they weren’t satisfied until last fall, when a small, diligent local committee played a major role in solving a nagging 10-ton problem.
The solution, which keeps 10 tons’…
In my experience, if you ask senior leaders if they would fire a sales manager whose team missed quota three years in a row, they usually say yes. If you ask them if they would fire a plant manager whose facility had a poor safety record for three consecutive years, they would say yes. But ask if…
“Check on your customers every 10 minutes or so,” instructs the typical restaurant manager. And Deming turns in his grave again because the manager’s objective is arbirtrary. It’s not based on the capabilities of a process or the needs of the customer. But wait—there’s a new service quality…
(AQSENSE: Girona, Spain) -- AQSENSE has incorporated into 3DExpress a new functionality to configure, with a single click, the “one camera—multiple lasers system,” which avoids capturing occlusions.
3DExpress software was presented November 2012 at the VISION show with the slogan, “3D Machine…
If the title of this post made you think you’d be reading about Abraham Lincoln and Tyra Banks, you’re only half right.
A few weeks ago, statistician and journalist Nate Silver published an interesting post on how U.S. presidents are ranked by historians. Silver showed that the percentage of…
The full-page ad in a Sunday edition of The New York Times stated boldly that $60 million was received during 2012—more than $1 million a week—by a variety of recognized charities and community causes. The ad was not from a charity or fund-raising organization. It was from one of America’s largest…
Last night I went to the theater. Actor and satirist Marco Paolini was performing his favorite monologue about Galileo Galilei. Not an easy task, when you consider the man and his place in history. Paolini was juggling religion, the Inquisition, mathematics, astronomy, astrology—and Galileo’s…
With the evolution of quality management, there has been a shift away from manual and paper-based solutions. Organizations are now leveraging the power of automation and integration across the value chain to improve the quality of products and processes. This progression has materialized directly…
A good friend of mine recently recommended a wonderful documentary to me: Jiro Dreams of Sushi. I now recommend it to you. It’s a phenomenal and fascinating study of a man who embodies the disciplined pursuit of perfection.
The 85-year-old Jiro Ono owns Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, $300-per-meal…
One of the most poorly understood concepts in the use of statistics is the idea of assumptions. You’ve probably encountered many of these assumptions, such as “data normality is an assumption of the one-sample t-test.” But if you read that statement and believe normality is a requirement of the…
Iran across an old but interesting article by Mara Lee on the Hartford Courant website: “Big Exports From Connecticut: Corn, Wheat, Soybeans, Oil; Feds Can’t Explain It.” The article provides a wonderful example of just how far one’s concept of reality can become skewed by not following the basic…