All Features
Annette Franz
I have been doing a bit of speaking lately, either about journey mapping or with journey mapping as part of the talk, and I’ve learned a lot, or rather, confirmed a lot. Namely, you might think you’re journey mapping, you call it journey mapping, but it’s not really journey mapping. Here’s what…
Kevin Price
In the world of risk management, maintenance of mission-critical equipment drives priorities and budgets. It is the ultimate test of proactive maintenance and smart decision making. Managing assets that “cannot be allowed to fail” is more than an emotionally charged mandate that forces managers…
Venkat Viswanathan, Shashank Sripad, William Fredericks
As electric cars and trucks appear increasingly on U.S. highways, it raises the question: When will commercially viable electric vehicles take to the skies? There are a number of ambitious efforts to build electric-powered airplanes, including regional jets and planes that can cover longer…
Amadou Diallo
At James Lick High School the slate-gray Chromebooks are ubiquitous. Rolling cabinets stocked with dozens of the laptops sit in classrooms where teachers assign them to students for everything from researching hereditary DNA to writing essays. In this majority-Latino school of 1,100 students, 84…
Shobhendu Prabhakar
Someone recently asked me why quality failures and safety incidents continue to occur despite organizations communicating their quality and safety visions to the workforce, developing and implementing quality and safety management systems, and campaigning day in and day out about quality and safety…
Ryan E. Day
Brodie International provides liquid flow-meters and equipment for the petroleum and industrial markets. The company specializes in producing high-precision meters and valves that are used in the custody transfer of petroleum products.
The challenge
Brodie products involve components with complex…
Chris Woolston, Knowable Magazine
Companies spend millions of dollars and burn countless hours conducting performance reviews and devising checklists to assess their employees, and business scholars have studied the issue with great urgency and intensity. The results so far? By all available evidence, formal attempts to rate…
Ronda Culbertson
The AS9100 family of standards has completed very important updates, raising the business management quality bar again for aerospace and defense suppliers and OEMs. The transition to the new standards caught quite a few organizations somewhat flat-footed; particularly with the emphases on risk…
Steven Brand
How do you know if your election vote is really counted? How do you know the person you’re chatting with online really is who they say they are? And how do you know if a product you purchase has really met quality standards?
These three scenarios may not seem like they have much in common, but…
Bill Laverty
Operations management plays an important role in the manufacturing process, but similar to a stage crew at a theater, operations managers do all their best work behind the scenes. The best operations managers strive to go unnoticed, and why shouldn’t they? A seamless supply-chain process should…
Harry Hertz
Recently I’ve seen some startling statistics from Gallup and Glassdoor about employee and customer engagement. I hope those statistics do not represent data from any organization you or I associate with. The actions of senior leaders, as well as setting the right focus on employees, can prevent…
Who’s minding the store? Wait, where is the store? These days as often as not, it’s riding around in customers’ pockets in the shape of their smart phones. Brick and mortar outlets, along with the advertising strategies that go with them, simply won’t translate literally into the digital landscape…
Boris Shiklo
About 10 years ago, software testing was perceived as the only possible quality assurance (QA) measure for software, according to the World Quality Report 2018–2019. However, QA has since outstepped these boundaries. The QA process now implies that all stakeholders have a direct interest in…
Alexandra Killewald, Xiaolin Zhuo
Almost 70 percent of American mothers with children younger than 18 work for pay, but motherhood remains disruptive for many women’s work lives.
American women earn almost 20 percent less per hour than their male peers, in part because women disproportionately take responsibility for raising…
AssurX
Last month an investigative report revealed that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has millions of “hidden” serious injury and malfunctions reports on medical devices. According to the report from Kaiser Health News, “Since 2016, at least 1.1 million incidents have flowed into the…
Chris Woolston, Knowable Magazine
More than a decade has passed, but Mary Mawritz can still hear metal-tipped tassels flapping against leather loafers—the signature sound of her boss roaming the halls of his real estate company.
“Whenever I heard that jingling, I would get sick to my stomach because I knew he was approaching,” she…
Adam Pintar
Now, if you’re familiar with either statistics or J.R.R. Tolkien, I know the title grabbed your attention. And if not, don’t worry; all will become clear in time, but I’ve always wanted to reference The Lord of the Rings in a title (and scientific papers provide little opportunity for that).…
Matthew M. Lowe
Despite the life science industry’s infatuation with modernity and trend chasing, even its most forward-thinking organizations have struggled to fully digitize and integrate their operations.
Yet, while the industry lags behind most other sectors in implementing business-streamlining digital…
Brian S. Smith
Throughout my career, I have been a member of several trade organizations. I believe that standards have meaning, in every field. When I become a member of an organization, I endeavor to learn as much as possible.
For example, I belong to ASQ (American Society for Quality). I enjoy having…
Ryan E. Day
Most of us have heard of kaizen—continuous improvement of philosophy and methodology. In business, this involves all employees working to improve a company's processes to lean it out, to run with less waste. But most of us who are familiar with kaizen think of it as something you do.
Especially, we…
Donald J. Wheeler, James Beagle III
Last month we provided an operational definition of when measurement systems are equivalent in terms of bias. Here we will look at comparing the within-instrument measurement error between two or more systems.
Once again we must emphasize that it makes no sense to seek to compare measurement…
Jim Benson
We need to hold people accountable. I invite you to just look at that sentence for a minute. I hear it in every organization we work with. Every. Single. Time.
Look at the sentence. Now, consider for a moment, why you would say it. Go on.
Accountability models rarely do root cause analysis…
Terry Onica
Since the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) and Odette International introduced the Materials Management Operations Guideline/Logistics Evaluation (MMOG/LE) more than 16 years ago, it has become the de facto standard for evaluating supply chain processes in the global automotive industry.…
Tara García Mathewson
Once students learn how to sound out words, reading is easy. They can speak the words they see. But whether they understand them is a different question entirely. Reading comprehension is complicated. Teachers, though, can help students learn concrete skills to become better readers. One way is by…
Ryan E. Day
More and more, manufacturers are becoming the target of hackers, but what can they do about it, if anything? It seems every month, maybe even every week, we hear about some sort of data breach or cyberattack. Think Facebook, Google, and Marriott. As consumers we’ve almost become inured to the idea…
