All Features
Arun Hariharan
In my October 2013 column, “Standardize to Improve,” I dealt with business process mapping in detail. Business process management systems (BPMS) comprise the entire gamut of documenting process steps, assigning ownership to process owners, and often, process-compliance audits to check whether you…
Mary McAtee
True to my profession as an engineer, I am a total geek at heart and proud of it. Spending time in automobile museums always fascinates me. It excites me to see a prescient innovator from the past come up with an idea like headlights. The first ones were Limelight carbide models that had a nasty…
Beth Colbert
When we think of champions of manufacturing today, we tend to think of some of the big companies such as Boeing, Caterpillar, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM. But companies don’t form themselves, and patents don’t automatically mean innovation—people do.
Not all companies have inventors. However, all…
Thomas Kochan, Lee Dyer
The technologies driving artificial intelligence (AI) are expanding exponentially, leading many technology experts and futurists to predict that machines will soon be doing many of the jobs that humans do today. Some even predict humans could lose control over their future.
While we agree about…
Austin Thomas
Since commercially available 3D printers came out a few years ago, their capabilities have radically expanded. At first, they could only print little things out of plastic, but now people have begun to print working cars and even bridges. People are actively experimenting with how to print with…
Jacqueline Calhoun
Which cybersecurity-related activities are most important to your business strategy and critical service delivery? How do you assess the effectiveness and efficiency of your use of cybersecurity standards, guidelines, and practices? To answer these questions and build excellence in your…
Patricia Morrill
Do all employees in healthcare understand how their jobs link to patients in some way? If they do, then they are more likely to know the importance of service excellence.
Does every leader, physician, and employee know the statistic that preventable medical errors are the third leading cause of…
American Customer Satisfaction Index ACSI
Customer satisfaction with automobiles and light vehicles slips 1.2 percent to a score of 81 on the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s (ACSI) scale of 0 to 100. A year ago, the industry improved driver satisfaction, and sales were at record highs. This year, demand seems somewhat saturated,…
Jim Benson
Focusing on our most important work (so that we can get it out the door and create value) is hard. It’s harder still when work suddenly picks up, is unfamiliar, or arrives with immediate deadlines when we are already busy.
The tyranny of the urgent often distracts us from what is truly important…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Our Sept. 22, 2017, episode of QDL was decidely techie, covering artifical intelligence, the internet of things, Manufacturing Day, and a cool color-matching tool that uses your smart phone.
Manufacturing Day preview
There is a lot happening on Manufacturing Day, which falls on Oct. 6 this year,…
Ryan E. Day
Every other day I stumble over an article about losing jobs to artificial intelligence (AI), AI being the demi-savior of mankind, or being the digital antichrist. So, exactly what is AI and what’s the big deal?
What is AI?
The question of what artificial intelligence is, immediately begs the…
Joshua Fairfield
Internet-enabled devices are so common, and so vulnerable, that hackers recently broke into a casino through its fish tank. The tank had internet-connected sensors measuring its temperature and cleanliness. The hackers got into the fish tank’s sensors and then to the computer used to control them…
Annette Franz
I recently saw an article with an image that included a quote from Antonio Banderas: “Expectation is the mother of all frustration.”
Honestly, this is true in life, in all relationships. Think about it for a second: Aren’t relationships much easier and much more relaxed when you have no…
Steven Brand
Quality management in manufacturing significantly contributes to a manufacturer's brand and bottom line. However, persistent challenges to quality management continue to trouble small and medium-sized manufacturing companies alike. The issues, of course, vary depending on the existing management…
GBMP
American Rheinmetall Systems (ARS) LLC, formerly Vingtech, is located in Biddeford, Maine. Established in January 2007, as part of a Norwegian company that had received a supplier contract for the U.S. Army’s CROWS remote weapon station program, the company was acquired by the Rheinmetall Group in…
Peter Merrill
ISO 9001:2015 has significant structural changes that differentiate it from the previous standard. The new high-level structure is common to all ISO management system standards (i.e., quality, environmental, IT security) and enables us to start looking at integration of these systems. There is a…
Sangeet Paul Choudary
User-centric firms should identify and track the core actions that can make or break their businesses.
Traditionally, executives have used standard metrics, such as cash flow, inventory turns, and operating income, to get a broad sense of the health of their firm. However, the game has changed…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
Headquartered in the little Hamlet of Deming, Washington, Canyon Hydro builds hydroelectric systems producing anywhere from 10 kilowatts up to 25 megawatts. In business for more than 40 years, Canyon Hydro has gained wide recognition with public and independent power producers…
William Hang, Zihua Liu, Kevin Yang
It seems to happen to every company, big or small, newcomer or seasoned expert. You ship a product design off to a manufacturer, and something goes wrong on the manufacturer’s side. The problem crops up in the design, production, or packaging, and leads to a bad apple in a batch of otherwise great…
John Flaig
Story update 9/26/2017: The words "distribution of" were inadvertently left out of the last sentence of the second paragraph.
Some practitioners think that if data from a process have a “bell-shaped” histogram, then the system is experiencing only common cause variation (i.e., random variation).…
Joe Bollard
As of Sept. 14, 2018, ISO/TS 16949 certificates are longer valid, which means automotive suppliers must certify to the new version, IATF 16949. Transition audits are underway and will continue into next year, but many companies still have a long way to go to prepare.
Let’s look at some of the…
Chip Bell
What if you were required to fill out an online form if you wanted the phone number or address of an enterprise with which you wanted to do business? Let’s say you were driving to a meeting at their location and you needed to contact someone to let them know you were unavoidably detained. You…
Mike Richman
QDL from Fri., Sept. 15, 2017, demonstrated that everywhere you look, you’ll find the positive effect of better quality. Here’s what we chatted about:
““U.S. Business Sectors Gain or Hold Steady in Public Esteem”
According to a recent Gallup survey, U.S. citizens’ outlook on a number of industries…
Christopher Martin
It’s said that the first five years of children’s lives are important to their future development and growth. Most of that is spent at home with parents and loved ones, before children are thrust into the first stage of their next 13 years of development: kindergarten. Being a parent of two…
Jeffrey Phillips
Lately I’ve been reading about the efforts to build or create innovation accelerators. Universities, businesses, and even cities and regions are talking about innovation and the need to create accelerators or innovation enablers. I’m glad that everyone is excited about innovation, and that they…
