All Features
Douglas C. Fair
Plant-floor quality issues tend to focus on a company’s technical resources. When products fall out of spec, alarms sound and all hands are immediately on deck to fix things. Despite large technology investments to monitor and adjust production processes, manufacturers are still bedeviled by…
Mark Lee Hunter, Luk Van Wassenhove, Maria Besiou
The digital revolution is transforming the relationship between consumers and companies. Nearly all business functions are feeling the effects, but conventional marketing sits squarely on the fault lines of disruption. Brand-authorized messages increasingly can’t compete with online customer…
NIST
Printing 3D metal objects is a booming industry, with the market for products and services worth more than an estimated $2.3 billion in 2015—a nearly fivefold growth since 2010. For this type of manufacturing, a metal part is built up successively, layer by layer, over minutes or hours. Sometimes…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
I n our June 23, 2017, episode of QDL we look at STEM education, personal kanban, and common mistakes when using SPC.
“ASME Supports STEM Opportunities Act of 2017”
Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) has introduced H.R. 2653, which promises to increase engagement of women and minorities…
Matthew Barsalou, Robert Perkin
As you drive east on I-70 coming from the Rockies, there is a point where you seem to have stopped descending, but a sign says, “Trucks: Don’t be fooled. Four more miles of steep grades and sharp curves.” The message is that it would be premature to relax at this point, and vigilant driving is…
Michael Ray Fincher
To meet the 2018 deadline for becoming certified to ISO 9001:2015, organizations are scrambling to overhaul their quality management systems. One major revision to ISO 9001 is the requirement to identify, evaluate, and address risks. Unfortunately, a tool most appropriate for these actions has…
Liri Andersson
Ten years ago, when we would ask senior executives or company directors what “digital” meant to them, their response would usually be something related to social media. Today, it might be apps, big data, 3D printing, the cloud, or another current example of digital technology. All such answers are…
Christopher Martin
Many of us are familiar with the concept of the Ohno Circle, innovated by Taiichi Ohno at Toyota during the 1940s. While familiarity with the technique and the goals it sets to accomplish is one thing, how many of us have actually participated? The surprising answer is… probably all of us, in a…
Roger Lehman, Julius Koh
Lucy felt hollow and dissatisfied. She was a star performer and had just helped her team clinch a large government deal that they had been working on for months. At the celebration that evening, Lucy was forced to put on a smile and a dynamic front. She had good relationships with her team members…
Robert A. Brown
Lean thinking has taken its rightful place in the effort to improve efficiency in manufacturing. However, it isn’t fulfilling its potential in many areas, most notably with knowledge workers. This is due to a fundamental flaw in how lean is presented and utilized. With a better constructed…
Steve Daum
I have daily conversations with manufacturer plant managers, quality managers, engineers, supervisors, and plant production workers about challenges when using statistical process control (SPC). Of the mistakes I witness in the application of SPC, I’d like to share the five most prevalent; they…
Phanish Puranam, Sunkee Lee
When organizations change how they compensate employees they are embarking on a social experiment, whether decision-makers know it or not. The trouble is the vast majority of these experiments are conducted unscientifically, yielding results that can be misleading or inconclusive.
The popularity…
William A. Levinson
‘We’ve always done it that way” explains why many suboptimal and even obsolete methods are taken for granted. The range chart for statistical process control (SPC) is, for example, somewhat inferior to the sample standard deviation chart, and it is almost certainly a holdover from when all…
Bonnie Stone
18:37:21
In part one of “New Spin on the ‘Stand in a Circle’ Exercise,” I described how Taiichi Ohno, the creator of the Toyota Production System, used the “Stand in a Circle” exercise to help managers identify waste in their operations.
During this exercise Ohno would take a manager or student…
Chad Kymal
In the 1990s, Omnex worked with Ford Motor Co. to develop the Ford quality operating system methodology, which with maturity and broad experience has evolved into Omnex’s business operating system (BOS) process.
The quality operating system promised and has delivered the following: • Cross-…
Mike Richman
The June 16, 2017, episode of QDL included my hot take on Hexagon’s ginormous user conference as well as interviews with two of our favorite guests, Chad Kymal of Omnex and Kelly Graves of Internal Business Solutions. Take a look:
“Field Report: Hexagon Live 2017”
I and more than 3,000 of my…
Kelly Graves
What are the common mistakes managers make when trying to motivate employees? In this article, we’ll discuss these mistakes and some better strategies to successfully motivate employees.
It’s human nature for managers to take the path of least resistance, and this often leads to making all…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
Building airplanes and spaceships poses some of the most unique engineering and manufacturing challenges mankind has ever encountered. Fortunately, you don’t have to build rockets to benefit from rocket science. Manufacturers of most any product can improve their efficiency and…
Bonnie Stone
During the mid-1940s, Taiichi Ohno established the Toyota Production System, which is primarily based on eliminating nonvalue-added waste. He discovered that by reducing waste and inventory levels, problems get exposed and that forces employees to address these problems. To engage the workers and…
Laurel Thoennes @ QD
You can be known as a hard worker and counted on to tie up loose ends, but fall behind when co-workers’ tasks are on hold until yours are complete, and you’re perceived as needing an attitude adjustment. What would you want to do? Place blame or work on a remedy? There is a solution: Personal…
Davis Balestracci
My last column mentioned how doctors and hospitals are currently being victimized with draconian reactions to rankings, either interpreted literally or filtered through the results of some type of statistical analysis. Besides the potential serious financial consequences of using rankings in the…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Sometimes leaders make bad decisions or harm team morale by making autocratic decisions without involving others. And other times they waste their team’s time by unnecessarily involving them.
How do you know when and how much to involve your team in decisions? Sometimes the answer is pretty…
AssurX
The Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed) wants the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to understand that medical device manufacturers need clarity on the FDA’s heightened focus on real-world evidence (RWE).
Responding to the Center for Devices and Radiological Health’s (CDRH’s…
Jim Benson
There are those days where your personal kanban is on fire. You’re in a state of flow and tickets are just moving right along. The days go by and you look at your “done” column… it’s full. Really, really full.
The “done” tickets seem to swim. There are so many of them! You’ve been productive, but…
Barbara A. Cleary
In a 1995 interview, tech guru Steve Jobs posited that empires could crash and burn if the emphasis is on sales rather than on product. “Companies forget what it means to make great products,” he said. Instead, they direct resources to selling, rather than improving and innovating.
If empires can…
