All Features
Kevin Meyer
Mindful observation takes effort and practice, but it’s valuable if you want to be a leader. It allows you to watch processes in action and look for small nuances and opportunities for improvement. For example, the wait staff at top-tier hotels do this every day. One waiter is always watching,…
Laurel Thoennes @ QD
Traffic crawled. Ahead of me was a pickup, its bumper thick with stickers. From the one most cracked and faded, I saw the word “welfare.” Just before the driver switched lanes, I made out the rest: “Work harder—there are millions on welfare depending on you.” That triggered a memory so vivid I no…
Matthew Barsalou
Although not a quality guru, the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes took a methodical approach to problem solving that can be useful when applied to root cause analysis (RCA) during the investigation of a product or process failure.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) was a British physician who…
Susan Fowler
My team and I went to SavvyRoo, a cool online brainstorming site where people can enter their question and rank other people’s posts. We asked leaders for their top question about workplace motivation, and out of hundreds of questions, this one surfaced in the top 10: Why are managers such lousy…
Barbara A. Cleary
Complying to requirements and standards is sufficient to meet the objectives of injury and accident prevention, and ensure the health and safety of all employees—right?
In his article, “We’re blinded by compliance bias,” health and safety consultant Dan Markiewicz says no, citing data indicating…
Evan Miller
Sponsored Content
The Mueller Co. was ready for a change. The multiplant manufacturer of water distribution products had an excellent reputation in the marketplace, but that good reputation came at a price. Internal scrap and rework metrics told the story. High costs reduced the bottom line and…
Azadeh Shoaibi
The word “prism” might make you think of a triangular piece of glass that separates white light into a rainbow of colors. But at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it means a powerful, computer-based system that separates critical bits of information from vast streams of healthcare data…
William A. Levinson
Among other requirements ISO 9001:2015, clause 4.4.1 requires an organization to identify the inputs and outputs of the processes of the quality management system; identify the sequence and interaction of these processes, noting that handoffs between processes often create risks; and identify the…
Jeffrey Phillips
Ihave been thinking a lot about the challenges that midsized and larger companies face when trying to do more innovation. It’s not a secret that they need to do more innovation; everyone knows this. It’s not really a secret what innovation is, or what the potential benefits might look like. We’ve…
Jonathan O’Hare
Closed-loop manufacturing and the digital thread are new buzzwords being thrown around a lot these days, but do we understand their significance? In all manufacturing processes, there are three key elements consisting of “sensing, thinking, and acting” that drive your manufacturing productivity.…
Steve Moore
When I entered college in the fall of 1970, I had a nice slide rule (or “slipstick” as some of us called it) that I proudly carried in a leather case to my engineering and chemistry classes. Virtually everyone at North Carolina State University had a slide rule then, but by the time I was a senior…
Chip Bell
Imagine a hotel proposing that the housekeeper put a goldfish in your guest room in a basketball-sized bowl filled with colorful rocks. All they ask is that you give it a name so you can have “your” fish join you again on your next stay. Visualize the bathrobe in the closet being zebra-striped or…
Nikolaus Correll
America’s manufacturing heyday is gone, and so are millions of jobs, lost to modernization. Despite what Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin might think, the National Bureau of Economic Research and Silicon Valley executives, among others, know this is true. A new report from PwC estimates that 38…
Ryan E. Day
I like my job in journalism. I get some interesting invitations from some interesting people. Last Friday my inbox greeted me with “The American Homebrewers Association (AHA) is throwing a rally in Chico! Let us know if you’d be interested in a press pass or an interview with an AHA representative…
Volodymyr Bilotkach
On April 9, 2017, a passenger was forcibly removed from a United Airlines flight from Chicago O’Hare to Louisville after the carrier was unable to find volunteers to accommodate four of its employees on standby. Many articles have reported that airlines routinely overbook their flights, and…
Morten Bennedsen
Employee absenteeism is a problem for companies everywhere. When employees are away from the office, for good reasons or not, the cost has been measured at somewhere around 4 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. Absences lead to delayed work, colleagues take on more, and projects are…
Knowledge at Wharton
The mismanagement of bet-the-company business crises has become pandemic. Consider just the most recent examples.
In December 2016, Yahoo disclosed that three years earlier hackers had stolen confidential information from more than 1 billion accounts, including users’ names, birthdates, phone…
Laurie Locascio
Like a lot of scientists, I am very goal-oriented, so after I got my Ph.D. in toxicology, I set out to become a leader in my field by the time I was 40. To get there, I knew I had to be acknowledged by the top researchers in my field, get invited to speak at important conferences, organize…
Brenda Stodart, Renu Lal
It is well known that small business is vital to the success of the U.S. economy. Less known, though, is how instrumental it has been to the growth and innovation in drug development.
We may think of the pharmaceutical industry in terms of giant corporations, but the fact is that there are…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
The year: 1989. Florida Power & Light had just won the Deming Prize, Japan’s national quality award, and became the first overseas company to do so. There were a lot of high-flown speeches in the aftermath and deservingly so. But for me, what stuck were the words of CEO Charles Turner.
“The…
Fred Schenkelberg
A conversation the other day involved how or why someone would use the mean of a set of data described by a Weibull distribution.
The Weibull distribution is great at describing a dataset that has a decreasing or increasing hazard rate over time. Using the distribution we also do not need to…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
For manufacturers, big parts pose big challenges. How does one measure parts that are in excess of 15 ft and also have complex geometry? Design and inspection are part and parcel of all manufacturing operations, but as product size increases, and part geometry grows more complex…
Mike Richman
On our most recent episode of QDL from this past Fri., April 14, 2017, we took a close look at innovation and engineering. Here’s a quick recap:
“SAE Institute Creates Webisodes to Benefit STEM Education” This piece demonstrates the good work that the San Jose, California, campus of the SAE…
Davis Balestracci
Many talk about reducing variation to improve quality. Does that include human variation, where everyone takes a different approach to improving overall improvement processes? What would happen if this variation were reduced?
Would some of you lean folks be interested in spearheading an effort to…
Gleb Tsipursky
Let’s say you’re interviewing a new applicant for a job, and you feel something is off. You can’t quite put your finger on it, but you’re a bit uncomfortable with this person. She says all the right things, her resume is great, she’d be a perfect hire for this job—except your gut tells you…
