All Features
Thomas R. Cutler
As regulatory compliance expands with fast-changing, ever-growing requirements, safety and quality professionals are falling behind. Senior management, particularly among small and mid-sized manufacturers, delegates the function of safety and quality without fully comprehending the scope and…
Michael Causey
Just when we’d all decided Washington lawmakers won’t accomplish much beyond enjoying their own excellent health insurance coverage, tasty bean soup in the Senate cafeteria, and the best parking on Capitol Hill, it turns out they might actually unite to accomplish something pretty big after all.…
Paul Sloane
Some meetings serve simply to disseminate information. One person gives a presentation, usually in PowerPoint, and others listen and absorb some of the content. In its method this meeting is really an extension of a school class or university lecture. We will not dwell on this type of meeting here…
Bruce Hamilton
The last few weeks for me have been all things Shingo, including a presentation at the Shingo Institute’s International Conference three weeks ago in Provo, Utah, followed by four days of Shingo Institute workshops at Vibco in Richmond, RI. Questions at both events about assessing for enterprise…
Blake Eskin
The section of the MakerBot factory where the MakerBot Replicator Z18 gets made didn’t get much overhead light, so fluorescent tubes were hung above each workstation. The assembly line workers weren’t used to the brightness, however, and some switched them off.
Scott Hraska, manufacturing…
Patrick Stone
The FDA says that investigational review boards (IRBs) aren’t required to collect a statement of investigator assurance from studies they preside over.
This is troubling. My first question: How are IRBs going to assure that clinical investigators will abide by requisite 21 code of federal…
Patrick Runkel
It’s usually not a good idea to rely solely on a single statistic to draw conclusions about your process. Do that, and you could fall into the clutches of the “duck-rabbit” illusion shown below.
If you fix your eyes solely on the duck, you’ll miss the rabbit—and vice-versa.
If you’re using…
Carrie Van Daele
After the economic downturn of 2009, when many workers were phased out, subject matter experts (SMEs)—people who held the most knowledge about companies’ products and processes—found themselves assuming more job duties. Feeling overworked and underappreciated, SMEs have been biding their time…
Brian Maskell
It is vitally important for lean people to know nothing when working on improvement. This sounds like a crazy idea, but it is another 100-percent turnaround from traditional management thinking.
To do this, it’s necessary to do three things: • Understand how lean thinkers go about radically…
Mika Javanainen
Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are woven into almost every facet of the manufacturing world to help employees and subcontractors complete their tasks safely and in compliance with regulations and standards. It sounds simple enough: Describe the processes in SOPs and verify that they are…
Jim Bevier
A simple calculation—available time divided by demand—known as takt time, is a fuzzy concept for many people in healthcare. That’s understandable when you consider a hospital is open 24 hours a day, and you never know how many people are going to show up at the door. Let’s look at two concepts…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
In my last column, I wrote about leaders having AIM, which is my acronym for the key characteristics of leadership: authenticity, innovation, and motivation. Here, I’ll expand on the characteristic of authenticity.
Over the years I’ve enjoyed many leadership roles, most of them as a volunteer in…
Michelle LaBrosse
What comes to mind when you think of “return on investment?” For most of us, our mind jumps to calculations of costs and revenues. The end goal, no matter the project, is for the last cell in the spreadsheet to be black or green—not red.
In this column, I want to encourage you to expand your…
Rip Stauffer
Recently, in one of the many online discussion groups about quality, Six Sigma, and lean, this question was posed: “Can X-bar R and X-bar S be used interchangeably based on samples size (n) if the subgroup size is greater than one and less than eight?” Answers varied, of course.
In some of these…
Mary Ann Pacelli
Recently, Mary Doyle Keefe passed away at the age of 92. You may not recognize her name, but you’ll definitely recognize her face. Keefe was the model for Norman Rockwell’s famous 1943 painting, Rosie the Riveter.
During the 1940s, various versions of the painting symbolized the contributions of…
Jack Dunigan
If it didn’t work then, will it work now? Elephant syndrome is what I call it, the tendency to never forget. But I’m not referring to a good memory; I’m talking about a faulty forgetter.
Like the elephant in the photo, we remain tied with string to obstacles we could readily overcome. That…
Donald J. Wheeler
While the computations for a process behavior chart are completely general and very robust, the secret to using a process behavior chart effectively lies in the art of rational sampling and rational subgrouping. Rational subgrouping has to do with organizing your data so that the chart will answer…
Robert Napoletano
Overall, lean is the toolbox we should all be using to help eliminate waste—the stuff you don’t want to do, and the stuff your customer’s don’t want to pay for. The best way to eliminate waste is to communicate what it is and what it isn’t.
One of the key elements in the ISO 9001 standard has…
Thomas Prewitt Jr.
One of our major problems with healthcare reform is that we are doing it from the top down.
At the top, a bloated bureaucracy works in an environmental context of regulations and finance that seems to be focused on what is best for government and payers. The perils of out-of-control costs have…
Chad Kymal
The final draft international standard (FDIS) of ISO 9001:2015 will be released in July, and the revised standard is slated for publication in September. Per Annex SL of the “Consolidated ISO Supplement,” some elements of the standard will be restructured to allow for easier integration of…
Dawn Keller
Generally speaking, I have a problem with authority. I don’t like being told what to do or how to do it. I’m not proud of that.
I recall debating with my high school trigonometry teacher regarding the value of the homework “process”—specifically in those situations where the student in question…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
If you are in a leadership role, chances are you believe it’s better to give than to receive. This means you also probably believe you should always be competent, never make mistakes, and always be strong. You may also feel that you should only receive when you have something to give in return.…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
In an era when every square foot and extra minute along a supply chain mean dollars saved or squandered, it’s not surprising that auto dealerships have been facing uncomfortable scrutiny. Protected by franchise laws, these icons of American commerce struggle to justify their value to customers as…
Matt Treglia
Ah, the scientific method. How elegant, how useful—and how easily ignored. The process of studying a problem, formulating a hypothesis, running a controlled experiment, analyzing the resulting data, and then making an objective decision is so quickly cast aside in the interest of quick-and-dirty…
Jens R. Woinowski
As you browse through lean management pages on the Internet, you may have seen reports on companies having little success with lean, or comments about how misunderstanding lean can lead to bad consequences. From time to time I can sense the level of frustration from those comments, and I…
