All Features
Arun Hariharan
On a recent visit to Japan, I had an opportunity to visit Toyota’s headquarters. During a meeting with some of its top executives, I asked one of them what role the senior leadership played in Toyota’s much-admired quality philosophy. The reply I received was, like many things about Toyota and…
Tab Wilkins
What’s still based on centuries-old technology but is experiencing a renaissance of growth and entrepreneurship today? Brewing beer—that frothy, cold beverage that millions enjoy responsibly each day. You’ve probably seen a new local brewery open, literally in a garage, based on someone’s home-…
Joel Smith
Learning to ride a bike is a rite of passage for any kid, so much so that we even use the expression “taking the training wheels off” for all kinds of situations. We say it to mean that we are going to let someone perform an activity on his own after removing some safeguard, even though we know he…
Jeff Freeman
You’re about to head off to IMTS next week in search of a solution for your latest manufacturing challenge. With myriad technologies available, it is likely you will find one or more possible solutions. Maybe you have a budget in mind to help you reach the next level of productivity, or maybe you’…
Mike Micklewright
According to a new study from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, “The best bosses are humble bosses, those who empower and appreciate their employees, are open to feedback, and care about the greater good.” And yet, bosses who yell, threaten, and micromanage their way…
Donald J. Wheeler
Outlier tests such as the W-ratio test and Dixon’s outlier test suffer from a problem that can mislead the user. This article will outline the problem and provide guidelines for the appropriate use of these tests.
Dixon’s outlier test
In 1953, W. J. Dixon proposed a test for detecting outliers…
Taha A. Kass-Hout, Jeffrey Shuren
In addition to food and drugs, the FDA has regulatory oversight of tens of thousands of medical devices ranging from bandages and prosthetics to heart valves and robotics. These products are used by millions of Americans, and they are essential, well-performing tools of modern healthcare, but…
Jeff Hajek
In any field, there are a handful of common mistakes. Continuous improvement is no different. Some of these errors come as a result of ignorance about the proper way of doing things. Some are the result of habit. And a handful come as a function of taking the path of least resistance.
Regardless…
Michael Causey
Medical device manufacturers would be well-advised to address any risk with potential home-use products during their design phase, according to an August 2014 guidance from the FDA.
As the agency notes, “Failure to adequately consider potentially hazardous situations during the design of home-use…
Ryan E. Day
'Pssst! Hey kid, ya wanna be a metrologist?"..."Uh, what's a metrologist?"... "Ya get paid to measure stuff."..."Sounds kinda boring." So it goes at colleges and universities all across the United States.
The fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—collectively known as STEM—…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Albert Einstein once said, “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”
On September 4 in 1957, amid great fanfare, Ford Motor Co. introduced the Edsel line of automobiles to the American public. It immediately stalled.…
Mike Richman
Anyone, in any business, wants to have a culture of quality, and everyone, in a sense, does. But is that quality good or bad? Even more to the point, especially for top managers trying to inculcate excellence within the organization, how do you know the difference? How have leading quality-centric…
MIT News
In the age of big data, visualization tools are vital. With a single glance at a graphic display, a human can recognize patterns that a computer might fail to find even after hours of analysis.
But what if there are aberrations in the patterns? Or what if there’s just a suggestion of a visual…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
Last evening my wife, Carole, and I attended a celebratory dinner for the family of one of my former students. Luca, my student, originally from Italy, brought his wife, Olivia, and his young daughter, Kendra.
Olivia, originally from Uganda, is a family physician working primarily with…
Rick Gehrke
The International Labour Organization estimates that more than 2 million deaths every year can be attributed to work activities. This single statistic clearly indicates the pressing need for occupational health and safety regulations, and the importance of a single standard to help organizations…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
In the words of my friend and colleague Larry Loucka, “Graphs are math.”
Graphs often serve as effective visual process performance tools. Typically, these types of graphs fall into the metric category. As reflected in the supporting concepts of the fourth dimension of the Shingo Prize model,…
William A. Levinson
Can something as simple as a toilet support LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)? We take this basic sanitation device for granted, and while it makes the obvious wastes disappear very cleanly, another form of waste hides in plain view.
LEED already promotes the use of greywater,…
Jim Clifton
The Middle East has collapsed into a state of chaos, conflict, and suffering that was unimaginable and unforeseen just four years ago. Hardly any experts or institutions predicted the wars and revolutions that have engulfed the region, and those same experts who missed the coming catastrophe…
Jennifer Havens
Managing operational efficiency in a manufacturing setting requires detailed knowledge of how each cell works to produce a finished good. All the individual processes must connect to materialize a finished product in the most efficient and cost-effective way, all the while maintaining employee…
Dawn Bailey
In a recent column, I shared insights from the 2013 Baldrige Award recipients’ leaders as they fielded questions related to their journeys to excellence. There was so much thoughtful reflection that it couldn’t fit into just one column.
More answers to questions follow:
How did you convey to…
The use of optical 3D shape measurement devices are rapidly gaining importance, allowing the reconstruction of real 3D objects efficiently. The 3D shape and texture can be obtained from stereo images acquired with a freely moving camera. This approach measures the image displacement from the…
Cathy Hayat
Finance professional Joe Fabiani never imagined his love of exotic cars would develop into a full-time career. It began when he searched for an improved exhaust for his Porsche 993 but was at a loss to find one that conformed to the specifications he had in mind. Frustration with OEM stock…
Ron Rode
“So what’s the weather gonna do today?” I am sure that we have all been asked that after answering the first question (about what we do for a living) with: “Metrology.”
Metrology or meteorology? Both are studies of a particular science but are two words that are easily mistaken or misinterpreted…
NASA
Thanks to NASA’s Kepler and Spitzer Space Telescopes, scientists have made the most precise measurement ever of the radius of a planet outside our solar system. The size of the exoplanet, dubbed Kepler-93b, is now known to an uncertainty of just 74 miles (119 km) on either side of the planetary…
Bruce Hamilton
While I am an unabashed proponent of learning by doing, I have a list of books that have been essential to me over the years as a framework for experiential learning.
Most of these books were written before 1990, and one of the most insightful, Managerial Engineering (Productivity Press, 1983) by…
