All Features
Tron Jordheim
There are plenty of places to rent tools and equipment in any town, anywhere. When people need to rent a post-hole auger or a trencher, many go to the local family-owned equipment rental shop—mostly because of past experience. It's not a sparkling clean place. In fact, it looks a bit like a…
Key Technology
At Pasta Montana, the focus on quality permeates every activity at every step of the manufacturing process. One shining example of this dedication is the company’s recent decision to be the first pasta manufacturer in the United States to install a digital sorter that ejects foreign material (FM)…
Matthew E. May
One of my all-time favorite quotes is from UK-based urban designer Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a master of designing shared space intersections: “If we observed first, designed second, we wouldn’t need most of the things we build.”
The Japanese phrase for what Hamilton-Baillie is talking about is "…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
When looking at any existing process, people often have a hard time visualizing the enormous amount of delay, waste, and nonvalue-added work involved. That’s where a time value map comes in; it makes the invisible waste visible. A time value map shows value-added and nonvalue-added activities and…
Jeffrey Eves
ISO 14001 is the world’s best-known environmental management system standard, and it provides a systematic framework to help organizations protect the environment through balanced socio-economic means.
In conjunction with an updated ISO 9001, a new version of ISO 14001 is being released in the…
Joseph A. DeFeo
Superior quality goods and services will result in sustainable financial results because they are more salable than those of the competition. This universal principle continually drives revenue and maintains lower costs, leading to greater profitability. In this way, the strategic pursuit of…
Miriam Boudreaux
Sometimes interpreting ISO 9001 or API Q1/API Q2 requirements seems to force us to agree to things we won’t be able to do, or to sustain for more than a few months, let alone days. So how do we write our policies and procedures to explain our approach while avoiding being boxed in by our own words…
Jeffrey Worthington
Organizations and their products constantly change. Quality professionals embrace the change process through continuous improvement, a method to anticipate, plan, and replan. We talk in terms of improvements, controls, processes, outputs, and outcomes, but we seldom call it “change.” We must…
David Lawson
Story update 6/18/2014: In an earlier version of this article the editors changed ISO/DIS 9001:2014 to ISO/DIS 9001:2015. The error was ours, not the author's. The correct name of the document is ISO/DIS 9001:2014, as now shown.
The publication of the draft international standard (DIS) of the…
Margaret A. Hamburg
The World Health Assembly is the decision-making body of the World Health Organization (WHO), attended every year by leading government health officials from its 194 member nations. Recently, I was pleased to participate as a member of the U.S. delegation in the 67th meeting of this important…
MIT Management Executive Education
Our first and second articles in this series have focused primarily on Bob Pozen’s tips for improving your productivity as an individual. Below, we suggest approaches to improving productivity within an organization through the proactive management of relationships at work.
Managing your team
“To…
Russell Harley
The following may seem difficult to believe, but it can be true. Among the definitions of the word “efficient,” we find the following: “achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense.” Although this is great for busy executives and companies, it is terrible for projects,…
Dan Nelson
Editor's note: This is part one of a serios about customer-centric quality management systems. Read part two here.
A document review is supposed to be conducted as part of stage one of the ISO certification process. For the uninitiated looking into certification—maybe you—that statement often…
Eston Martz
Remember The Little Engine That Could, the children’s story about self-confidence in the face of huge challenges? In it, a train engine keeps telling itself, “I think I can” while carrying a very heavy load up a big mountain. Next thing you know, the little engine has done it, but until that…
Mike Roberts
As a research company, LNS Research is in the perfect position to see what is really going on behind the scenes in the manufacturing industry. On one side of the coin, we’re interviewing and surveying quality and manufacturing executives to understand their foremost challenges; on the other side,…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Value stream analysis is an effective way to identify improvement opportunities within a product or service family's value stream, envision a leaner future state, and develop an actionable value stream improvement plan to achieve the future state. It's bread-and-butter stuff for the lean…
Annette Franz
That’s probably a silly question, but I don’t feel silly reminding anyone of the answer.
Last month, I took a different angle to this question and asked, “What’s the Cost of Listening to Customers?” In that column, I mentioned that if we don’t understand who our customers are, what jobs they are…
Matthew Littlefield
You know that old saying “if it’s not broke, don’t fix it”? Unfortunately, that is the thought process many executives adopt around quality management. It is not necessarily that their quality management systems are broken, per se, but the challenge of having disconnected quality systems and data…
Ryan E. Day
It was just an email invitation to a public relations event in the Mission District of San Francisco, but it started a long string of adjectives like: brief, cryptic, amusing, exciting, breathtaking, scary, and… well, stinky.
All those adjectives collided last week to provide an almost surreal…
Davis Balestracci
Do you still insist on asking, “Which chart do I use for which situation?”
I’ve seen many flowcharts in books to help you answer this question. They’re all some variation of this:
I find them far too confusing for the average user and have never taught this in my work. Besides, you get no credit…
Janet Woodcock
In recent years, there have been important advances to ensure that therapies for serious conditions are approved and available to patients as soon as sufficient data can show that the therapies’ benefits outweigh their risks. Despite the progress, there is much more work to be done. Many…
Dave K. Banerjea
In most industries, maintenance and calibration management departments are separate operations that rarely, if ever cross paths. However, in some industries, such as pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing, maintenance and calibrations are often performed on the same assets. As a result,…
Stacey Jarrett Wagner
In college I learned about chaos theory, sometimes called the butterfly effect, in which small differences in an initial condition result in divergent outcomes in dynamic systems. In layman’s terms, my fellow students and I were fond of saying that when a butterfly flutters its wings over your…
BDO USA
The manufacturing industry is poised for growth in 2014. Still, the second annual BDO USA LLP analysis of risk factors listed in the most recent 10-K filings of the largest 100 publicly traded U.S. manufacturers found that they will contend with a number of challenges as they work to capitalize on…
MIT Management Executive Education
We’ve all been there—staring down the week’s to-do list with the best of intentions, only to find, at the end of the week, that we didn’t accomplish everything that was required of us. Our tasks get carried over into the following week, and before we know it, we’re caught in the paradox of being…
