All Features
Scott Berkun
Many people never learn how to work on a team. The reason many projects fail has little to do with expertise or intelligence. Instead it’s the fact that as soon as you have two or more people working together, they have to figure out to how to share, collaborate, and trust each other.
“Playing…
Thomas R. Cutler
Within the retail industry, it’s impossible to look at the quality of material handling processes without looking at delivery to retail outlets. Nearly three-fourths of the total costs of direct store delivery (DSD) rest with warehouse, order assembly, and delivery to retail customers. The…
Miriam Boudreaux
In part one of this series I described how many auditors want your quality manual to repeat what is in ISO 9001, API Spec Q1, or API Spec Q2. Since auditors don’t always make the connection between how you wrote the quality manual (in a way that’s useful for you) and the standards in question, your…
Alan Nicol
When we learn the ways of lean methodology, we’re taught that there are two types of waste: pure waste, which needs to be eliminated; and necessary waste, which does nothing to improve our performance or profits but must be produced anyway.
I’ve decided that there’s a third type of waste, called…
Patrick Runkel
My previous article examined how an equivalence test can shift the burden of proof when you perform a hypothesis test of the means. This allows you to more rigorously test whether the process mean is equivalent to a target or to another mean.
Here’s another key difference: To perform the analysis…
Ryan E. Day
And so the debate rages on about whether the wildly popular Flappy Bird app is actually a tool for teaching lean or teaching theory of constraints. Really? No, not really. But at least I’m not the only one thinking about it.
Actually, it was Jens Woinowski’s article “What You Can Learn about Lean…
Mike Roberts
In industries like aerospace, defense, or automotive where an adulterated part or component can have a catastrophic effect to your business performance, managing supplier quality and compliance are top-of-mind issues for executives. With sometimes thousands of such relationships and dependencies,…
Sandia National Laboratories
Sandia National Laboratories engineers have been studying the most effective ways to use solar photovoltaic (PV) arrays—a clean, affordable, and renewable way to keep the power on. Systems are relatively easy to install and have relatively small maintenance costs. They begin working immediately …
Dennis Payton
In 1908, the first Model T was created and more than 15 million were sold through mid-1927, proving that a focus on core product can create a tidal wave of success. The plan and processes Henry Ford put in place to create the Model T revolutionized the automotive industry.
Having a streamlined…
Patrick Runkel
With more options come more decisions. With equivalence testing added to Minitab 17, you now have more statistical tools to test a sample mean against target value or another sample mean.
Equivalence testing is extensively used in the biomedical field. Pharmaceutical manufacturers often need to…
Dan Nelson
Why is internal auditing important to your quality management system (QMS)? To ensure that processes conform to ISO 9001 requirements, or to ensure that the company conforms to management’s own defined plans? Although audits can be done for both reasons, the second choice is more important.…
Davis Balestracci
To summarize my last three articles, most improvement approaches come out of the same theory and are based on the assumption that everything is a process.
The universal process flowchart in Figure 1 sums it up beautifully. The boxes at the top are how executives think the process works. The…
Dan Harris
How often do you stop to think about the ubiquitous “Made in China” label? If you’re a China lawyer, you should think about it almost every day.
To convince recalcitrant clients of the need for product liability protection for the products they are having made in China, I sometimes send them the…
Mike Micklewright
Well, phew… I’m relieved. We have someone to blame. At least GM will be able to fire the engineer who allegedly lied under oath about a 2006 design change to fix the faulty switches on the Chevy Cobalts. Now we can all get on with our lives, right? And feel comfortable that the problem will never…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Available time for changeovers per period (Ta∆), also called available time for (internal) setups, represents the time per a given period (e.g., day, shift, week) during which a machine, equipment, or resource can be changed over (i.e., from one product to another, prepared for a different medical…
Carly Barry
Ugh, your process is producing some parts that don’t meet your customer’s specifications. Fortunately, after a little hard work, you find a way to improve the process.
However, you want to perform the appropriate statistical analysis to back up your findings and make it easier to explain the…
Larry Goldman
Let me start off by saying that I’m not one to judge... unless someone actually asks me to.
And so it was last month, when I was contacted by the Kansas City Business Marketing Association (KS BMA) to help judge entries in the 2014 BMA Fountain Awards. When Marketing Duty calls, we have no choice…
Miriam Boudreaux
Have you ever seen a quality manual that didn't look exactly like the ISO 9001 standard? Not lately, probably. Nowadays, most quality manuals I see look like mirror images of an ISO standard or the American Petroleum Institute (API) Specification Q1 or Q2. I often wonder what value there is in a…
Matthew Barsalou
Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on March 8, 2014, and has yet to be definitively found. But the lack of wreckage or even an idea as to what happened isn’t sufficient to stop the first lawyers from filing lawsuits. The lawyers are already seeking to identify component manufacturers and the…
Jack Dunigan
Studebaker, producer of some of the most iconic cars in America, started making wagons for farmers, miners, and the military in 1852. Incorporated in 1868 under the name Studebaker Brothers Manufacturing Co., it entered the automobile business in 1902 making electric vehicles. By 1904 it was…
Mark R. Hamel
I remember, years ago, watching my oldest child struggle to loosen a bolt. This was one of those all-too-few, brief, and shining child-rearing moments where I could easily and quickly share some trusty words of wisdom.
“Righty tighty, lefty loosey.”
I’m pretty sure my son’s response was somewhere…
Dawn Bailey
In health care settings, clinical integration is a fairly new concept that means coordinating patient care across conditions, providers, settings, and time to achieve care that is safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable, and patient-focused.
According to Becker’s Hospital Review, “clinical…
Quality Digest
In August 2009, a 911 emergency call made from an out-of-control vehicle, speeding at more than 100 miles per hour, reported, “We’re in a Lexus... and we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck... there’s no brakes... we’re approaching the intersection... hold on... hold on and pray…
David Muil
Management systems are sometimes misunderstood as nothing more than a heavy administrative burden providing limited business benefit. In fact, many organizations with management systems in place haven’t effectively defined the processes they actually employ at all. Perhaps it’s because they think…
Akhilesh Gulati
Sean was looking forward to the MEC meeting. He'd seen a potential application for TRIZ in a medical setting and wanted to discuss this with the group.
His mother had been suffering from digestive problems and had needed an endoscopy that she dreaded. He was worried that, apart from the initial…
