All Features
Donald J. Wheeler
Why bother to plot your data? A simple shortcut is available that will allow you to do your analysis without the data getting in the way. How do you accomplish this breakthrough? Read on.
This marvelous advance in analysis is known as the “data-free graph.” As usual we begin with a collection of…
MIT Management Executive Education
This is the third and final post in a series on launching a successful startup.
In his book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup, Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, stresses the importance of searching for the holy grail of…
Christine Schaefer
The student demographic profile of Jenks Public Schools has significantly changed since the Oklahoma district became a Baldrige Award winner in 2005. The pace and variety of population shifts that Jenks has experienced may resemble those in your own school system’s environment. What evidently hasn…
Pamela K. Bethune
All companies depend on their suppliers. When handled well, the supply chain is a source of strength and even regarded as a value chain. Conversely, a poorly managed supply chain will manifest its weakest link quite easily. All too often, the fallout requires much more than cleanup on aisle three…
Mike Figliuolo
All too often, leaders seek to build support for an idea by talking—a lot. They go on and on about why the decision is a good one, detailing its benefits, the reasons others should support it, and the path forward. There’s passion and excitement behind the talk, and the leader lets it show through…
Mike Micklewright
Editor’s note: This article discusses topics covered at greater length in episodes 19–23 of a new streaming video training series, Creating and Sustaining Lean Improvements—Integrating Principles, Culture, and Tools by the author and 360 Performance Circle, a sister company to Quality Digest.…
Bruno Scibilia
Have you ever wished your control charts were better? More effective and user-friendly? Easier to understand and act on? I’ll share some simple ways to make statistical process control (SPC) monitoring more effective in Minitab.
I worked for several years in a large manufacturing plant in which…
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Ben Recht is looking for problems. He develops mathematical strategies to help researchers, from urban planners to online retailers, cut through blizzards of data to find what they're after.
He resists the "needle in the haystack" metaphor because, he says, the researchers, engineers, and…
Mary McAtee
Ever since people began handing down information from person to person and parent to child, there has been something called tribal knowledge. Most people can point to a specific skill they have or knowledge they possess that was transferred to them by an elder. This elder may have been a relative…
Mark Murphy
Here’s a little quiz: Imagine you’re going to your local grocery store to buy some milk. How would you like the store employees to interact with you?
• Choice A: They’re friendly, warm, and build personal rapport with me. I know we’ve got a relationship. • Choice B: They keep our interactions as…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
For better or worse, we’ve resigned ourselves to the idea that to live in the modern world, we have to give up total privacy. But even as we wring our hands about the loss of privacy—meanwhile searching Google for stories on the latest security breach—how often do we stop to think about the…
Michael Causey
It’s March 2014, but you could forgive medical device company leaders if they’re still smarting a bit from a generally tough 2013. Several new studies indicate a low level of mergers and financing occurred last year, which could slow product innovation down the line.
Also there was a drop in 2013…
The QA Pharm
There are many instances when a pharmaceutical quality management system (QMS) must be improved in part or as a whole. In some cases improvements are made in response to regulatory inspection observations. In other cases they are made when new company standards are deployed to remain current with…
Justin Barton
Nonprofit organization CyArk works with its vast network of partners to aggregate and archive 3D data of our collective human history, to transform these data into useful conservation and management tools, and create education and research materials. At the same time, CyArk leverages new…
William A. Levinson
Car dealers’ successful efforts to ban the sale of Tesla Motors cars in several states reinforces the growing belief that the Internet has turned dealers into nonvalue-adding parasites. This is something I said more than 20 years ago in The Way of Strategy (iUniverse reprint, 2000), and cited the…
TE Connectivity
For more than 50 years, the linear variable differential transformer (LVDT) position sensor has been a reliable tool for linear position feedback for laboratory, industrial, military, and aerospace applications. These sensors can provide linear displacement measurements ranging from microinches…
Bruce Hamilton
As any conference-goer can attest, the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line when that line is the lunch line. At lean conferences like the ones I’ve attended, it’s especially incongruous to hear stories all morning about customer service and flow, and then later stand in a…
Renishaw
Bicycle design company Empire Cycles, and Renishaw, the United Kingdom’s only manufacturer of metal-based additive manufacturing machines, have collaborated to create a 3D-printed titanium bike frame. It’s based on the Empire MX-6 mountain bike design but is stronger and about 33-percent lighter…
Brian Maskell
Lean-practicing companies often employ day-by-the-hour (DBTH) charts within production cells and for other processes. The DBTH method uses a visual board to display what work must be completed each hour of the workday. The board is located in the work area and where specific process steps are…
Umberto Tunesi
If we were extraterrestrials or even just earthly kids, we’d be hard-pressed to understand the many lamentations about understaffing made at all organizational levels. The world’s seven billion inhabitants continually increase despite birth control policies and practices, thus making warm bodies…
Mike Figliuolo
What’s the biggest risk facing leaders of most entrepreneurial ventures? It’s not closing that first round of funding or landing a cornerstone customer. As with most things, it all comes back to people—and your ability to lead those who don’t have much practice following.
It’s easy to get seduced…
Brenda Percy
In the first installment of this series, we considered four traits to look for in an automated quality management system (QMS) that will provide the most long-term value for your money. Now we’ll take a more in-depth look at the automated QMS by breaking it down into its core functionalities and…
Matthew J. Savage
Lori, a software customer, phoned to ask if Cpk is the best statistic to use in a process that slits metal to exacting widths. As a PQ Systems technical support analyst, I too wondered what index would be best suited for her application, a highly specialized one. Perhaps Cpk, Ppk, Cpm, or some…
Annette Franz
Can you believe this is a question that some people still ask? I can’t. But at least it gives me an opportunity to help convey the message about delivering great service and, ultimately, a great overall experience.
A couple weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great…
NIST
During the first six months in their special, new, four-bedroom home in suburban Maryland, the Nisters, a prototypical family of four, earned about $40 by exporting 328 kilowatt hours of electricity into the local grid, while meeting all of their varied energy needs.
Furthermore, these virtual…
