All Features
Donald J. Wheeler
You have spent good money obtaining your experimental results, and now the time has come to communicate those results to those who need to take action. This column will describe how to cut through the complexities of your analysis and communicate the results quickly and easily.
You have 30…
Dan Nelson
Paul Batalden, M.D., professor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, once said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” This idea seems applicable to any system of human design. Phrased slightly differently using ISO 9001 parlance, “Every…
Jack Dunigan
Let’s say for the purpose of this article that you have a position open and a slate of applicants who possess approximately the same list of qualifications. What do you do?
You start by looking at qualities. Certain qualities are important in almost any job, but particularly critical when working…
Davis Balestracci
For all the talk about the power of control charts, I can empathize when audiences taking mandated courses on quality tools are left puzzled. When I look at training materials or books, their tendency is to bog down heavily in the mechanics of construction without offering a clue about…
Akhilesh Gulati
Editor’s note: This article continues the series exploring structured innovation using the TRIZ methodology, a problem solving, analysis, and forecasting tool derived from studying patterns of invention found in global patent data.
Last week’s executive council meeting ran long, but there were no…
Mike Figliuolo
You have to admit, Han Solo could definitely pull off that leather vest. On top of that, he can teach all of us a thing or three about informal leadership.
We’ve all been in a role at one time or another where we weren’t the “formal” leader of the team. We were just another team member trying to…
Arun Hariharan
Last week, I accompanied my father to an eye hospital to get his eye examined for a suspected cataract. The hospital examined his eye and confirmed the presence of a cataract. They recommended surgically implanting an artificial lens in his eye—a fairly common procedure these days for cataract…
Rob Fenn
So, you’ve decided that you really need to embark upon ISO 9001 registration. Perhaps it’s being requested by a client, or you’ve worked at a company before that had implemented it to great effect. Or maybe you’ve just been convinced by the numerous studies that have elucidated the strong benefits…
MIT Management Executive Education
In his book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup (Wiley, 2013), Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, goes beyond theory to outline the steps anyone can take to become a successful entrepreneur.
In the first article in this…
Shimadzu
International standards ISO 6892 and JIS Z2241 for tensile testing of metallic materials have been revised with the addition of another test item: strain rate control.
When strain is measured with an extensometer, strain rate control has been added as a test item to the current stress rate…
MIT Management Executive Education
One of the most common mistakes new entrepreneurs make is trying to be everything to everyone in the hopes of increasing their market share. In the beginning, many entrepreneurs take an “act now, plan later” approach to get a jump on the competition. This can be a recipe for failure.
But the…
Harry Hertz
The words used in the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence have been selected by design, i.e., in general there is a deliberate intent behind the words used and the order in which they are presented. Although that intent is clear to the Criteria’s authors, it’s not always obvious to users…
John Ayers
Let’s assume you work for a small company that wants to grow the business by soliciting subcontracts from a major prime contractor. What unknown risks might be in store for your company in pursuing this path? Here are some of those risks, along with a personal example and eight suggestions for…
Jim Frost
Ihave written a number of blog posts about regression analysis, and I think it would be helpful to collect them in this post to create a regression tutorial. I’ll supplement my own posts with some from my colleagues.
This tutorial covers many aspects of regression analysis, including choosing the…
Jens R. Woinowski
In my line of business, the term “best practices” is common. It’s an abbreviation for the sum of all experiences people have had, condensed into how-to instructions, design or behavior patterns, lessons-learned documents, and so on, all collected to a “best practices” document. In my mind, the…
Gorur N. Sridhar
Single minute exchange of dies, or SMED as it’s commonly known, is defined as “the time elapsed between when the last good piece of product A comes off and the first good piece of product B starts.” SMED is probably one of the most important lean manufacturing tools, if not the most important, for…
Gallup
Too many companies continue to rely on rigid, archaic management models. Recent analysis from Gallup shows that six elements can help drive a company’s transformation to a high-performance culture.
Business growth in the Arab Gulf offers a good example. In recent years, the Corporation Council…
Matthew Barsalou
The famous baseball player and sometimes philosopher Yogi Berra is credited with saying, “The future ain’t what it used to be,” and he really got that prediction right. Things are nothing like I imagined they would be 25 years ago. Maybe in my teen years I watched too much Beyond 2000 and read too…
Michael Causey
It’s a growing trend in these United States: paying extra for conveniences such as bypassing the riffraff in airport security lines, or whizzing past mere mortal motorists on pristine, pay-for express lanes.
Where I live in the Washington, D.C. area, the new express road program in Northern…
Dan Nelson
Nobody likes to be told they’re doing something wrong. But if you were doing something wrong due to a misunderstanding, and it was actually hindering your operations while adding unnecessary cost, wouldn’t you want to know?
For example, let’s assume that you are using a tool consistently with…
Umberto Tunesi
I was just thinking about the often-observed contradictions among quality assurance, quality control, and production. My production experience was as a laboratory technician with two German companies, one of which had an Italian subsidiary. The differences were striking. Although in both German…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
The Japanese term, heijunka, also known as level-loading, production leveling, or production smoothing, facilitates system stability by addressing workload unevenness (mura) by leveling both volume and mix over time (see figure 1).
Heijunka also serves as a pacing mechanism for operations, often…
Tom Kadala
If you were sitting at a Las Vegas gambling table with a 3-percent chance of winning big, would you continue to play or fold? Guessing your likely response, let’s compare this example with launching a startup company. Statistics show that 97 percent of startups fail after their fifth year of…
Mary McAtee
I have been pondering about how we can sometimes ignore or misread data that are screaming to tell us something important. There is a phenomenon referred to as “groupthink” that occurs when a group of otherwise reasonable people ignore empirical data and experience in favor of convincing each…
Peter Theobald
Now that the holiday season is upon us, my mind turns to gift buying, parties, overindulgence, and of course, Santa Claus and his North Pole operations. We know that Santa does an incredible job of delivering scores of gifts to good children all over the world. But is he doing this in an ISO QMS-…
