All Features
Argonne National Laboratory
Doctors have a new way of thinking about how to treat heart and skeletal muscle diseases. Body builders have a new way of thinking about how they maximize their power. Both owe their new insight to high-energy X-rays, cloud computing, and a moth.
The understanding of how muscles get their power…
AJ Sweatt
Familiarity breeds contempt. Or neglect. We see this all the time. We grow tired of things often in our lives. In relationships. In politics. With music. With food. With jobs. It’s important that we mix things up from time to time. Or in many cases, to reenergize or recommit.
Maybe—just maybe—we…
Matthew E. May
We’ve all heard the clichés: “If you’re going to do something, do it right,” and “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Change one word—“right” to “artfully”—and the view of work as art is not the far reach it may appear to be. But allow me to state my case more, er, artfully.
Like…
Patrick Runkel
Boxers or briefs. Republican or Democrat. Yin or yang. Why is it that life often seems to boil down to two choices?
Heck, it even happens when you open the Basic Stats menu in Minitab. You’ll see a choice between a two-sample t-test and a paired t-test:
Which test should you choose? And what’s…
Stacey Jarrett Wagner
Approximately half of the 704 employers participating in a survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education and American Public Media’s Marketplace said they have trouble finding qualified college graduates to fill their companies’ positions. Yet, 68 percent of the survey’s manufacturers said colleges…
Jack Dunigan
Editor’s note: This continues Jack Dunigan’s series about unsung heroes in the workplace, and the 16 traits they all share.
One stormy night many years ago, a man and his wife entered the lobby of a small hotel in Philadelphia. Trying to get out of the rain, the couple approached the front desk…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Pitch is a representation of takt image—a visual and often audible management time frame that lean practitioners use to pace and monitor value stream performance. It’s typically driven by, and linked to, a value stream or line’s pacemaker process.
Pitch performance is routinely tracked and…
William A. Levinson
Few quality professionals would want to hear somebody call their quality policies propaganda, but they are exactly that by definition. “Propaganda consists of the planned use of any form of communication designed to affect the minds, emotions, and action of a given group for a specific purpose,”…
Matthew Barsalou
I live and work in Germany, and I recently learned a useful German phrase: “Service Wüste.” Well, half-German; the service part is actually English. Translated into English it would mean “service wasteland” or “service desert.” That’s how many Germans describe Germany.
In general, I’ve found the…
Jon Miller
My latest recommended reading for people who care about getting things done is Craig Weber’s Conversational Capacity: The Secret to Building Successful Teams That Perform When the Pressure Is On (McGraw-Hill, 2013). The awareness and ability to improve our conversational capacity is essential,…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
With the publication of my humorous children’s novel, The Annoying Ghost Kid (Robert Evans Wilson, Jr., 2011), I have had the opportunity to go into elementary schools and teach kids a game that shows them how the creative process works. It’s a great way to come up with story ideas for books and…
Matthew E. May
Editor’s note: This is Part 2 of Matthew May’s “Elegant Solutions.” Read Part 1 here.
I’ve written before about traditional “specs.” How they’re old school. How they rarely help define and describe what we judge our satisfaction by: the experience.
Now comes routehappy.com, which is an intuitive…
NIST
Even though modern industrial robots are becoming more nimble and capable, they still need to get a good grip on things, literally, with the equivalent of hands that are as agile and dexterous as the human variety.
How to tackle this thorny challenge, known in robotics speak as dexterous…
I believe that 5S is one of the most effective tools within the realm of workplace organization. Since its inception, 5S has gained a loyal following in many different types of work environments. Companies that have truly embraced 5S enjoy high levels of organization and efficiency.
For those of…
Ryan E. Day
I can’t believe he said that. Well, wrote that. I’m reading another reader’s comment to an article about quality in manufacturing. The reader says, “We shouldn’t drag politics into this!” Really?
First of all, how can you drag something into where it already is? Somebody tell me one facet of…
MIT News
In 2006, when Tomás Palacios completed his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he was torn between taking a job in academia or in industry.
“I wanted to make sure that the new ideas that we were generating could find a path toward society…
Michael Causey
In a new 47-page guidance the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) appears to be doing its best to cover the waterfront for medical device manufacturers who need to better understand the complex medical device reporting (MDR) requirements. Topics range from the big picture (who is subject to this…
Jack Dunigan
Editor’s note: This continues Jack Dunigan’s series about unsung heroes in the workplace, and the 16 traits they all share.
The tasks of evaluation, decision making, and determining action are continually recurring for leaders and managers. We leaders must, from the start of the day to its close…
Artec 3D
Artec scanners were used to create realistic 3D models of Brazilian national football team players for an upcoming multimedia project produced by Globo Internacional, a mass media group in Latin America. Globo has yet to unveil the details of its project, but Artec wanted to share some insightful…
Jim Verzino
Last month we ventured into a new realm of integrated management systems in the article, “Stop Wasting Everyone’s Time with a Disjointed QMS.” What does it take to implement an integrated management system that cuts across traditional silos such as quality, service, production, environmental,…
Shaun Wissner
In the small world of 3D metrology, we all have heard the same questions in various contexts countered with some wildly different answers. This new column will explore these frequently asked questions, and address what is and what is not proper 3D metrology practice. Over the coming months, I will…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
I recently ran across a great quote in Quality Progress by Govind Ramu of SunPower Corp. He wrote, “Processes without results are useless, and results without processes are unsustainable.” (“Experts and Answers,” Quality Progress, December, 2012). Ramu is correct, of course, but his quote prompted…
Knowledge at Wharton
When you overhear a person five spots ahead of you at the coffee shop ordering a mocha light decaf, no whip, one pump, it might be enough to make you abandon your place in line and walk out. But what if the context is different and what’s at stake isn’t a hand-crafted drink, but your health—or…
Donald J. Wheeler
Based on some recent inquiries there seems to be some need to review the four capability indexes in common use today. A clear understanding of what each index does, and does not do, is essential to clear thinking and good usage. To see how to use the four indexes, to tell the story contained in…
Jeff Dewar
Not all user conferences are created equal. I’ve been to so many I’ve lost count. Some are simply boring with over-filtered information, and others are pure marketing events. Then there are a few that enchant, delight, and add true value for attendees. And I know why.
As I began writing this…
