All Features
Steve Vaughn
Since agile methodology is in the process of changing the way corporations work, it should come as no surprise that it is now changing the way we organize our personal lives as well. After all, our families and classrooms are also teams with which we work to accomplish common goals.
Using agile…
Umberto Tunesi
Spring has sprung, and as I was taught by my mother, it’s the time for major cleaning, preferably before Easter. My home’s floor and windows complain about my carelessness; Easter has passed, and they don't feel tidy. I told them that no resource is infinite, that I must proceed according to…
Gartner
Emerging and innovative technologies, including mobile, cloud, big data, and the Internet of Things, can improve operations and customer experiences, and even create new business opportunities. Hung LeHong, research vice president at Gartner, explains that although these technologies are…
Kyle Toppazzini
Many of us are familiar with change management models used in organizational change. What I find most interesting are the differences between the standard organizational change-management model and the psychological process an
Most change models incorporate the following six aspects: 1. Creating…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
Honestly, the last bit of formal and substantive math that I worked with was back in college. Many, many years ago, I received a B.S. in mathematics, but other than the diploma, there is little physical—or intellectual!—evidence that would support this reality.
My former classmates might say the…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
When I realized that this year’s Chair Academy International Leadership Conference would focus on sustainability through leadership, I immodestly thought I had something to offer. The folks at the Chair Academy apparently agreed. I argued that if we want our educational institutions to model…
FARO
A family-owned business from the start, G5 Outdoors really began in 1966, when Louis Grace Sr. founded Grace Engineering in Memphis, Michigan. It’s vision statement is “Precision products through innovative manufacturing.” Over the years, the company has grown and become known for developing…
Richard DeRisio
Editor’s note: Quality Digest will host Richard DeRisio’s webinar, “Effective Strategies for Complaint Handling” on April 16, 2013, at 2 p.m. Eastern. Register here. DeRisio will also be a guest on Quality Digest Live on Friday, April 12, 2013, at 11 a.m. Pacific.
FDA’s regulation for “complaint…
Association For Manufacturing Technology AMT
February U.S. manufacturing technology orders totaled $385.89 million according to AMT—The Association for Manufacturing Technology. This total, as reported by companies participating in the United States Manufacturing Technology Orders (USMTO) program, was up 5.7 percent from January but down 10.…
Davis Balestracci
I received the following note from a physician who is very interested in improvement: “I am not sure I understand what a process behavior chart and a moving range chart do to the discussion, and what do the colored lines represent? aka ‘Still confused.’”
His comment was in response to my column…
Michelle LaBrosse
Should I get my project management professional (PMP) certification now, or should I wait until I have more time to study? What if I study and I don’t pass, and waste all that time for nothing? Will having it actually help my career, or will there be no change?
These are the questions that run…
Ryan E. Day
Before writing and editing I kept the lights on and the bulldog fed by building things. I spent three decades in manufacturing. Alarm systems, hang gliders, moulding products, and motorhomes have my fingerprints all over them. Building the highest-quality product possible was an absolute top…
Matthew Barsalou
Thursday, March 28, 2013, was not a good day for the field of quality. On that day we quality practitioners lost the great statistician George E. P. Box, who died at age 93.
I’m not a statistician; however, as a quality professional, I am somebody who needs to use statistics for practical, real-…
MIT News
A new report by researchers at MIT and elsewhere finds that the global manufacturing sector has made great strides in energy efficiency: The manufacturing of materials such as steel, cement, paper, and aluminum has become increasingly streamlined, requiring far less energy than when these…
Mike Roberts
For years, executives have tried to create closed-loop environments where processes and data in each stage of the value chain benefit from cross-functional communication and collaboration. And for a number of reasons, this has proven difficult.
Over time, the rising complexity of products and…
John Flaig
What’s wrong with root cause analysis? Let’s begin with the name, which is singular. It implies that there is only one root cause, when in reality most problems are usually caused by a complex combination of several factors, some of which are more significant than others.
To appreciate this point…
Umberto Tunesi
In a world that every day becomes more and more volatile, uncertain, complex, controversial, and ambiguous, making any decision whatsoever is no light task.
We are told that long before Julius Caesar said, “Alea jacta est,” (“The die is cast”) or Hamlet, “To be or not to be,” our forefathers used…
Jim Frost
Recently, Patrick Runkel wrote about using regression models to explain how historians ranked the U.S. presidents. Given that I both love regression and have written about using regression to predict U.S. presidential elections, I wanted to take Runkel up on his challenge to improve on his model…
Jack Dunigan
Twenty six! Twenty six employees came… and went. They didn’t quit. I let them go. Most quietly, some not so quietly, but they left.
It took some time as I hired, fired, gleaned, and screened until eventually I assembled a crew that could think, plan, and work without constant direction from me.…
Ryan E. Day
We’ve been hearing complaints of a lack of skilled workers for quite some time now. It’s even gotten to the point of controversy. Lack of skilled workers or lack of incentive? Those companies adversely affected by this skills gap are slowly but surely separating themselves into two camps: the…
Story update 4/12/2013: We had inadvertently listed Steven Vaughn as the author. The author is actually AJ Sweatt, as shown.
Recently, both Yahoo! and Best Buy have been, in turns, vilified and congratulated for reversing their policies on home commuting.
The passions run deep. Home-commuting…
MIT News
A new kind of 3D display developed at HP Labs plays hologram-like videos without the need for any moving parts or glasses. Videos displayed on the HP system hover above the screen. Viewers can walk around the display and experience an image or video from as many 200 different viewpoints—like…
University of Michigan
Wouldn’t it be convenient if you could reverse the rusting of your car by shining a bright light on it? It turns out that this concept works for undoing oxidation on copper nanoparticles, and it could lead to an environmentally friendly production process for an important industrial chemical,…
Mark R. Hamel
Many folks use the terms “efficiency” and “productivity” interchangeably. They are not interchangeable. They are not equivalent. Heck, they’re not even synonyms—even though Thesaurus.com thinks so.
Technically, productivity is a ratio of (good) outputs to inputs; efficiency is the ratio of actual…
Georgia Institute of Technology
A dancing robot is nothing new. A quick search on YouTube will yield videos of robots dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” “Gangnam Style,” the “Macarena,” and more. But instead of programming a robot to copy an existing dance, Amy LaViers, a Ph.D. candidate in electrical and computer…
