All Features
Akhilesh Gulati
You check into a high-end hotel for an exorbitant fee. You are tired, thirsty, and you want a drink of water. Either you find no water or the bottled water costs an additional $5.50. You see a coffee pot and complimentary coffee or tea, but you don’t want to drink something hot; you want water.…
Mike Micklewright
Fourteen months ago, I changed careers. I had been an independent consultant for 17 years (I still do public speaking), built a good practice and then gave it all away to go back into the corporate world as a vice president of global continuous improvement and supplier development for a high-growth…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
Although Quality Digest often has in-depth articles about the nuances of control charts, I’ve found that many beginners are at a loss to figure out how to organize their data, especially in service industries such as health care, hotels, and food. They complain that the examples are all…
Donald J. Wheeler
Last month in “Exact Answers to the Wrong Questions” we looked at how we can compute useful limits with as few as six to 10 values. In this column I would like to consider the question of how to use the limits on a process behavior chart to understand the underlying process. In order to do this, we…
Georgia Institute of Technology
In a busy laboratory at the Fuller E. Callaway Jr. Manufacturing Research Center, a researcher from the Georgia Tech School of Mechanical Engineering is using a novel digital technology to cast complex metal parts directly from computer designs, dramatically reducing both development and…
Mark R. Hamel
Lean transformations might be easier if we possessed some measure of the sixth sense—extrasensory perception (ESP).
Sort of like in the 1999 psychological thriller film, The Sixth Sense, we might be inclined to whisper repeatedly that, “We see concrete heads.” You know, that lean euphemism for…
Knowledge at Wharton
By now, the story is familiar: On Aug. 5, 2010, 33 miners were trapped 2,000 feet below ground at the San Jose mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert. During their first 17 days without contact with the surface and for weeks thereafter, the miners organized themselves for survival under the leadership of…
To remain the valuable business system that it currently is, ISO 9001 needs to continue to evolve, ensuring that organizations of all sizes, complexities, and locations see a clear connection between their strategic objectives and their quality management system (QMS). It is not just about meeting…
Stewart Anderson
A new book on strategy recently crossed my desk, and I have to say it is an excellent read. It’s called Understanding Michael Porter, by Joan Magretta (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011). Porter’s ideas and concepts are foundational to the subject of competitive strategy, and it is always good to…
Banner Medical
Banner Medical is committed to an ambitious approach to quality assurance, one developed specifically for the evolving, critical needs of the medical device industry. The company believes this investment achieves multiple payoffs—in relationship-building with customers, in risk mitigation, and in…
Michael Causey
Predicting things on Capitol Hill is never easy, especially as the election campaign “silly season” enters the picture, but it’s beginning to look like medical device companies should expect heavier regulation in 2012, and that will only increase if President Obama is reelected in November.
The…
Umberto Tunesi
I’ve been baptized; I do believe in religion. But I really can’t stand the fact that the Ten Commandments had to be set in stone. The human brain is capable of effectively remembering some 100 words—and much, much more.
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I don’t object to documents as such. I love books; my…
Bill Kalmar
Have you noticed that sometimes it’s better to be a new customer or subscriber than a long-time devotee of a particular company? Every day you see ads and hear commercials about discounts or free memberships or extended warranties for new customers. Some gyms waive the initiation fee, magazines…
Bruce Hamilton
Some years back while working in an administrative department, I encountered a curious condition. Along with about a half-dozen employees, I was following the information flow from sales order to shipping. Our spaghetti diagram kept looping back to an in-box on a table just outside John’s door. It…
MIT News
For Tim Gutowski, advanced manufacturing is an opportunity not just to boost employment, but also to improve the environment.
Gutowski heads MIT’s Environmentally Benign Manufacturing research group, which looks at the environmental cost and impact associated with manufacturing traditional…
Quint Studer
In work, as in life, we learn from trial and error: I was having Problem A, so I implemented Solution A, and it didn’t work. Then I tried Solution B and it did. Next time I’ll know to use Solution B first thing.
And that’s how it goes, over and over again, throughout your career. Forty years or so…
Jim Benson
I will not be accused of burying the lead here, and say right up front: Your value stream is wrong. And it always will be. This is a good thing because as we work from day to day, the steps we take to complete our work can subtly or even violently change. When we move from home to work to a special…
Knowledge at Wharton
Is customer service a lost art, or are today’s customers harder to please?
On the one hand, moments of tear-your-hair-out frustration are commonplace—from shopping in stores where sales associates are nowhere to be found, to dealing with salespeople unable to help locate a sought-after item, to…
Arun Hariharan
Is it possible to apply the principle of first time right (FTR) in a sales context? This two-part article looks at what happens when companies do just that. Part one defined FTR in sales, and outlined some of the obvious advantages. Part two looks at FTR in sales’ effect on revenue, profits, and…
Arun Hariharan
First time right (FTR), or doing things right the first time, is an important concept in quality. Some experts even consider FTR the very definition of quality. This two-part article summarizes an experiment in which FTR was applied to sales. Is it possible to sell something right the first time?…
NIST
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is hosting a free public workshop on best practices in federal conformity-assessment activities Wed., April 11, 2012, at NIST’s Gaithersburg, Maryland, site. Conformity assessment determines whether a process,…
Paul Naysmith
During the the mid-1980s, two great schools of investigation were put up against each other. Each were immensely popular, and still are today, with fans firmly seated in one methodology or the other. One school was led by a disheveled, cigar-smoking character. The other had a lady more akin to your…
Dawn Keller
I am 100-percent certain that on the day they asked me to manage at Minitab, they did not tell me I would have to do so much process work. They didn’t clearly articulate that as a manager, I’d spend a considerable part of my time discussing how we develop software rather than actually developing…
NIST
It turns out you can be too thin—especially if you’re a nanoscale battery. Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST); the University of Maryland, College Park; and Sandia National Laboratories built a series of nanowire batteries to demonstrate that the thickness of…
Kevin Atkins
Exquisite home décor begins with products that epitomize attention to detail and artistic subtleties that are often hard to manufacture in volume without looking mass-produced. For more than 55 years, Baldwin Hardware, part of the Stanley Black & Decker’s Hardware and Home Improvements (Stanley…
