All Features
Katie Gignac
Any company that truly lives its quality management system will tell you that you must innovate to get ahead. Employees at GNP Co., the chicken processor formerly known as Gold’n Plump, live by a commitment to quality, innovation, and continuous improvement— all hallmarks of a culture built on the…
William A. Levinson
The ISO 14001 environmental management systems (EMS) standard and the new ISO 50001 energy management systems (EnMS) standard are complementary, synergistic, and mutually supporting systems for improving stakeholder value. ISO 50001’s proposed reference to greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction is, however…
Umberto Tunesi
Last night on the Italian National Geographic channel, I watched a reconstruction of the November 2011 American Airlines flight No. 587, in which 265 people lost their lives. At the time the cause seemed almost natural and unavoidable: The AA’s Airbus got caught by the turbulence that a JAL 747…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
Yogi Berra once said, “If people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?” I have found the same is true of statistical process control (SPC).
As the author of the QI Macros SPC Software for Excel, I get emails every week asking, “What’s the right chart to use for my…
Having been involved in quality and process control for quite a few years now, I tend to read any article regarding a quality issue or new ideas for quality or process improvement. Last week, Washington state’s Tri-City Herald published an article by Annette Cary about tanks at a vitrification…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
I’m wondering when we humans started assuming that commerce must be perfect? After all, the adage “let the buyer beware” has been in circulation since folks ran around saying it in Latin. A kind of passivity seems to have crept into transactions. Except for the act of opening one’s wallet, buying…
Tim Lozier
Quality management, if we’ve learned anything, is a central factor in any manufacturing organization. What’s most compelling is the evolution during the past decade of our perception of quality management. Once thought to be a compartmentalized system in an organization’s infrastructure, quality…
MIT News
“Everyone, take your order slips and move the shipment to the left,” says Nelson Repenning, a professor of systems dynamics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “Factories, brew beer.”
With that, six groups of high-achieving managers from a major multinational firm, ensconced in MIT’s Building…
The QA Pharm
It stands to reason that pharmaceutical companies in compliance trouble also have problems with their deviation management and corrective and preventive action (CAPA) systems. After all, maintaining a good compliance profile as well as an efficient operation requires the ability to detect problems…
Timothy F. Bednarz
A manager who wishes to communicate effectively must receive and impart reliable and honest input by observing, questioning, and opening up productive two-way dialogue. Feedback is a major part of the total communication process that requires presenting ideas, thoughts, and messages clearly and…
Ryan E. Day
Perhaps I am overendowed with self-confidence; or perhaps nothing more than plain old hubris. Then again, maybe some things are just as obvious as they seem to me. Take 5S, for instance. Really? There’s a place for everything and everything in its place. If you got it out, you put it back.
Six…
Michael Causey
Sure, the Italians have better food, the English richer royal culture and accents, and French women don’t get fat, but we in America regulate medical devices better, don’t we? Not so fast, says the European Union.
They apparently aren’t happy that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is writing…
Lisa Greenleaf
Located in Victor, New York, Surmotech is a full-service electronics contract manufacturer. For more than 20 years the company has provided a complete range of manufacturing, design, and engineering services to the military, medical, industrial, and telecommunications industries and consumer…
Tripp Babbitt
Long ago, W. Edwards Deming warned us about the use of what he called “arbitrary numerical goals.” Targets are another name for these. They are so commonplace that governments, service, and manufacturing organizations all use them. Targets have become accepted in all organizations, but this…
Donald J. Wheeler
When the data come along one value at a time, we tend to put them on a chart for individual values (an XmR chart). Since virtually all business and managerial data occur one value at a time, the primary chart for service-sector data is the XmR chart. Yet the original process behavior chart was the…
Jeff Dewar
Editor’s note: This is the third of a four-part video interview with Juran Institute’s CEO, Joseph DeFeo, and hosted by Quality Digest’s CEO, Jeff Dewar. View part one here, and part two here.
Imagine this conversation....
Mary: “You still have to listen to the customer.”
Bob: “But we’re certified…
Jaynie L. Smith
What customers value most changes constantly, and the pace of change has increased exponentially with the economic recession.
One year ago people were looking at the financial stability of a company before purchasing its products, according to surveys conducted by my company, Smart Advantage. No…
MIT News
Innovations in software and technology are creating increasingly complex systems: cars that park themselves; medical devices that automatically deliver drugs; and smartphones with the computing power of desktop computers, to name a few. Such complex systems allow us to do things that seemed…
Jim Benson
OK, so there’s nothing about this video that isn’t cute. And that’s fine. But what does it have to do with lean? One of the most important lessons that lean can teach us is how to appreciate variation and make the most of it.
When Jim Henson and this little girl went on set, it was to create a…
Mark R. Hamel
Leonardo da Vinci’s comment, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” could easily serve as a lean tag line.
Surely, lean tools, like standard work, visual controls, and mistake proofing devices, are only truly effective if they are easily explained, understood, deployed, maintained, and…
Alberto Gutierrez
During the next few months, manufacturers of certain in vitro diagnostic and radiology products may start to notice they are getting decisions on their premarket notification submissions, aka 510(k), sooner than expected. This will be due to a six-month pilot program called Triage, launched…
Mark Graban
As the Supreme Court debates the fate of “Obama Care,” we should recall the formal name of the law: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Most of the public debate has been about the cost of health care, losing sight of the urgent need to fix the ongoing crisis of quality and…
Bruce Hamilton
3P, or “Production Preparation Process,” is a method introduced to the United States during the mid-1980s by Chihiro Nakao, a contemporary of Taiichi Ohno, and a founder of the consulting firm Shingijutsu Ltd. I recall the method was called “New Production Preparation” (NPP) early along, but…
Umberto Tunesi
Just a few reminders to start with: In the automotive supply chain, process failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) must be based on—or at least must take into consideration—design FMEA. This is the case whether a given supplier is responsible for the design or not.
During an FMEA, severity (S)…
Andrew Sobel
Has this ever happened to you? You’re talking to a client, or perhaps your boss, and you realize the conversation has gotten off on absolutely the wrong foot. You may have learned new and unexpected information from the other person that renders everything you’ve said irrelevant. You may have…
