All Features
Jeff Dewar
Editor’s note: This is the second 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.
In this part of my video interview with Juran Institute president and executive coach, Joseph De Feo, we discussed where the…
Tim Lozier
Everyone seeks out value. Whether you’re a coupon clipper, a sale shopper, or a garage-sale stalker, people look to get some sort of value out of their buying experience. And if the product is purchased at a retailer, you look for ways to get the most out of the product you purchased. The software…
Gallup
Companies that lead the world in growth have something in common: a relentless focus on talent. They are very intentional about this. The executives who lead these companies have created high-performing operating systems.
From decades of work with companies to implement these systems, Gallup has…
NIST
Two new advanced laboratory buildings for high-precision science and measurements have officially opened in Boulder, Colorado, providing upgraded facilities to support technology innovation and economic growth as well as the training of future scientists.
Federal, state, and local government…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
There’s a lot of buzz about “data analytics”—mining huge data sets to discover invisible patterns of customer behavior that can be leveraged to maximize sales. But I’ve found that few people know how to mine the hidden improvement projects from existing “small data” using Excel’s PivotTables.
Over…
Michael Causey
While calling it one of the more “egregious” examples he’s seen or heard about, Fisher Wallace Labs (FWL) CEO Chip Fisher said the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) attempt to “force its own agenda” over dissenting science or how its own advisory boards vote on medical device classification is…
Akhilesh Gulati
Given the current dynamic business environment, there is a tremendous need for operational agility and the ability to quickly respond to changing market forces. Time to value (TtV) is an important metric that can be used to manage such environmental conditions. It can drive the development of…
William A. Levinson
Loss of American manufacturing capability to low-wage countries is but one part of the overall problem with the U.S. economy. The other part consists of a shortage of skilled workers, given that a high school diploma is no longer adequate for many manufacturing jobs. Brooklyn’s Pathways in…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Twelve years ago, I phoned a prospective client I’d been courting for months. The last time we’d spoken, only a few weeks earlier, she expressed interest in my conducting a seminar for her company. This time she said, “I was in the audience at the Fox theater last week; we won’t be needing your…
Arun Hariharan
Close your eyes and make a mental list of companies worldwide that use quality as their strategic weapon for achieving value for shareholders. Chances are you have some great examples, but most likely it’s a small list. Given the huge number of companies in every industry that aren’t on your list,…
The QA Pharm
The high layoff numbers in the pharmaceutical industry and poor job prospects in a weak economy have flooded the market with would-be consultants to pharma companies that need extra help. Here are my suggestions for hiring and working with an experienced good manufacturing practices (GMP)…
Georgia Institute of Technology
Taking advantage of the force generated by magnetic repulsion, researchers have developed a new technique for measuring the adhesion strength between thin films of materials used in microelectronic devices, photovoltaic cells, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).
The fixtureless and…
Knowledge at Wharton
Bucking the decades-old wave of offshoring manufacturing jobs to China, other parts of Asia, and Mexico, GE said it would move jobs back from these countries to the United States, where it will build water heaters.
Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s chairman and CEO, notes that his decision to invest $1 billion…
Jeff Dewar
Editor’s note: This four-part video interview with Juran Institute CEO Joseph DeFeo is hosted by Quality Digest’s CEO, Jeff Dewar. The series will run weekly beginning with today’s segment.
You can’t have a conversation about quality management without soon invoking the name “Dr. Juran.” The man…
ASQ
March 15, 2012, marked the 25th anniversary of the ISO 9000 series standards. Since the standards were released in 1987, they have gone through three revisions: 1994, 2000, and 2008. According to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), as of 2009, the total number of organizations…
During the past 18 months, Seatronics, an Acteon company, along with Technip, Star Net Geomantics, and BlueView Technologies, have been developing the BlueView 3D system for underwater metrology. The system combines terrestrial laser and underwater, 3-D multibeam sonar-scanning technology to…
Jim Frost
Anyone who has performed ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis knows that you need to check the residual plots to validate your model. Have you ever wondered why? There are mathematical reasons, of course, but I’m going to focus on the conceptual ones.
The bottom line is that randomness…
NIST
Physicists at JILA, a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU), have demonstrated a novel “superradiant” laser design, which has the potential to be 100 to 1,000 times more stable than the best conventional visible…
Bill Kalmar
During the 1940s, it was commonplace for boys, during their formative years, to spend their days girl-free. In fact, my pals and I zealously maintained girl-free territories so that our game playing, bike rides, and hours of comic book reading were devoid of girls. We even had a clubhouse that was…
Mark R. Hamel
Problem-solving tools are powerful things. But not so powerful that they are immune to human error. Few things are.
Analogously, this is one reason why our school teachers strongly encouraged proofreading. You know—critically reading what you just wrote to ensure that it is clear, well-organized,…
Argonne National Laboratory
Argonne researchers are working with two industrial partners to create nanofluids that improve the cooling of power electronics in hybrid electric vehicles.
These new coolants can lessen the need for heat exchangers, which could result in smaller cooling systems and lighter vehicles.
“Fluids…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
I am no longer surprised by the number of people who say, “I’m working on my Green Belt/Black Belt certification, but I’m not sure how to apply Six Sigma to [health care, telecom, hotels, food, transportation]—insert your service industry here. They just can’t seem to figure out how to translate…
H. James Harrington
The older I get, the more I realize that the basic things we believe in and live by do not change. The world keeps moving faster and faster. We need to run and work harder just to keep up. We get sidetracked by many new ways to use our time. Technology is moving so fast that before you can learn…
Harry Hertz
The title of this column reflects what has been my guiding philosophy ever since my first managerial position. And I truly believe that the statement is accurate. This observation led me to muse recently about what makes employees not just good, but exceptional—the types of employees we all want as…
Jim Tennermann
Everyone in the quality profession has heard the term “NIST traceable.” Having calibration traceability to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is desirable for most measurement devices. It is also enshrined as a requirement in some regulatory documents. Unfortunately, NIST…
