All Features
Dawn Bailey
Some 147 years ago, Milliken & Co. was selling woolen goods manufactured in New England; it soon expanded to represent the cotton mills of the southern United States. With a passion to be not the biggest but the best, the Milliken family led the company through the turbulent 1980s when imported…
MIT News
Why don’t more women enter the male-dominated profession of engineering? Some observers have speculated it may be due to the difficulties of balancing a demanding career with family life. Others have suggested that women may not rate their own technical skills highly enough.
However, a recent…
Ryan E. Day
It’s getting to be an almost daily mantra for me to say, “We live in exciting times, and they’re getting more so every day.” Although the term “exciting” is usually associated with joy, it can be a double-edged thing. I’m aware of the benefits of manufacturing durable goods close to home, but have…
Arun Hariharan
In “Close the Loop with the Customer, Part One,” we left off with Amla, the CEO of a large company, laying down what he called “commandments” for dealing with any problem brought by customers or agents. The commandments are based on lessons learned from an agent’s complaint for not receiving her…
Arun Hariharan
Sometimes, customer issues or complaints get tagged as “resolved” without actually resolving them from the customer’s perspective. At times, the customer doesn’t even know that their complaint has been tagged as resolved because no one from the company told them. Often, this happens because someone…
Carly Barry
My husband said to me the other day, “You talk about being lean all the time, but your email in-box is definitely not lean!”
I have to admit, I tend to keep things around just in case I might need them down the road. I keep coupons I might use for months beyond expiration, every piece of high…
NIST
Memory devices based on magnetism are one of the core technologies of the computing industry, and engineers are working to develop new forms of magnetic memory that are faster, smaller, and more energy efficient than today’s flash and SDRAM memory.
According to the article, “Nanoscale spin wave…
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…
