All Features
Bruce Hamilton
I think there are no new airplane stories left for those of us who take to the not-always-friendly skies, but having been on one of those super delay specials recently and coincidentally not caring especially about being hours late (I had booked a full day of buffer as a hedge against possible…
Jason W. Womack
You are a hard worker. But oftentimes at day’s end, it seems you haven’t accomplished much. You want what you do to really count. Here are ways to consistently and incrementally improve performance.
Don’t overwrite e-mail. Much of your time—probably too much—gets eaten up by e-mail. There’s no…
Mark R. Hamel
Recently, fellow-blogger David Kasprzak, introduced me to the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) strategy. ROWE, created at Best Buy’s Minneapolis headquarters, espouses a philosophy under which employees can work where they want, when they want, and how they want—as long as the work gets done.…
Harry Hertz
The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence defines innovation as “making meaningful change to improve products, processes, or organizational effectiveness and creating new value for stakeholders.”
Innovation involves the adoption of an idea, process, technology, product, or business model…
APQC
Organizations understand the importance of measuring and tracking quality, particularly in product manufacturing. However, applying rigorous quality measurement on an enterprisewide scale, beyond manufacturing and service levels, is relatively new. Nonetheless, some organizations have made strides…
Bill Kalmar
Lately, much has been discussed and written about buying products made only in America. ABC’s World News with Diane Sawyer has been touting the quality of American-made products for several months and encouraging viewers to “Buy only American!” But I think The Oakridge Boys express it best singing…
Greg Fox
I have a 12-year-old son. This is not a unique condition. And you might think that I would be well prepared for the associated challenges, having been a 12-year-old son myself at one time. But you’d be wrong.
Regular readers of my blog posts might recall that my family and I recently moved from…
Grant Ramaley
One of the greatest challenges that I have in discussing standards is trying to put things in a context so that all people affected by them can understand how they matter. So I want to start with a simple picture and a remarkable snapshot in time. It shows how small medical-device companies are…
Guidon Performance Solutions LLC
Industry experts at Guidon Performance Solutions’ Second Annual Virtual Healthcare Summit agreed that health care organizations’ ability to survive their increasingly demanding and changing environment will require a new agility and adaptability. Consensus from the speakers signaled that most…
Stanford News Service
For 50 years, scientists searched for the secret to making tiny implantable devices that could travel through the bloodstream. Engineers at Stanford University have demonstrated just such a device. Powered without wires or batteries, it can propel itself though the bloodstream and is small enough…
Davis Balestracci
For those of us practicing improvement in a medical culture, presenting this “funny new statistical way” of doing things to a physician audience triggers a predictable stated reason: “This isn’t in line with rigorous, double-blind clinical trial research.” And your response should be, “True! Nor…
Michael Causey
Deciphering the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a bit like trying to understand what the old USSR was up to during the days of the Cold War. In those days, it was called Kremlinology, or the study of a complex, secretive organization. We need a catchphrase for those who try to figure out what…
Umberto Tunesi
Editor’s note: Umberto Tunesi is a new columnist for Quality Digest. He brings his auditing expertise to bear on a surprising range of subjects, and we’re happy to add his European perspective to our mix. “I realize I’m being tough on the ISO/TS 16949 and AIAG manual writers, as well on performance…
Donald J. Wheeler
In a recent article that shall remain nameless, a statistician carefully worked out the exact answer to the wrong question. Then, based on this exact answer, he made an erroneous recommendation regarding the use of a process behavior chart for individual values. In this column I will explain both…
Duke University
Randomness and chaos in nature, as it turns out, can be a good thing—especially when trying to harvest energy from the movements of everyday activities. Duke University engineers believe they have come up with the theoretical underpinning that could lead to the development of energy-harvesting…
Darryl Rosen
You glance down at an incoming text message while an employee is talking to you. You bark, “Just get it done!” to your team and then walk away.
According to a recent CareerBuilder poll, 58 percent of managers received no training before starting the job, which often results in avoidable management…
NIST
A new report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) has documented 149 potential sources of human error in the analysis of crime scene fingerprints. The study by a working group of 34 experts recommends a…
MIT News
The loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs is a topic that can provoke heated arguments about globalization. But what do the cold, hard numbers reveal? How has the rise in foreign manufacturing competition actually affected the U.S. economy and its workers?
A new study co-authored by David Autor,…
Gartner
Business process management (BPM) delivers significant benefits to organizations, but some have faced many problems due to wrong turns along the way, according to Gartner analysts. They have identified five BPM threats that business process improvement (BPI) leaders need to be mindful of as…
Paul Naysmith
The pile of papers in front of me is sizable. I’m wondering what would be the correct term for the volume of these white sheets of paper. A group of lions is called a “pride”; is a group of résumés called a “wedge,” a “stack,” or a “flurry?” I’m distracting myself from the reality of having to work…
NIST
Weights and measures are indispensable. From the grocery store to the gas pump, all kinds of consumer products are sold by some measurable quantity, whether it’s length, count, volume, or weight. These values, the machines that measure them, and the people who measure the machines to ensure their…
Akhilesh Gulati
The city of Austin, Texas, wanted to be listed as one of the top five places to live in the United States. Explaining that vision to the various municipal departments wasn’t difficult. Managers set about benchmarking from previous years, looking at the numbers, and deciding where they should take…
Bill Kalmar
Every four years our Gregorian calendar provides us with an extra day. Leap year, as it is called, or intercalary or bissextile year, contains one additional day to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year. (And if you understand that, please contact me.) In any…
Stewart Anderson
Many companies begin their lean improvement journey by first implementing 5S, the Japanese methodology minimizing errors and mistake proofing: seiri (sort), seiton (set in order), seiso (shine), seiketsu (standardization), and shitsuke (sustain).
For many firms 5S seems like a logical starting…
American Customer Satisfaction Index ACSI
As the economy improves, albeit at a very slow pace, aggregate customer satisfaction with goods and services has improved as well. The ACSI gain for the final quarter of 2011 is very small, but it represents the fourth consecutive quarter without a decline.
The national ACSI advanced by 0.1…
