All Features
APQC
In 2011, the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC), a proponent of knowledge management, benchmarking, and best practices business research, talked to a series of large organizations to learn how they measure quality. Every organization interviewed expressed considerable interest in…
BAIRD
During the Robert W. Baird 41st annual Industrial Conference, which was held Nov. 8–9, 2011, in Chicago, teams from Baird Equity Research put together macro-sector comments based on presentations and breakout sessions from more than 100 public companies. Here are some of the comments pulled from…
Mike Forbes
Whenever manufacturing nonconformances are discovered, immediate action is required to ensure that a flawed product is quickly identified, contained, and corrected at the suppliers’—and often the customers’—locations. Radiography can deliver a timely solution to these potential problems. In…
Joanna Leigh
Suppose you came upon a man in the woods, working to saw down a tree. He is exhausted from working for hours. You suggest he could take a break to sharpen the saw because it will help the work go faster. “I don’t have time to sharpen the saw!” he exclaims. “I’m busy sawing!”
People and…
Knowledge at Wharton
It is well-known that negative interactions have a bigger impact than positive ones, and that people tend to remember a person’s unfavorable qualities more vividly than their positive traits. These observations were included in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) titled, “How a Few…
Andy Cheshire
Bah! The NBA makes me mad. Seriously, why can’t the basketball players and the execs resolve this current lockout? I want to have something to watch after football season is over. Let’s talk about what is holding up the players and the organizations from agreeing to a decision on how money is…
Akhilesh Gulati
When you try to improve your athletic abilities (e.g., playing tennis, swimming), how do you go about it? There are quite a few options, including observing how those who are best-in-class perform. When we learn from others, we gain from their insights without having to endure the mistakes they may…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
As most of us know, on Oct. 5, 2011, we lost Steve Jobs, co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. Amid all the reports of his life and death, one of his phrases stood out to me: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” The phrase ended his June 12, 2005, commencement address to the graduates of…
NIST
Why there is stuff in the universe—or more properly, why there is an imbalance between matter and antimatter—is one of the long-standing mysteries of cosmology. A team of researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has just concluded a 10-year-long study of…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
Story update 11/13/2011: The references at the end of this article were inadvertently deleted during final editing. They have been restored.
During a Sept. 23, 2011, Quality Digest Live interview, I made several comments relative to business metrics and the need for an enhanced business…
CMSC
The Coordinate Metrology Society (CMS) announced today the results of their large-scale, interactive measurement study conducted at the 27th annual Coordinate Metrology Systems Conference (CMSC).
The 58-page report entitled “How Behavior Impacts Your Measurement” focuses on measurement…
NIST
The international General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) has approved a plan to redefine four of the seven base units of the International System of Units (SI) in terms of fixed values of natural constants. The initiative would make possible new worldwide levels of consistency and…
Bill Kalmar
Just the other day as I was perusing our local newspaper, an ad for a pizzeria caught my attention. Included was a fact unbeknownst to me: October evidently was National Pizza Month. To celebrate this tasty month, some cities arranged chartered bus tours of the various pizzerias in their town.…
Chuck Pfeffer
It was a dark and stormy evening as the graveyard shift started at Frankenstein’s Precision Parts. Tonight was the night: All of the parts for the Reanimation order were ready for inspection. The contracted inspector was due at midnight.
Just as the clock struck 12, a bolt of lightning…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
At a recent health-care conference I had a conversation with Mary, a Six Sigma Black Belt for a 700-bed hospital. She told me that the hospital had only a few copies of Minitab software, which was shared by several people. She was always being asked to close out of the program so that someone…
Belinda Jones
The Coordinate Metrology Society (CMS) has released the long-awaited results of its large-scale, interactive measurement study conducted during the 2011 Coordinate Metrology Systems Conference (CMSC), which was held July 25–29 in Phoenix. The 58-page report, “How Behavior Impacts Your…
Donald Jasurda
Manufacturers face many obstacles across the life cycle of delivering a product to market.
They often find themselves:
• Spending a lot of time reworking or repairing parts
• With parts that fail inspection, but fit and function properly when assembled
• With parts that pass…
William A. Levinson
The recent incident in which JetBlue stranded Flight 504’s passengers on a runway for seven hours reinforces the need for all but recreational travelers to adopt remote conferencing technology as rapidly as possible. It is past time to eliminate the need for the so-called services of an industry…
Gallup
Telltale markers are everywhere: the sliver of plastic clipped to a key chain, the colorful card positioned deep inside a purse, the frequent e-mail reminders about a “special” deal available only to members of a maybe not-so-exclusive club. These are just a few of the loyalty and rewards…
Thomas R. Cutler
In a little more than a month, the U.S. presidential primaries will begin; in a year the national election will be upon us. To most politicians, most Americans, and the millions of unemployed, no issue is greater than creating jobs in the United States.
Calls for funding and stimulus…
Knowledge at Wharton
Armed with powerful mobile devices, consumers and employees have become the force behind a wireless wave of change. Whether they are seeking discounted prices or looking to coordinate a sales campaign, these mobile end users are growing impatient with companies that are still trying to control…
Mark R. Hamel
I’m certainly no physicist, but I think there’s a worthy analogy between the decay of radioisotopes and lean behavior within an organization.
According to a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ webpage on Radiation Emergency Medical Management: • “Radioactive half-life is the time…
Knowledge at Wharton
Innovation is a tough word to define, but most would say they know it when they see it. At a recent Wharton Women in Business conference, participants were asked to discuss their personal definitions of the term and give a concrete example from their own experiences. Here is a look at what they…
Christine Park
We’ve heard of the recent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decisions to increase the focus of inspections on management with executive responsibility. There have been at least two warning letters issued this year with observations targeted in this area.
Although there are 26 references to…
Tripp Babbitt
Information technology is failing us. Service organizations the world over have been left to sift through the carnage of IT projects that have failed. Undeterred, they seem to quickly embrace the next IT project before the last is given a proper burial.
The research and evidence on failed IT…
