All Features
ISO
In the wake of recent failures in corporate governance, two new standards from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) will help organizations to disclose corporate information quickly and effectively. Increased pressure by industry regulators obliges companies to provide such…
William A. Levinson
The elimination of waste (muda) from all manufacturing and logistics activities is an obvious concept. Less obvious is the fact that waste often hides in plain view. “Unfortunately, real waste lurks in forms that do not look like waste,” says Shigeo Shingo in Modern Approaches to Manufacturing…
Sandia National Laboratories
The human eye is as comfortable with white light generated by diode lasers as with that produced by increasingly popular light-emitting diodes (LEDs), according to tests conceived at Sandia National Laboratories.
Both technologies pass electrical current through material to generate light, but…
Mona Pearl
One of the main challenges of the U.S. economy is mind-set. As trade borders become seamless and the world becomes more dependent on technology, U.S. companies and their executives must scramble to acquire the tools and skills necessary to survive and thrive in the increasingly competitive…
Paul Naysmith
My cell phone was vibrating like a dryer set at hyper-speed, and my wife’s name popped up on the screen. My first thought was that something had gone wrong. I did tell her to call only if there were problems with the movers. I was on the other side of town, a prisoner at the Department of Motor…
MIT News
Continual product and process innovation are crucial for commercially successful products to maintain their industry dominance, according to MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) industry co-director Vah Erdekian.
At the MIT Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity annual summit held Oct…
The RFID Network
RFID tags are not like bar codes. Just because you see a tag doesn’t mean your RFID equipment will see it. Conversely, if you can’t see a tag, that doesn’t mean your RFID equipment won’t read it. To make sense of this contradiction, it’s important to understand the basic concepts about RFID…
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…
