All Features
Ed OBoyle
We all know these are difficult economic times. Consumers’ priorities have shifted dramatically, and that means dramatic changes for many businesses. Gallup has analyzed consumer behavior in many different sectors of the economy throughout the recession. What they’ve discovered is a foundational…
Donald J. Wheeler
All improvement efforts require a framework. No matter what we are doing, we all need some way to align our efforts and focus on a specific objective. During my 40 years in this business, I have seen many different models offered as frameworks for improvement. Most of these have been variations on…
Pierre Huot
Whether you are manufacturing small electronic appliances, automobiles, consumer goods, or large-scale parts, you know how much inspection and quality control affect the continued success of your organization.
3-D laser imaging is used for more than just inspection purposes. The ability to…
William A. Levinson
A Google search of the phrase “new customers only” reveals more than 3 million web pages. Radio ads for what look like exceptional deals often include the modifier, “new customers only;” existing customers are not eligible. We therefore advise our readers to always be new customers despite the…
Bill Kalmar
Alert: Due to an e-newsletter error you may have landed on this article expecting to find Miriam Boudreaux's One Hour of Root Cause Analysis or Eight Hours of Firefighting?. Click here to be redirected to that story. Our apologies. --Editors
We’ve had weeks to digest all the hoopla surrounding…
Dan Adams
The U.S. economy is finally on an uptick. According to Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke, the economy is set to grow by 3–4 percent in 2011. That’s great news for businesses that have been seeing decreasing or stagnant numbers on their revenue reports for the last couple of years. But now that…
GKS Global Services
Mystery Science Theater 3000, an award-winning television comedy, created many unique puppet characters during the course of its 20-year existence. The show quickly became a cult classic and is still popular today with a large devoted fan base.
Challenge
Producers wanted to create a…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Back when I was yardstick high, a well-dressed couple on TV kept breaking into the show I was watching to enthuse about a new technology that was going to cook a complete steak dinner during the hour-long program. It was an early demonstration of an appliance that would become both more…
Ryan E. Day
The recent brouhaha involving a class-action suit against Taco Bell alleging that their beef filling is more filling than beef really got me thinking, but not about what’s in the tacos. Instead, it got me thinking about quality control, quality assurance, and particularly about customer…
Jon Miller
During the early 1990s, I recall my Japanese sensei were absolutely appalled at the dearth of industrial and production engineers hired as kaizen consultants within major U.S. manufacturers. The cycles of downsizing in aerospace and defense industries had hit the industrial engineering field hard.…
Kimber Evans
Kaizen. Across many industries in many countries, this term is thrown around as a “standard practice.” Continuous improvement—the ultimate goal of business everywhere, right? Find ways to get things done quicker, cheaper, more efficiently… and then implement those goals into an everyday routine.…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Once upon a time, I met a beautiful, charming, and witty woman and fell deeply in love. During the months we dated I was the consummate romantic. I brought her flowers, wrote heartfelt love letters, and on occasion even sang to her. At one point she remarked that no one had ever treated her…
Tripp Babbitt
The hordes of companies and governments moving to shared services are dizzying. So many have combined back offices, human resources (HR), information technology (IT), finance, and contact centers that most companies assume this is a good thing.
But where is the evidence?
The theory behind most…
jeffdewar
In January 2011 I had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Deming to explore the current state of his teachings. He was unhappy. He felt that too much of the momentum and quest for “Profound Knowledge” that began during the 1980s has been lost. Our conversation followed an evening talk at a packed…
Denise Robitaille
I’ve been working with a client on implementing an ISO 9001-compliant quality management system. As always it’s a unique and interesting project, since organizations have different cultures, processes, products, and customers. No two quality management systems are quite the same. Documentation…
Mike Richman
Protecting the health and well-being of consumers and the world at large is the quality industry’s highest calling. During the past several decades, as the manufacture of electronics and consumer goods has shifted away from North America and Europe, the need to confirm and ensure the safety of…
Jon Miller
There is an expression in Japanese, “Dust accumulates to form a mountain.” (Chiri mo tsumoreba yama to naru.) While this may not be geologically correct, it carries a deep truth that lean practitioners will recognize through experience. Taken positively, this is the essential spirit of kaizen…
Michelle LaBrosse
February—the days are starting to get longer, the snowstorms are (hopefully) subsiding, and Valentine’s Day has come and gone. All over the country, you can find different opinions about Valentine’s Day. Some people are excited at the prospect of lavishing their loved one with adoration and…
Jacques Hoffmann
In parts one, two, and three of this “Leak Testing 101” series, we discussed three methods of dry-air leak testing—pressure decay, differential pressure decay, and mass-flow leak testing—including the pitfalls and hidden costs inherent in two-step pressure testing methods and the higher accuracy…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
One of the laments we hear quite frequently in the manufacturing sector is the lack of skilled employees available in the hiring pool. In the age of high-definition video games, social networking, and phones that have more capability than your five-year-old laptop, it's no wonder that manufacturing…
I have long admired and respected Toyota. I have been to its factories, published and written books and articles about its revolutionary production system, known many of its brilliant people, and taught its methods to thousands of students. Like many of Toyota's admirers, I was shocked and saddened…
In business there’s a saying: Time is money. The more time it takes for something to get done, the more money is wasted. Companies that can figure out a way to compress the time it takes for something to happen can realize significant cost savings and also get their products into the market faster…
Bill Kalmar
Fifty years ago President John Kennedy delivered one of the most memorable inauguration speeches since President Lincoln. Kennedy’s words still resonate after all these years when he stated, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” After the Lincoln address…
Steven Ouellette
With the announcement of another Toyota recall, it seems that everyone and their dog have an opinion about Toyota, and some of them might even be drawing the right conclusions. While everyone is allowed to have opinions (not the dogs—on quality matters I don't trust entities that consider cat poo a…
PQ Systems
In the world of continuous improvement, it might seem that one does not want to look back. After all, as systems improve, old data is no longer useful, and keeping it around—like keeping old love letters—may someday get you into trouble.
Knowing when to recalculate control limits is important, as…
