All Features
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…
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…
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…
Cognex Corp.
With a worldwide reputation for product quality, customer service, and minting technology, the Royal Canadian Mint (RCM) is at the forefront of innovation in producing coinage and currency. The RCM uses advanced automation equipment to count and wrap pennies in rolls. However, in the past these…
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…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
There is a group effort commencing beneath the English city of Nottingham with a main goal of assessing the archaeological importance of nearly 500 man-made caves that were cut into the sandstone during medieval times and possibly earlier. The caves have served many purposes from housing dungeons,…
Oscar Combs
What makes a quality or health, safety, and environment (HSE) management review meeting more effective? I personally believe that top management is the critical ingredient. Throughout my career, I’ve participated and led management review meetings and one common challenge was always getting the…
Pierre Huot
If a manufacturer were to ask its clients how they evaluated goods or services, the three most common metrics would be goods at a fair price, on-time delivery, and quality. Ask which could be most valuable and in all likelihood the most significant response would be quality. When included in the…
The QA Pharm
Most pharmaceutical companies have an internal current good manufacturing practices’ (CGMP) auditing program administered at the site and corporate levels of the organization. Auditors are typically part of the quality assurance or regulatory compliance function, and the usual approach is to…
Georgia Institute of Technology
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a new sampling device that could prevent thousands of people worldwide from dying of pneumonia each year.
Called PneumoniaCheck, the device created at Georgia Tech, is a solution to the problem of diagnosing pneumonia, which is a…
Melissa Pregill
Anyone sitting in the manager’s chair these days can speak to sleepless nights devising imaginative, effective ways to keep programs on track and staff motivated and productive. While corporate leadership across all markets trims the ranks due to a chronically ill economy (of course, distributing…
UCSF
It takes songbirds and baseball pitchers thousands of repetitions—a choreography of many muscle movements—to develop an irresistible trill or a killer slider. Now, scientists have discovered that the male Bengalese finch uses a simple mental computation and an uncanny memory to create its near-…
Oscar Combs
One may ask, “What does a taco have to do with quality?” Ask Taco Bell’s president Greg Creed, and I’m sure he will tell you a lot. On Jan. 19, a lawsuit was filed against Taco Bell claiming the company’s beef is only 35 percent ground beef and 65 percent other ingredients, such as binders,…
Johns Hopkins University
Large wind farms are being built around the world as a cleaner way to generate electricity, but operators are still searching for the most efficient way to arrange the massive turbines that turn moving air into power.
To help steer wind-farm owners in the right direction, Charles Meneveau, a Johns…
Joan Voight
Now that reviewer websites such as Yelp have become more common, you probably take the typical approach of glancing over the comments about your business, looking for patterns of praise or complaints. And if you are wise, you are adjusting your business practices according to the overall feedback…
Bill Hathaway
While eating my lunch at the park last fall, I looked down at the wooden deck below me, and noticed that an ant had picked up a large crumb from my sandwich. The crumb was heavy, and the ant labored to move it. Unfortunately, the gap between the deck planks was too wide for the ant to cross…
Donald J. Wheeler
Last month’s column looked at how to fix some of the Problems with Gauge R&R Studies. This month I will show you how to learn more from your gauge repeatability and reproducibility (R&R) data with less effort. Rather than getting lost in a series of computations, the "evaluating the…
Claudia Jackson
Twitter is not at all what I expected. After a few months, I now use Twitter to improve my knowledge in health care quality, expand my professional network, and save time. Through Twitter, I’ve connected with an amazing variety of people, including health care providers, marketing pros, e-patients…
Bill Kalmar
It seems every day we view “breaking news” reports on television or read about a particular event in the paper that catches our attention. It might be acres of brush fires that level hundreds of homes, a new law that restricts the number of calories that can be consumed in school cafeterias, or…
Mark R. Hamel
My teenage education was (maybe) enhanced by substantial doses of Monty Python. Occasionally, I discover a lean metaphor somewhere within their body of work. One of my absolute favorite scenes is from the movie, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The three-minute scene goes by two names: “The…
