All Features
Thomas R. Cutler
Burger King’s advertising jingle during the 1970s was, “Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce. Special orders don’t upset us. All we ask is that you let us serve it your way!”
In late August, Sarah E. Needleman profiled in the Wall Street Journal that entrepreneurial manufacturers are experiencing…
Tripp Babbitt
Systems thinking requires a massive change in the way organizations design and manage work. Old thinking must be flushed out so that new and better thinking can replace it. The outdated functional design of organizations according to the type of work performed needs an overhaul. Frederick Taylor,…
Davis Balestracci
I attended a talk in 2006 given by a world leader in quality that contained a bar graph summary ranking 21 U.S. counties from best to worst (see figure 1). The counties were ranked from 1 to 21 for 10 different indicators, and these ranks were summed to get a total score for each county (e.g.,…
Mark Graban
Lean thinkers see the waste in health care when they are at the hospital gemba. I think this is true whether you are a lean person who is new to health care or if you’re a long-time hospital person who has learned lean. Experts (doctors) ranging from John Toussaint to Patricia Gabow to Don Berwick…
Today’s entrepreneurs and business leaders must tread a tightrope through a universe of distractions. Information pours into our brains in a relentless, never-ceasing deluge. A rising army of companies across the globe competes for our customers using “new and improved” business models and…
Bill Kalmar
While watching the local and national news recently, I hearkened back to the 1950s when TV news was void of all the theatrics and proud puffing. Today we hear that station WBUZZ got the “exclusive report” on the upcoming storm, or WGRIM indicates that the station has the “exclusive report” on…
Jon Miller
I am in Japan helping to lead one of our lean manufacturing benchmarking trips. What I took away from the debriefing from yesterday’s lean benchmarking visit was a series of lessons on how to sustain a lean culture after 10 years. The company we visited had made a few defining choices, played its…
CEED
Students of CEED—an Australia-based program that links university engineering students with industry and government companies to complete specific on-site projects as part of their studies—are contributing significantly to the success of manufacturing projects, including those focused on making…
Manufacturing is getting easier in many ways, at least as far as the technology is concerned. For example, machine tools are simpler to program and operate, rapid prototyping means that product development is faster and cheaper than ever, and user-friendly CAD software may even negate the need for…
Davis Balestracci
During my recent travels, I have noticed an increasing tendency toward formalizing organizational quality improvement (QI) efforts into a separate silo. Even more disturbing is an increasing (and excruciating) formality. Expressions such as “saving dark-green dollars” are creeping into…
Angelo Lyall
Most organizations are reluctant to set prices too low or too high because exceeding the boundaries on either side yields damaging consequences. If we accept that, to succeed in the long run, a firm should make decisions that result in positive economic profit (in this case “economic profit” is…
GKS Global Services
Jamie Goldstein from Newton, Massachusetts, was 15 years old and an aspiring car designer when he sculpted an elaborate car design in clay. Having the foresight to create a design portfolio of his work, he wanted to make a more durable model of the clay car, painted and detailed. Modeling clay was…
Akhilesh Gulati
The economy is uncertain, pessimism is rife in businesses, and many are standing around waiting for things to happen. However, complacency does not send a positive message to customers, colleagues, and employees. It is also not conducive to getting workforce input and buy-in to move in new…
Maribeth Kuzmeski
Once upon a time, customer service meant more than pressing 2 to wait (and wait and wait) for “the next available representative.” Companies valued those who bought their goods and services and went the proverbial extra mile to make them happy. Today we’re more likely to hear how a company has…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”
These are the words of the woman who became the poster…
Jon Miller
Leaders lead. Or do they? There is not always a cause-and-effect relationship between leadership actions and follower behavior. Not all leaders succeed at pulling people along in the same direction. If a leader needs to drive people in a direction, keeping the fringes from straying too far from…
Andrew Reich
Looking for a new factory to work with in China can be daunting. With pressures from poor rice production on the rise and labor throughout China unstable, more China-based manufacturers are closing shop every day.
For these reasons I think it’s an opportune time to review the key aspects and goals…
Martin VanDerSchouw
All organizations can slot their activities into one of two categories: projects or new initiatives, and operations. Everything falls into one of those. To succeed, an organization must do both very well, and both must be supported by strong leadership, discipline, and visibility from top…
NIST
With growing interest in using nanoparticles for everything from antibacterial socks to medical imaging to electronic devices, the need to understand the environmental, health, and safety risks of these particles also grows. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)…
Michelle LaBrosse
I was recently watching the movie “When Harry Met Sally,” and there’s that funny scene where Harry tells Sally that she’s high maintenance:
Harry Burns: There are two kinds of women: high maintenance and low maintenance.
Sally Albright: Which one am I?
Harry: You’re the worst kind; you’…
Robert I. Sutton
Recently, I wrote a list of “12 Things Good Bosses Believe.” Now I want to delve into the ninth belief mentioned in that article: “Innovation is crucial to every team and organization. So my job is to encourage my people to generate and test all kinds of new ideas. But it is also my job to help…
During the past few years, I’ve found myself encountering more customers requiring gauge repeatability and reproducibility (GR&R) studies performed on thread gauges. When I say, “thread gauges,” I’m really referring to indicating thread gauges; you might refer to them as “snap gauges” or “tri-…
Bob Cramblitt
When the NASA Discovery space shuttle launches in November, there will be dozens of upgrades and safety modifications, but one thing will remain unchanged from every mission during the last five years: 3-D scanning and processing will be used to help ensure the safe return of astronauts to Earth…
Steven Ouellette
Last month I wrote about how the random sampling distribution (RSD) of various sample statistics are the basis for pretty much everything in statistics. If you understand RSDs, you understand a lot about why we do what we do in hypothesis testing, inferential statistics, and estimation of…
Laser Design Inc.
RavenWorks, a Maple Grove, Minnesota, company known for its automotive machining and testing business, is launching its own line of automotive parts. RavenWorks’ employees, who are hot-rod enthusiasts, saw a need in the market for replacement parts for vintage vehicles. They decided to carefully…
