All Features
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
I would like to share with you a story about my mom, a woman who was very insecure about her background. She grew up in a blue collar family where neither her mother nor father finished eighth grade. Mom completed high school, but only with tutoring by my father. She would frequently say to me, “I…
Barbara Hemphill
Kathy is the office manager for a large corporation. The great news is that the company is growing and Kathy is looking for employees to handle all the new clients. The bad news is that she has no office space for these new employees to work in. The truth is, the office and storage areas are full…
As many as 14.6 million Americans are unemployed, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. That means 14.6 million people have been dealing with the losses that come with unemployment: the loss of financial stability, of identity, and of their normal daily routine.
Emily Wright dealt with…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Editor's note: In this second in a series of articles on workplace visuality, Gwendolyn Galsworth, Ph.D., author of Work That Makes Sense (Visual Lean Enterprise Press, 2010) and Visual Workplace/Visual Thinking (Visual-Lean Enterprise Press, 2005), and recognized visual expert, shows us how…
Steve Martin
I like the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) cycle for three reasons: It’s simple, it provides a pathway for teaching, and it works.
I love teaching. For me, seeing the light bulb over a lean student’s head illuminate for the first time is highly rewarding. During the early years of my lean journey,…
Michelle LaBrosse
Are you tired of hearing people say that change is the only constant? I think we all need to keep saying it to remind ourselves that we must be ready to keep changing. But here’s the rub: How do we make change stick? How can you, as a project manager, use your skills to create business processes…
Mark Graban
I have as many bad customer-service experiences as the next guy, with health care and other businesses. As I’ve said before, unless there’s a broader lesson involved, I try not to be a “hack” blogger who just uses his platform to complain about the last bad thing to happen. However, I think the…
Mark R. Hamel
My dog, Bailey, has a sensei—a dog-obedience trainer. Actually, my wife and I have a sensei to teach us how to train our dog. In fact, my wife and I have used the same dog-obedience trainer for the last three dogs, all German shepherds. No one would mistake us for Mr. and Mrs. Dog Whisperer.…
Jacques Hoffmann
In part one of this series, we considered the pros and cons of pressure-decay testing. In part two, we’ll take a close look at a leak-testing method called “differential pressure decay.” This method is similar to simple pressure-decay testing discussed in part one.
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Bob Cramblitt
Although he’s not one for clichés, Rus Emerick, process improvement specialist at Schneider-Electric, endorses this one: “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
This concept, which dates back to Aristotle, is at the core of an approach called functional analysis that has implications…
Bill Kalmar
Here it is, one week into August with loads of summer days still staring us in the face, and yet the “back to school” ads have been popping up for weeks. Every day brings advertisements for backpacks, tennis shoes in school colors, insulated lunch bags, computers, Master brand combination locks,…
Stewart Anderson
The recession has been an extremely disruptive event for many organizations. Many bear relentless pressure to identify new market needs, create appropriate products and services, become more effective and efficient, and develop and modify systems and processes to meet and deliver those goals. In…
Robert Parsons
Finally, the long and arduous process that appears to be a requisite phase in the development of an international quality management system standard appears to be nearing an end. Though the AS9100:2009 and AS9101:2009 (checklist) have been available for quite some time, the aerospace industry has…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Editor's note: In this first in a series of articles on workplace visuality, Gwendolyn Galsworth, Ph.D., author of Work That Makes Sense (Visual Lean Enterprise Press, 2010) and Visual Workplace/Visual Thinking (Visual-Lean Enterprise Press, 2005), and recognized visual expert, sets out the basic…
Tripp Babbitt
While reading an issue of Quality Digest Daily, I came across an article by Kenneth Levine and Peter Sherman titled, “Ten Simple Principles for Treating Employees as Assets.” I thought it followed the usual themes about engaging employees and driving out fear until I ran across the following jewel…
Steve Moore
An article titled “Sharp Drop in Firefighter Fatalities in 2009” appeared in a safety trade journal recently. For the first time in three years, it said, on-the-job firefighter fatalities dropped below 100. The article went on to say that the 82 firefighter deaths in 2009 were substantially below…
Environmental Quality Corner with Ken Appel
On July 8, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced an initiative “… to evaluate industry’s compliance and understanding of Part 11 in light of the enforcement discretion described in the August 2003 Guidance for Industry Part 11, Electronic Records; Electronic Signatures—Scope and…
Walter Pastorius
In sawmills, optimization is an in-process procedure that maximizes output of the highest-value board size and quality from the limited and environmentally valuable input of randomly shaped logs. During the optimization process, 3-D profiles of each raw board are analyzed before positioning saws.…
Steven Ouellette
Story update 10/05/2010: Corrections were made to captions for Figures 6, 7, 8, 9.
As I was teaching class the other day, I told the students I was going to reveal to them the one secret they needed to learn to understand every statistical test they would ever use. The secret was the one thing…
Since almost 70 percent of all changes in organizations fail, you might be interested in knowing why that’s so. Rick Maurer, author of Beyond the Wall of Resistance: Why 70% of Changes Still Fail and What You Can Do About It, Revised Edition (Bard Press, 2010), put together his top 10 list in the…
Donald J. Wheeler
Capability indexes allow us to characterize the relationship between the process potential and the specifications. Performance indexes characterize the past performance relative to the specifications. Yet, in practice, we seek to make sense of these index numbers by converting them into other…
Bill Kalmar
The current economic uncertainty has many of us seeking ways to cut back on expenses and streamline our lifestyle. Using grocery discount coupons or looking for those “buy one, get one free” meal tickets have become commonplace. Restaurants have recognized the changes in dining habits and have…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
A dish-style radio telescope is being constructed in China that will allow astronomers to detect galaxies and pulsars at unprecedented distances. Not only will the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) be almost 200 meters larger than the current largest telescope in the world, it…
Jay Elepano
For decades we were taught to believe that if you ever wanted to measure anything properly, you needed a coordinate measuring machine (CMM). A couple of decades ago, portable arms were released and although they were novel, nothing could compare to the rigidity and accuracy of three linear scales…
Mike Micklewright
In part one of this series I described what dyslexia is and how I linked “dyslexia” with “lean.” In part two, I suggested an approach to training in the work place called “universal design for learning” (UDL), which takes into account those who learn differently from others. In this part, I will …
