All Features
Bill Kalmar
A
s the school year is winding to a conclusion, scores of children are anxiously awaiting the beginning of their summer vacation. I suspect that there are also an equal number of teachers preparing to clean out their desks and use the next couple of months to unwind and re-energize.
The…
GKS Global Services
I
n 2006, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) kicked off a project called the Vehicle Design Summit (VDS), which today has grown into a large international consortium of teams from universities and innovative companies seeking, among other pressing global needs dealing with energy and…
Jacques Hoffmann
Not too long ago, when you wanted a product to be leak-proof, you simply put it under water, made sure it didn’t bubble, and thereby concluded there were no leaks. Such “bubble testing” takes time and depends on the operator’s ability, making it totally inappropriate for the modern production…
Pete Abilla
Some time ago, while consulting for a huge call center, I took a group of customer service agents for a little gemba walk and a quick activity to demonstrate a few lean fundamentals. What was scheduled for a 60-minute exercise turned out to be an experience that awakened the agents, several of whom…
Jamie Flinchbaugh
Managers get a lot of training on how to solve problems. They get no training on their role in problem solving. Many managers have come up through the ranks and it is most likely that their skill at solving problems and the knowledge gained from solving a lot of problems got them promoted into a…
Leaders of quality assurance programs must be able to generate interest and commitment without burdening clinical and administrative staff with an activity they neither understand nor believe in.
Hospital accreditation has been defined as “A self-assessment and external peer assessment process…
Environmental Quality Corner with Ken Appel
At the time of this writing, inspectors from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are at work monitoring seafood safety in areas affected by the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Finger-pointing continues and there is now talk on the news of criminal prosecutions. The full economic effect of the…
The client is a small independent company that just made a $600 million bet on a new deepwater floating platform to develop a Gulf of Mexico field, which bigger companies considered too small to develop themselves. Get it right and the client doubles production next year. Get it wrong… well, do…
Sinead Randig
W
e’ve all done it: You need to learn something so you sign up for training. You attend a class. You go back to work. Does anything from the training class stay with you a week later? How about a month or six months later? Usually you feel good after training. You remember some of the content. You…
Paul Scicchitano
The billowing cloud of volcanic ash spewing from Iceland may have been a major pain for air travel, but it also had a positive side. It served up a gentle reminder for me to find out what the heck is going on with AS9100 certification.
Faster than I could say Eyjafjallajökull, I was on the…
Greg Hutchins
Quality Digest Daily recently ran “Safety and Quality Experts Named to Toyota Quality Advisory Panel” as one of their top-read articles.
Good. I had missed it, so I read the article. I noticed was that it wasn’t an article, but a press release describing what Toyota was doing to remediate…
Mary F. McDonald
In one scene from the movie “Precious,” we see the main character, Clarisse Precious Jones, getting ready for school in the morning. We see this obese African American teen put on a red headband—but looking in the mirror, we see the red headband on a pretty, thin blonde teen. She picks up and puts…
Almost two years ago, the management team of the Indiana Toll Road (ITR Concession Co. LLC) and the Chicago Skyway Bridge (Skyway Concession Co. LLC) decided that implementing a quality management system compliant with ISO 9001 would be a useful tool for driving continual improvement. The shared…
Akhilesh Gulati
Business owners get so engrossed in running their businesses that they get into a rut and wonder why they are not able to lower their “handicaps.”
Learning to lower one’s golf scores can be quite a challenging task. For most handicap players the short game presents the best opportunity to…
R. Eric Reidenbach Ph.D.
Quality Digest Daily recently published the results of a survey of 415 manufacturers and 179 retailers that was “designed to identify the top business and supply chain issues, as well as how manufacturers and retailers expect to leverage IT resources to address those objectives and challenges…
Mike Micklewright
O
K, so I used this title as an attention grabber. I’m sure that I’ve already upset some people with this title and they will proclaim to never read my column or newsletter again… at least until the next edition. You should know me by now. When I want to make a point I sometimes get a little…
Kimber Evans
C
ontinuous quality improvement is something from which any company can benefit. Here at Quality Digest, we are just as much at risk of getting caught in the same-old, same-old as the next guy. However, in the past 18 months, we have taken great strides to bring new and innovative products and…
Steven Ouellette
We have recently covered a lot of ground on the topic of measurement system analysis (MSA). We talked about the basics of MSA, the potential study, the short-term study, and the long-term study. At this point you should have a pretty firm foundation in the importance and methods of good MSA…
Bill Kalmar
T
hose of us who are senior citizens (or as we are sometimes called, those in the autumn of our years) have seen a lot of changes in the world. If you took a snapshot right now of what is in your home, your automobile, or what you can purchase in various stores, it’s easy to quickly realize…
Oriel STAT A MATRIX
In recent years, there have been published reports of an increase in Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspectional observations associated with training deficiencies. Specifically, these inspectional observations have focused on training related to the quality system requirement that…
Michelle LaBrosse
There’s a lot of talk about ROI, the infamous return on investment. But the question is, “How can you personally generate ROI in your own life?”
The first step is to expand your concept of what capital is. It is not just a financial term.
There are five kinds of capital:
Financial…
Donald J. Wheeler
Having an effective model for the nature of data will inevitably identify two different paths to process improvement. One path seeks to operate a process up to its full potential while the other path seeks to operate to meet requirements. This article explains how these two paths differ and how…
NIST
The following is a profile of one of the 2009 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Winners. The Baldrige Award is the nation’s highest award for quality and is administered by the Department of Commerce through the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
AtlantiCare, a nonprofit…
William A. Levinson
The airline industry’s complete disregard for service quality and total contempt for its customers has changed little since Quality Digest columnist H. James Harrington called out American Airlines for diverting his luggage on an international flight. American Airlines’ CEO, Gerard Arpey,…
Donald J. Wheeler
Having an effective model for the nature of data will inevitably identify two different paths to process improvement. One path seeks to operate a process up to its full potential while the other path seeks to operate to meet requirements. This article explains how these two paths differ and how…
