All Features
GKS Global Services
A company based in the U.S. Southwest makes innovative optics for racing cars and other extreme vehicles. Recently the owners, who grew up in Southern California’s skateboard culture, came up with a new product idea for a kick scooter, mainly for kids, based on the design of a skateboard. The…
Chet Marchwinski
I’ve now been continuously thinking about lean for 30 years, since the fall of 1979 when my bosses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) asked me to explore how a few Japanese companies had developed a striking advantage in designing and making motor vehicles. Recently, I’ve found…
Stewart Anderson
Recently, here in Canada, there has been a lot of talk about the need to increase productivity within Canadian businesses. Canada has consistently lagged behind other developed nations in productivity. According to 2009 data from the Conference Board of Canada, the country gets a “C” grade, and…
Rick Johnson Ph.D.
Jim Collins, author of Good to Great (Harper Business, 2001), has said that “Good is often the enemy of great.” That may be true, but I also believe that good is often good enough, and too much focus on greatness can be the enemy of good. Most of us would be happy with good performance, a good…
Jon Miller
These days, there must be people at Toyota waking up in a cold sweat from dreams in which they are being scolded by Taiichi Ohno, furious at the massive vehicle recalls caused ostensibly by the pursuit of scale and volume production at the expense of quality. At least I sincerely hope this is the…
Bill Kalmar
In the last several months, a new reality TV program entitled “Undercover Boss” has surfaced. The premise is that a CEO or top executive of a company travels to a store or factory of the company where the senior manager pretends to be an entry-level employee. To explain the presence of cameras,…
Donald J. Wheeler
Courses in statistics generally emphasize the problem of inference. In my December column, “The Four Questions of Data Analysis,” I defined this problem in the following manner:
Given a single unknown universe, and a sample drawn from that universe, how can we describe the properties of that…
Direct Dimensions Inc.
In 2009, Direct Dimensions Inc. was approached by Texas A&M University’s Flight Research Laboratory (FRL) with a challenging yet typical 3-D problem. The FRL, while primarily an active teaching facility, also offers both flight and wind tunnel test services. This particular project was for a…
Anantha Kollengode
T
he check sheet is a simple and effective tool useful in lean Six Sigma projects. It is sometimes referred to as a concentration diagram or location plot. It is a handy tool for qualitative and quantitative data gathering and analysis. Check sheets help to systematically collect and organize…
Paul Leavoy
Courtesy of another controversy surrounding hazardous substances in children’s toys, China’s massive manufacturing sector is reliving a public relations disaster.
Four years ago, a nationwide recall on children’s toys containing lead paint—and manufactured in China—cast a pall on the integrity…
Rip Stauffer
It’s better to measure things when we can; that’s been well-established in the quality literature over the years. The use of go/no-go gauges will always provide much less information for improvement than measuring the pieces themselves. However, we don’t always have the luxury of using continuous…
Thomas R. Cutler
Supply chain organizations face significant pressures resulting from global competition, shorter product life cycles, and lean economic conditions. The escalating requirements of large customers create painful challenges for those companies still tied to conventional supply-chain processes.
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Imagine an automobile owner who goes to the service desk at the dealership and reports a problem, describing the symptoms in detail to the customer service representative. If the service desk employee sees the same or similar symptoms in the dealer’s or manufacturer’s database, she knows what to…
Imagine an automobile owner who goes to the service desk at the dealership and reports a problem, describing the symptoms in detail to the customer service representative. If the service desk employee sees the same or similar symptoms in the dealer’s or manufacturer’s database, she knows what to…
Jim Benson
Making mochi naturally in Ecotopia.
Noticing waste serves no purpose. Understanding it does. Whether we seek to manage waste or attempt to eliminate it entirely, we need to know how much of it exists and what form it takes—what is its volume, its shape,…
Paul Scicchitano
There’s an important tool for quality professionals that you may have overlooked in your effort to retain customers in this difficult economy. And unlike Six Sigma, ISO 9001 or 9004, lean, and total quality management (TQM), this tool won’t cost you anything.
“Imagine you are a customer. You’…
Consider the most fundamental of measurements: the measurement of physical distances, as when we use feet and yards, or meters. Once upon a time, a foot must have been thought of as the size of, well, a human foot, without worrying whose foot exactly. These days, we are no longer satisfied with…
Mike Richman
If you’re like me, the point at which “work” most closely approximates “play” is when you get to fire up the right side of your brain and do some out-of-the-box thinking about new projects. What’s exciting, I find, is the opportunity to build something from scratch that has the potential to carry…
Jeff Liker
I recently spoke to an executive from a Canadian manufacturing company that supplies Toyota and has several years of experience implementing the Toyota Production System (TPS). He said his biggest disappointment was that their corporate culture still doesn’t support surfacing problems. People are…
Leslie Parady
Despite double-digit unemployment, advanced manufacturing firms are still searching for highly skilled people to fill open positions. Critical skills are scarce and about to become much scarcer as the skills gap grows and the “Baby Boomers” retire.
Manufacturing is one of four industries…
Tripp Babbitt
Springtime. Birds, sun, warmer weather, and a chance to get the “Z” out for a spin. I drove it at every opportunity during this winter, of which there weren't many (rough winter). As I sat in the cockpit of my machine and turned the key in the ignition, I heard an unfamiliar click and dying of…
Arizona MEP
Vantage Mobility International (VMI) is well on its way to achieving its goal: to become the No. 1 provider of personal mobility transportation solutions by the end of 2010.
“We’re transforming our business from soup to nuts,” says Doug Eaton, president and CEO of VMI. “Our company is growing…
Steven Ouellette
A
hh, measurement system analysis—the basis for all our jobs because, as Lord Kelvin said, “… When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.” How interesting it is then, that we who thrive on data so frequently don't…
Environmental Quality Corner with Ken Appel
No quality control system is perfect. Just think “Toyota” in the context of today’s headlines and that should be abundantly clear.
Taking Toyota’s predicament to heart—for any quality manager in any industry—means thinking through where the inherent weaknesses are in production processes and…
Jon Miller
A recent problem-solving team activity made me aware of the importance of knowing when to shift the conversation from “why?” to “how?” To be honest, it’s sometimes hard to know where to draw the line in the “5 Whys” analysis, especially when the root cause approaches the murky territory of human…
