All Features
Stewart Anderson
I am often struck by a remark of W. Edwards Deming that the aim of a system must include plans for the future. As Deming wrote in The New Economics, “A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system. The aim must include…
Raissa Carey
It took Gutzon Borglum 14 years to complete the carving of Mount Rushmore, one of the world’s most iconic monuments. Sixty-nine years later, thanks to ground-breaking 3-D laser scanning technology, the granite sculpture of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and…
(Academy Leadership Publishing: King of Prussia, PA) -- When news headlines trumpet story after story about fiscal mismanagement, unchecked greed, massive bankruptcies, and rampant downsizing, it’s hard to believe there’s any good news about the business world. Indeed, it’s almost impossible not…
In the classic Aesop fable, “The Fox and the Grapes,” a fox desires some grapes hanging high overhead. When he is unable to come up with a way to reach them, he convinces himself that the grapes are probably sour and therefore not desirable anyway. “Sour grapes” has become an idiomatic expression…
R. Eric Reidenbach Ph.D.
Successful quality initiatives are based on understanding the true nature of “quality.” It resides in the minds of those who judge it and use it to make their purchase decisions—in other words, the market. Divorced from the market, quality or value has no real meaning. Uninformed definitions of…
Some things never cease to amaze. We are meeting with the executive committee of a major global company, and we have just asked if innovation is one of their top strategic priorities. Their unanimous answer is “yes.” We then ask about their individual responsibilities. “Which one of you is the CFO…
Davis Balestracci
Customer satisfaction data resulting in various quality indexes abound. The airline industry is particularly watched. The April 10 Quality Digest Daily had an article with the title "Study: Airline Performance Improves" and the subtitle "Better on-time performance, baggage handling, and customer…
Paul Leavoy
If analysts are correct, the recent economic downturn may be slowing and even changing direction. The recession's effect on operations, however, has barely begun to manifest. Training budgets are typically the hardest hit when economic times are tough or corporate purse strings are pulled more…
Tony Shaw
A woman in Southern California’s Inland Empire, age 53, is suffering from an unidentified neurological disorder. It started as an odd numbness in her left arm, and now she feels an uncomfortable, persistent tingling and prickling pain from the bottom of her feet to the top of her eyebrows. She…
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…
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…
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…
