All Features
Donald J. Wheeler
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n the past there was only one criterion required to be a good supplier: you had to ship very few nonconforming items. If your proportion of nonconforming items took a turn for the worse then you would be “in trouble,” and you would stay in trouble until your fraction nonconforming dropped…
Jack Healy
Recently released labor market, manufacturing, and consumer data indicate an economy steadily emerging from the long recession. One of the most gratifying indications of this change was the Associated Industries of Massachusetts Business Confidence index showing a continued gain of 1.8 points in…
Georgia Institute of Technology
(Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute: Atlanta) -- Debbie Guzman, laboratory director at Athens Regional Medical Center, says that implementing lean principles in a health care setting is especially challenging. Traditionally used in manufacturing, lean refers to an operational strategy…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
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ix Sigma and lean provide tools for process improvement. Most of today’s business improvement programs can trace their roots back to a lean or a Six Sigma heritage. In general, these process improvement methodologies are considered advances from total quality management (TQM) and other methods…
Rickard Lindhé
ABB of Västerås, Sweden, is a pioneer among world industrial robot manufacturers when it comes to using laser-based measuring technology to ensure robot precision. ABB, with an installed base of 125,000 robots, stands out as the world’s largest in the arena of industrial automation. And Leica…
Bill Kalmar
In ice hockey parlance a hat trick is when a player scores three goals in a single game. A perfect hat trick is when a player scores three goals in succession—a rare feat. But of course being from Detroit, the home of our renowned Red Wings, we are accustomed to these feats of talent.
A hotel…
Metris
As Europe sets ambitious targets for energy that is clean and inexhaustible, wind energy is predicted to meet approximately 25 percent of Europe’s power demand within 25 years. Today’s wind turbines measure 70–150 meters and feature bladed rotor diameters of 100 meters or more, translating into a…
When I started Productivity Inc. Press in 1979, quality of work life (QWL) was a very popular symbol for American unionism. Unions wanted workers to have a quality of work life, however, I don’t believe they understood what quality of work life really meant. The unions wanted workers to have a…
Mike Micklewright
In one of my recent Quality Digest published articles, “Why Root Cause Analysis Sucks in America,” I provided a list of 10 reasons why root cause analysis (RCA) in the United States is so awful. Number 2 on the list of 10 is: 2. We don’t practice it at home. Why should we do it at work?
More…
National Committee for Quality Assurance
(NCQA: Washington) -- “The State of Health Care Quality 2009,” an annual report, now in its 13th year, provided by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), finds that the quality of U.S. health care was virtually stagnant in 2008, a disturbing slowdown after a decade of improvements.…
Dave Maxham
A joint project of NCMS called Volumetric Accuracy for Large Machine Tools (VALMT), partnering Automated Precision, Boeing, Siemens and Mag Cincinnati, has pioneered an innovative process and established new methodology in volumetric error compensation for large machine tools. Volumetric error…
Michelle LaBrosse
A couple of years ago, I was featured on CNN pouring out the contents of my backpack. The story was about how I ran my business, virtually, from wherever I was with the trusty items carried on my back.
As you might imagine, there were all the usual suspects: my laptop, iPhone, digital camera,…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
The financials of an enterprise are a result of the integration and interaction of its processes, not of individual procedures in isolation. Using a whole-system perspective, one realizes that the output of a system is a function of its weakest link or constraint. If you're not careful, you can be…
Jay Arthur—The KnowWare Man
At the 2009 National Association for Healthcare Quality conference, I gave a speech on lean Six Sigma simplified. At the end of the session, one of the attendees asked, "If Six Sigma is so easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?" My answer: Because we’ve made it too complicated, expensive, and hard…
Jim Jubelirer
Story update 10/23/2009: The link to the prerecorded webinar mentioned at the end of the article has been corrected.
The U.S. economy runs on service. From front-line service in transactional industries such as retail, banking, hospitality and food service, to technical support for high-tech…
Joe Calloway
The Acme Widget Co. needed to increase revenue and profits, so they undertook an initiative to attract new customers: They launched a new advertising campaign and offered special deals to first-time buyers. They were initially delighted to see a significant and immediate increase in new customers…
Paul Scicchitano
There’s one class trip that stands out in my mind to this day. It wasn’t so much the thrill of missing a day in our suburban Philadelphia all-boys school—although that was definitely high on my list for wanting to visit Pennsylvania’s state capital in the first place.
No, it was really the…
Steve Arbogast
A quality management system is a framework of processes and procedures that are used to ensure that an organization can fulfill all tasks required to achieve its goals, strategies, and objectives.
The majority of businesses around the world have some sort of well-defined quality management…
Stewart Anderson
Story update 10/22/2009: We added a reference to Toyota Kata in the first paragraph.
The tools and techniques of what is commonly called “lean manufacturing” have their origin in the Toyota Production System (TPS). While the lean movement deserves much credit for popularizing these tools and…
Miriam Boudreaux
When you think about equipment that is used for measuring and test activities, you think about important equipment that is used to pass or fail product but may not necessarily see its correlation with a supply chain. However, this very equipment—whether it is calibrated in-house or off-site—does…
Ten years after the Institute of Medicine released its influential report "To Err Is Human" (www.iom.edu/en/Reports/1999/To-Err-is-Human-Building-A-Safer-Health-System.aspx), hospital care still has many safety problems, and the quality of care remains lower than it should be in many institutions…
Steven Ouellette
I'm not saying that the following apply to you... really. But, you might be a Black Belt if...
You test your co-workers for normality – and find some of them to be non-normal and a little skewed…
…and you know you can handle non-normal co-workers if you can just transform them
You recall…
Akhilesh Gulati
Isn't it the economy that's on everyone's minds? When will the economy pick up? Will we be able to survive until then or will we too become another company that used to exist? How do we ensure a stronger position when the economy turns around?
Alas, if only we had a crystal ball. Nobody does,…
Maribeth Kuzmeski
It happens to the best of us. An upset client calls to complain about a product or service, and you’re completely caught off guard. How do you react? Do you fly off the handle right along with him? Or do you respond in a calm, thoughtful way that salvages and even strengthens your relationship? A…
Forrest Breyfogle—New Paradigms
The balanced scorecard is a commonly used vehicle that is to align organizational-chart work efforts to executive-determined strategies and goals. With this approach, strategic planning could be considered as step one in this overall business-management-system process.
Consider now the true…
