All Features
Vaishali Gopi
Data, analytics, surveys, IoT, artificial intelligence, and automation are the leading buzzwords in retail and customer service. But what is the point of having all these data about our customers? The business implications can be overwhelming and never lead to anything meaningful.
However, for…
Miriam Boudreaux
If you are wondering whether your organization could benefit from formal root cause analysis (RCA) and corrective action training, read on to see if any of these issues are present in your day-to-day operations. RCA and corrective actions are some of the most useful tools for continual improvement…
Aaron Fox
If industrial manufacturing had a buzzword of the decade, it might be “Industry 4.0.” The concept is inescapable, yet it can be hard to define, especially for small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs). After all, SMMs’ capabilities, needs, and budgets look very different from the large companies…
Donald J. Wheeler
Lean production is built on the explicit assumption that each step is operated predictably and capably. Predictable operation can only be achieved and maintained by using process behavior charts. But short production runs make it hard to see how to use process behavior charts in a lean environment…
Penelope B. Prime
The United States and China have reportedly reached a so-called phase one deal in their ongoing trade war.
While few details have been disclosed, the agreement principally seems to involve the United States calling off a new round of tariffs that were slated to take effect on Dec. 15, 2019, and…
Nathan Furr
Few companies and CEOs have attracted as much praise, derision, skepticism, and enthusiasm as Telsa Motors and its founder Elon Musk. Having interviewed Musk and the Tesla leadership as part of my research, one of the questions I’m asked most frequently is: How can you make sense of Tesla’s wild…
Corey Brown
Many manufacturers see reducing changeover time as a golden opportunity to improve operational efficiency and reduce waste. For good reason, a simple reduction in changeover time can increase output, reduce inventory, reduce work in progress, and improve responsiveness to customer demand.
Yet, the…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
What a year.
No matter your job, your industry, or your political beliefs, this year has been a heck of a ride. The (still ongoing) trade war with China, manufacturing gains (and losses), the 737 MAX, Hong Kong riots, North Korea, Brexit, impeachment. What a mixed bag of ups and downs that has…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
’Tis that time of year, when the elves at QD set down their chisels, hammers, and stone slates for a week. We’ll be grinning in sweaters and clutching beverages somewhere, like the rest of you. Then we’ll be back, bright and early at the crack of January, to begin another year of reporting on all…
As usual with Quality Digest’s diverse audience, this year’s top stories covered a wide range of topics applicable to quality professionals. From hardware to software, from standards to risk management, from China trade to FDA regulations. It’s always fun to see what readers gravitate to, and this…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
Values are beliefs about what is fundamentally important. They affect your decision making and your behaviors, whether you are conscious of them or not. Your real values are reflected by your behavior, and if your espoused values are not consistent with your behavior, you will lose credibility and…
Jim Benson
When we look at a Personal Kanban, its simplicity belies its power. Visualizing our work as individuals, as teams, and even as teams of teams creates trust, reliability, and understanding. When we want to coordinate work, these are serious prerequisites.
The image below is from a construction…
Anat Amit-Eyal
Eric, a 40-something married father of three, runs a successful startup. Given his demanding career, he and his wife decided she would be a stay-at-home mum. Eric believed the attention he devoted to his family was adequate, and that he had fully harmonized his work as CEO and life as a family man…
Christy Lotz
After being an ergonomist for almost 15 years, I can honestly say I have never been more excited about the future of this field. When I first began working at Humantech and would do wall-to-wall assessments every week, I didn’t think I would last.
The pen and paper-based methods we used were often…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Some mistakes managers make at the start of a visual conversion are serious and hard to repair. For example, when managers decide to commandeer the task of implementing the visual where—or simply order it into existence. Either way, this is the damaging loss of an opportunity of inestimable value…
NIST
A new research effort at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) aims to address a pervasive issue in our data-driven society: a lack of fairness that sometimes turns up in the answers we get from information retrieval software.
A measurably “fair search” would not always return…
NVision Inc.
It roamed Texas long before the first dinosaurs. Growing to 12 ft in length, with powerful jaws and specialized teeth for stabbing and tearing apart its prey, it was not a creature you’d want to encounter while on a Saturday morning hike. “It” was Dimetrodon limbatus, and a fossilized skeleton of…
Andrea Canidio
The culture of overwork—with the expectation of incredibly long hours and interrupted vacations—is often criticized for its negative impact on workers and organizations. Workers suffer from burnout, are not as productive as they think they are, and make mistakes, as research has made overwhelmingly…
Michael Millenson
In late November 1999, a TV producer called me about an alarming report that 44,000 to 98,000 Americans were being killed each year by preventable errors in hospitals, and another 1 million were being injured. Could that be true? Based on my research, I replied, the estimate seemed low.
The “To…
Corey Brown
While on-the-job training is practical for certain applications, manufacturers rely on it too heavily as a method for onboarding and training employees.
Companies looking to train a new workforce should be aware that on-the-job training can: • Hurt productivity • Increase safety risks • Impact…
Nico Thomas
Earlier this year, the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, celebrated its 50th anniversary. The recognition is much deserved for an agency that has worked hard to strengthen minority-owned businesses. Through a network of centers and partners not…
Davis Balestracci
During the late 1970s, quality began to evolve from its historically Neanderthal, passive inspection approach to its current Cro-Magnon state, where its more proactive, project-based approach is bolted on to the operational status quo. Joseph Juran was a pioneer in such efforts. Various subsequent…
Clifton B. Parker
An underlying theme emerged from the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence’s fall conference: Artificial intelligence (AI) must be truly beneficial for humanity and not undermine people in a cold calculus of efficiency.
Titled “AI Ethics, Policy, and Governance,” the event…
Ryan E. Day
Headquartered in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Plasan North America (PNA) manufactures metal, composite, and ceramic-composite components for defense and commercial applications. PNA brings decades of process experience to bear in creating the world’s most advanced armor, metal components, and…
Gleb Tsipursky
When was the last time you as a quality professional saw a major failure in implementing decisions? What about in project or process management? Such disasters can have devastating consequences for high-flying careers and successful companies. Yet they happen all too often, with little effort taken…
