All Features
Taran March @ Quality Digest
So it seems the contentious wall along our southern border, variously known as the Trump wall or the Mexico-United States barrier, isn’t meeting requirements. Walls keep people in; walls keep people out. They serve as backdrops for graffiti. But aside from fulfilling the last item, this wall might…
Richard Ruiz
According to the Deloitte Automotive Quality 2020 report, auto manufacturers spend an average of 116 days annually on quality management system (QMS) compliance.
Layered process audits (LPAs), which can number more than a thousand audits per year, can take up many of those hours for companies that…
Ryan E. Day
Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Dimensional Engineering was born on the back of a dream, a major contract from an aircraft manufacturer, and a process developed specifically to fulfill that project. Dimensional Engineering has steadily grown to become a full-service team of consulting and field…
NIST
Just as a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, the deformations and fractures that cause catastrophic failure in materials begin with a few molecules torn out of place. This in turn leads to a cascade of damage at increasingly larger scales, culminating in total mechanical breakdown.…
Bruce Hamilton
After being recognized in 1990 by the Shingo Prize, my plant became an overnight hot spot for benchmarking. Hardly a week went by when there was not a visit from a distinguished visitor, Fortune 500 company, professional organization, or college class. Initially, we accepted the visits because of…
Janelle Farkas
According to the International Institute for Analytics, businesses that use data will gain $430 billion in productivity benefits over competitors who aren’t using data by 2020. As an industrial engineer for the Northeastern Pennsylvania Industrial Resource Center, part of the MEP National Network,…
Theodoros Evgeniou
It seems that every week, AI technology has learned to do something humans do, but faster and better. From detecting cancers and eye conditions to predicting floods; or analyzing the language, tone, and facial expressions of candidates during recruitment processes, AI is now at the stage where it…
Mike Figliuolo
Driving a strong business starts with the people who work for your business, and those people align with the business through the company culture. How are you shaping yours?
A high-performing culture is one where people drive performance because of the right behaviors. They’ve embedded these…
Frances Brunelle
Just as baby boomers on the manufacturing plant floor are getting ready to retire, so are the owners. More than 5,000 small manufacturing operations (with annual revenues between $2 and $20 million) will either close their doors or find new owners during the next five years.
Some of these owners…
Mark Rosenthal
I was sitting in on a conversation between a continuous improvement manager and the operations manager the other day.
The operations manager was asking for help developing good leader standard work.
The C.I. manager was responding that she had already developed it for the value stream manager and…
Michael Fagan
Technology is supposed to help us, but sometimes it feels like for every step forward, we take two steps back. Like many people (and despite my resistance), my family has accumulated a few internet of things (IoT) devices in our home. Our motivation for acquiring them has been to streamline our…
Martin Abel
Imagine that your boss Ethan calls you into his office. He expresses disappointment in your recent performance and lack of commitment. How would you react? Accept the feedback and put in more effort? Would you pout in your office and start looking for a new job?
Now, would your reaction be…
David Moser
Technology companies are frequently driven by their engineering processes. Of course product quality is regarded as most important, and that quality can be tested and measured with numbers and data. Such companies also frequently align their core identity with the engineering that belies their…
Paul Laughlin
What tools should data analysts have in their toolbox? It’s a broad question and one with diverging views. So, I am delighted to welcome back a guest blogger who doesn’t shy away from controversy.
Martin Squires is a very experienced znalytics leader, whom I’ve previously interviewed in our audio…
Donald J. Wheeler
In the past two months we have looked at how three-sigma limits work with skewed data. This column finds the power functions for the probability limits of phase two charts with skewed probability models, and compares the trade-offs made by three-sigma limits with the trade-offs made by the…
Steven Brand
If you remember the woodworking, metalworking, and auto shop classes that used to be taught in high school, you already have an idea of what a makerspace is. Makerspaces, sometimes called Maker Labs, are defined as “a place in which people with shared interests can gather to work on projects while…
Jody Muelaner
One of the key ideas in lean manufacturing is that defects should be detected as early as possible. Efforts to control manufacturing processes, so that issues can be detected before defects occur, actually predate lean. Statistical process control (SPC) is a set of methods first created by Walter A…
Kendall Powell, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
When my kids, ages 11 and 8, bang through the back door after school, often the first thing out of their mouths is: “Mom! Can we play Prodigy?”
After a quick mental calculation of how much screen time they've already had for the week and…
Tom Comstock
How can industrial and manufacturing enterprises achieve better new product introduction (NPI), a critical element of operational excellence? Corporate goals of improving market share and revenue, maintaining competitive differentiators, and improving customer experiences are especially challenging…
Davis Balestracci
In 2006 I was at a presentation by a world leader in quality (WLQ) who has been singing W. Edwards Deming’s praises since the late 1980s and even does the famous red bead experiment as part of some of his plenaries.
He presented the following bar graph showing a comparison of the sum of rankings…
Joseph Paris
A few years ago, I was asked to conduct a workshop, deliver a keynote, and chair a three-day conference on manufacturing process excellence in Europe, produced by the Process Excellence Network (PEX), a division of IQPC. Although that was a lot to ask of me, the lineup of speakers and content was…
Derek Benson
As a quality professional, you’ve probably heard the famous quote from W. Edwards Deming, “In God we trust; all others bring data.” Thanks to technological advancements in our industry, data exist more abundantly than ever. This presents a new challenge for those tasked with extracting and…
Bill Snyder
In 1500, China’s economy was the strongest in the world. But by the 19th century, the United States, Western Europe, and Japan had leapfrogged over China by churning out goods and services in vast quantities while the former superpower stalled.
Why? Some economists argue that China’s lack of free…
Anthony D. Burns
You’ve set aside Sunday afternoon to bake some cookies, but you discover you have run out of eggs. Your partner in marital bliss has gone out and taken the car. You call a couple of mates, and they tell you to try bananas, vegetable oil, or applesauce as egg substitutes. You decide to have some fun…
Harish Jose
Today I’m looking at design from a cybernetics viewpoint. My inspirations come from cybernetics and design theorists Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Klaus Krippendorff, Paul Pangaro, and Ranulph Glanville. I was curious about how the interface of a device conveys the message to the user on how to…
