All Features
Jon Miller
In a recent e-mail, a reader of my blog asked me, “How can we enhance top management commitment and involvement for implementing total productive maintenance (TPM)?”
This is a great general question to ask during any effort to establish excellence, maintain excellence, or transform excellence…
National Association for Healthcare Quality
The Toyota Production System and U.S. health care improvement share a long history. What lessons can health care leaders learn from Toyota’s recent production troubles? A few experts recently discussed this on WIHI, an audio program sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). Here…
Donald J. Wheeler
During the past 20 years it has become fashionable to condemn measurement processes that are less than perfect. Yet the reality is that we must always use imperfect data. Given this fact of life, how can we ever know if a measured item is or is not within the specifications? Put another way, how…
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…
(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…
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…
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…
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…
Steven Ouellette
We have recently covered a lot of ground on the topic of measurement system analysis (MSA). We talked about the basics of MSA, the potential study, the short-term study, and the long-term study. At this point you should have a pretty firm foundation in the importance and methods of good MSA…
Donald J. Wheeler
Having an effective model for the nature of data will inevitably identify two different paths to process improvement. One path seeks to operate a process up to its full potential while the other path seeks to operate to meet requirements. This article explains how these two paths differ and how…
Donald J. Wheeler
Having an effective model for the nature of data will inevitably identify two different paths to process improvement. One path seeks to operate a process up to its full potential while the other path seeks to operate to meet requirements. This article explains how these two paths differ and how…
Jon Miller
After every major natural disaster that disrupts global supply chains, there are voices that cry out “A-ha! I told you just-in-time inventory doesn’t work!” Recently the Icelandic volcano turned European skies airplane-free for a few days and news programs reported shortages of critical raw…
R. Eric Reidenbach Ph.D.
I just read an article that appeared on Quality Digest Daily, “The Quality Crisis in America,” by David C. Crosby. The gist of the article is that the nation is in the midst of a quality crisis that has been with us for a very long time. The problem, according to Crosby, “is that the ‘big boss’—…
Jeff Liker
The most stunning accomplishment of Toyota during the last 50 years is its turnaround from making “junk” to virtually redefining quality in the auto industry. Toyota was influenced to the core by W. Edwards Deming and quality is evident everywhere in the company. The objective of the Toyota…
Mark Kiemele Ph.D.
I
t is no secret that lean Six Sigma (LSS) and design for Six Sigma (DFSS) have arguably been the most effective initiatives for improving bottom line results and revenue growth since the advent of Frederick Taylor and management science. Billions of dollars in bottom-line impact have been…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Lean Six Sigma methodologies have been around since Henry Ford’s creation of the assembly line in the early 1900s. Yet, companies that turn to lean Six Sigma often find themselves defending against the stigma that it stifles creativity, turns people into robots, or is just another way to get more…
Greg Hutchins
Toyota is in the news daily for its safety-related recalls. It’s sad… no, tragic. How could a company’s quality reputation be diluted so quickly? The pundits are saying that it will take many years to regain its lost quality reputation.
For Toyota, its reputation was its most important asset—…
Jon Miller
I received pair of questions about lean logistics over the past few weeks that prompted this article. The questions were “What is the milk run method?” and “What is the role of the water spider?”
The milk run
The milk run is an example of time-fixed, quantity-variable replenishment of…
