All Features
Kade Moody
Is the following statement true or false? The new revenue recognition standard will have only a minimal effect on my accounting practices and policies. I hope that statement is true for your organization, but I think for many healthcare systems, the answer is false.
If you have already started…
Andrew Maynard
In 2014, more than 32,000 people were killed in car crashes in the United States. In 2012, more than 2 million Americans visited the emergency room as a result of car crashes. An estimated 94 percent of the crashes that caused these injuries and fatalities are attributable to human choice or error…
Peter Bussey
Operational risk management (ORM) centers on environmental, health, and safety (EHS) risks that can cause accidents or incidents anywhere that work takes place, whether it’s a manufacturing plant, an offshore drilling platform, a mine, or a marine terminal. This article will discuss why and how…
Kevin Meyer
When many people go into the office, they start their day by chatting with some colleagues, checking their email, and surfing the net for a while. Then they start working on whatever project is due that day. Soon, however, they hear the sound of a new email arriving, which they promptly open,…
Sponsored Content
The new Geomagic Control X inspection product from 3D Systems offers a computer-aided design (CAD)-like interface and an improved workflow for Geomagic Control users. By including extended product manufacturing information support, users of popular CAD systems can now seamlessly…
Jeff Sanford
Since we at Humantech developed an entire software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering to help our clients streamline the ergonomics process, a recent article in the Harvard Business Review gave me the opportunity to reflect on how our clients successfully implement ergonomics from a process management…
Serguei Netessine
Big data is helping us learn much more about what drives sales in the digital environment. The traditional service sector, however, remains very much a “black box.” A physical sales environment, such as a clothing store or restaurant, is subject to even more intangible elements than e-commerce…
Thomas R. Cutler
Manufacturers’ waste-reduction initiatives are rarely as effective as they could be. When reducing waste, inventory is often the main target. But how do you right-size inventory in an environment of constant variability? In a word: kanban.
Electronic kanban signals keep product moving throughout…
Festo Didactic
Manufacturing in the United States and Canada is marked by negative stereotypes left behind from 1955. Repetitive and simplistic duties in grimy workplaces, without a chance to change or advance a career, are the images most people see when they imagine what it means to work in a factory. But, a…
GBMP
Ellis Medicine is a 438-bed community and teaching healthcare system serving New York’s capital region. With four main campuses, five additional service locations, more than 3,300 employees, and more than 700 medical staff, Ellis Medicine offers an extensive array of inpatient and outpatient…
NQA
For companies that are registered to more than one management system, integrating them makes a lot of sense. Combining your management systems provides greater benefit than running separate management systems in parallel. An integrated management system (IMS) can help reduce duplication and…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
I hate banks. I’ve hated them since I was a drifty teenager who had a volatile relationship with math and trouble coming up with the required documents proving my adultness. My first checking account had less to do with the paltry sum I owned than it did with running head-on into the vast and…
Paul Smith
It’s hard to turn the pages of any business or leadership magazine these days without coming across something about the value of storytelling. Whether it’s for leadership, marketing, sales, or some other purpose, the benefits of telling stories in business is well documented.
What’s more often…
Annette Franz
How are you getting to the root cause of any issue you or your customers are having? What types of root cause analyses are you conducting? Are you even thinking about root cause analysis?
Conducting some sort of root cause analysis (and there are many different types) any time you experience an…
Garry Oswald
If your company ships anything on a regular basis, you should know about freight invoice auditing. This is the method that shippers have used for 60 years to cut the costs charged by carriers and to make deliveries more efficiently to their end users.
Auditing does more than save on shipping…
Frank Armstrong
In manufacturing facilities many employees view the quality personnel as cops. “Their whole job is to come out and beat us up when processes don’t produce quality products,” they complain. “We can’t help it. Why are they always on our backs?”
There’s some truth to that mindset. If a process is…
Milan Kocic
Picture this: Your coordinate measuring machine (CMM) has crashed for the umpteenth time, and now it’s out of commission because you need to replace the probe head. Does this sound familiar? Across the world, manufacturers are facing the same problem: A situation occurs, you have to call the CMM’s…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
Over the years, I’ve beaten myself up over business breakdowns, lost relationships, and countless other failures. I would only look at what I’d done wrong and where I was at fault. And, of course, this would only make me feel worse.
People would tell me, “Rob, you need to love yourself.” Wow,…
Christine Schaefer
Every year a new cohort of Baldrige Executive Fellows gains intensive knowledge about leading organizations to excellence through cross-sector, peer-to-peer learning hosted at the sites of Baldrige Award recipients. Every Baldrige Fellow completes a capstone project as part of the executive…
Fred Schenkelberg
We establish reliability goals and measure reliability performance. Goals and measures can be related; however, they’re not the same, and neither do they serve the same purpose.
Recently, I’ve seen a few statements that seem to confuse the role of statistical confidence when establishing a goal.…
RED FLAG. This was the text I received from a woman I’d been mentoring for a year or so. She had recently been promoted to a senior management position in the software division of a large technology company. We had developed our own language for when she had a serious professional problem. Texting…
There was a time when manufacturers thought that “hot test”—a test at the end of the assembly line of a fully functional engine—was the only way to ensure that each unit had been assembled to perform as expected.
A lot has changed during the past 20 years. Manufacturers, from automotive to…
By 2020, research shows that the number of connected industrial devices will grow 285 percent from 2015. If you’re like some industrial leaders who feel the industrial internet of things (IIoT) is more hype than real, you’re taking a wait-and-see approach. But if you’re like many of the leaders we…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Summer with its balmy evenings and long talks with good friends, lemonades in hand, is over. Let’s set the groundwork for this new season and get our definitions in place, once again—the difference between visual and lean.
What is lean?
Technically speaking, lean is a predetermined set of…
Anthony Harris
The proliferation of Accountable Care Organizations (ACO), spurred by the healthcare industry’s shift from fee-for-service to pay-for-performance, has focused healthcare executives’ attention on clinical outcome metrics. Yet the greatest barriers—individual clinician practices—remain difficult to…
