All Features
Davis Balestracci
“When I die, let it be in a meeting. The transition from life to death will be barely perceptible.” —Anonymous
Today I’m going to share some ideas from an always-thoughtful newsletter written by Steve Harden of LifeWings—a company of pilots who use aviation ideas to create cultures of safety in…
Lois Kelly
I’ve been fantasizing about going on a road trip next summer to Alberta to experience the majestic Canadian Rockies. While browsing possible itineraries, I keep noticing this advice: “Leave the beaten path and take the alternative route of....”
If you’re trying to get new ideas considered at…
ISO
A meaningful, systematic approach to environmental management has made IBM one of the world’s most environmentally conscious companies. The globally integrated IT company leverages ISO 14001 for a comprehensive corporate policy on environmental affairs.
In a recent interview for ISOfocus,…
Mary McAtee
Businesses come and go. Even Fortune 500 companies get in trouble. There is at least one organization, however, that is setting a high bar for others. Do you know which one?
Let me pose these questions: • What U.S. company is celebrating their centennial anniversary this year? • What company is…
Brian Maskell
Companies that are seriously pursuing the lean journey soon find their accounting, control, and measurement systems need to change to support the new strategy. The principles and methods of lean thinking and practice are quite different from traditional business and therefore require different…
Mark Rosenthal
Improvement kata describes a routine for continuous improvement through four major steps. Those steps provide a structured pattern to enable consistent practice of each kata routine until it becomes habit—until it’s a natural way of thinking and acting. This change in behavior makes it easier…
Capture 3D
To reduce weight and fuel consumption, the aerospace industry increasingly relies on lightweight materials and new material combinations. That’s why the entire fuselage of the Airbus A350 XWB consists of carbon fiber composite (CFC) materials. In total, the long-haul aircraft reaches a CFC portion…
Rina Molari-Korgel
What a busy year for the Coordinate Metrology Society (CMS). To get you updated, I will need to throw a lot of numbers and dates your way. Here we go!
The 2015 Coordinate Metrology Society Conference (CMSC) in Hollywood, Florida, was a great success. Forty-five exhibitors and a newly expanded…
In aerospace vehicle manufacturing and assembly, including that at Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, measurements of composite part thickness are required for ensuring that underlying processes are within tolerance, and for achieving outer-mold line-control surface requirements.
This article…
Belinda Jones
This past summer, the Coordinate Metrology Society (CMS) and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte were awarded an Advanced Manufacturing Technology Consortia (AMTech) grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department.…
Dawn Bailey
I heard the example that best helped me understand work systems and supply chains at a Baldrige training event right after the very sad 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. A colleague was talking about automakers in the United States and elsewhere whose suppliers were located in the devastated…
Timothy Lozier
Compliance is a broad term. It can mean compliance to financial obligations, quality and safety, or general compliance to any regulation that is driving the organization. When you look at the current state of quality management and safety management with respect to compliance, most of the…
Mark Whitworth
Layered Process Audits (LPAs) offer companies tremendous potential benefits, but they’re also more involved than other audits. They task all of a plant’s personnel - including multiple levels of management—and cover all key areas at varying intervals. Creating an LPA system that is truly effective…
Kevin Meyer
“If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.” —Thomas Merton, Love and Living
Sometimes there are dots just waiting to be connected....
I was rather surprised when Pope Francis mentioned Thomas…
Craig Cochran
ISO 9001:2015 does a lot of things right, but using clear language isn’t one of them.
One of the most glaring examples is the transformation of the word “records” into “retained documented information.” That's right, the standard’s updaters took one word and turned it into three. And the three…
Michael Causey
A new FDA guidance calls on the medical device community to be more proactive when it comes to developing a solid set of cybersecurity controls to ensure safety and efficacy for users.
However, the agency isn’t putting the entire onus on medical device manufacturers. The FDA “recognizes that…
Harry Hertz
Business schools today have a renewed emphasis on teaching leadership. Dawn Bailey explored this topic in a recent Blogrige post. One of the principles behind this shift, she explained, is intended to cause a deep dive into values. And values-centered leadership is, in my opinion, a critical…
Thermal chambers have found a place in the psyche of test, quality, and production engineers—and for good reason. Chambers have been a staple for testing and conditioning materials and electronics for many decades.
First developed as passive conditioning tools, chambers have become standard fare…
Sonal Sinha
In a recent poll, employees (22.9%) were identified as the top source of supply chain fraud risk, followed by vendors (17.4%) and other third parties (20.1%), including subcontractors and their vendors. In calling new attention to the old cliché of “an inside job,” the statistics may prove to be…
Douglas C. Fair
Sponsored Content
Statistical process control (SPC) software has been around for decades, used by manufacturers across industries to help monitor process behavior and control quality on the shop floor. Like any technology, the software has evolved over the years into something much more than a…
Fred Schenkelberg
Why do so many avoid confronting the reality of failure? In plant asset management, we are surrounded by people who steadfastly don’t want to know about nor talk about failures. Yet failure does happen; let’s not ignore this simple fact.
The blame game
Unlike a murder mystery, failure analysis (…
Michelle LaBrosse
In past articles, we’ve written on the value of project management professional (PMP) certification for helping you advance in your career and earn a higher salary. (Yep, it’s still true that project managers who hold the PMP certification earn, on average, 17 percent a year more than project…
Randall D’Amico
Sponsored Content
Relationships between an organization and its suppliers have traditionally been characterized by adversarial activities and posturing in which at least one, and often both, parties lose. Rather than working together to find ways to create a win-win outcome, buyers use their…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
How do you help leaders understand they need to delegate? I often hear this question, and it was the focus of a recent letter I received.
“Hello Jesse: What have you found are the most effective ways to engage business owners in the need to delegate? Are there particular pain points that make…
Arun Hariharan
When I visited one of the world’s most advanced car manufacturing plants at Toyota City, Japan, one of the many things about the manufacturing process that struck me as remarkable was that from start to finish, whether molding steel sheets into body parts or fitting those various parts together,…
