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Carly Barry
I had the opportunity to speak with a great group of students from the New Jersey Governor’s School of Engineering and Technology—a summer program for high-achieving high school students. Students in the program complete a set of challenging courses while working in small groups on real-world…
Matthew E. May
“Business and human endeavors are systems... we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never get solved.”—Peter Senge
Senge had it right. I have never, ever seen a systemic issue truly resolved with an isolated, tactical solution. Every year…
Annette Franz
It was Mark Twain who said, “Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.” This has become my favorite saying, both with regards to customer experience and to life in general.
I’ve used this quote recently with my kids, and it's an important code to live by. It speaks to honesty,…
Harry Hertz
The results are in for the annual Best Places to Work in the Federal Government. The overall survey results are not surprising based on history, the current environment, and where many organizations—both government and business—have been challenged during recent years in the area of workforce…
Michael Rapaport
Editor’s note: Here’s part one.
Sound quality management systems touch every level of your organization, from conception to post-market monitoring. Not surprisingly, manufacturing operations management (MOM) systems benefit from quality management system (QMS) integration. In an ideal scenario,…
Michael Causey
Let’s start with what most everyone agrees on: The Unique Device Identification (UDI) program is a swell idea. It gets a little trickier after that.
In extensive comments, the Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), Boston Scientific, and Merck, among more than a dozen other…
Mike Figliuolo
Leadership is inherently about communication. Your ability to communicate well with your team, your boss, your co-workers, and anyone else around you can make or break your career as a leader.
Given the importance we place on communications, it always helps to have a few tools and techniques that…
Christine Schaefer
A few months ago, my family received a personal reminder of the importance of quality in the skilled-nursing profession. It was delivered as my elderly father was transitioning from a hospital to a nursing home.
With the advancement of his dementia and a few other vexing conditions, my father’s…
Michael Rapaport
In all likelihood, your company has already encountered difficulties harmonizing quality management systems (QMS) with product life cycle management (PLM) systems. Synergies between engineering, manufacturing, supply chain management, and service will not materialize on their own—even in a closed-…
Umberto Tunesi
Editor’s note: Read part one here.
Both management system consultants and auditors face a dilemma when they analyze, at least technically, companies’ organizational charts. It’s not only in small or medium-size companies that managers wear more than one hat, making it difficult for auditors to…
Davis Balestracci
Twenty-five years ago, I learned a wonderfully simple model summarizing the four stages of a change process, whether personal or organizational.
• Awareness • Breakthrough in knowledge • Choosing a breakthrough in thinking • Demonstrating a consistent breakthrough in behavior
Here’s the point:…
Dennis Payton
Some of the shortest descriptions in the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) CFR 21 Part 820—“Quality System Regulation” are found in Section 820.30 and Section 820.40, totaling about a page of information about design and document controls. However short, these two sections outline some of the…
Arun Hariharan
Experience teaches us that most quality problems can be preempted, or at least prevented from recurring, if you make it a habit to ask seven simple questions: what, where, who, how much, when, why, and how.
What: Ask what are you trying to achieve, or what is the desired outcome (of your business…
Jack Dunigan
Ours was a great idea. As residents and business owners in the Caribbean, we had identified a niche market and determined to fill it. We formed a business partnership for a small manufacturing company. For a short time it went OK. Then we processed our first large order and delivered the product…
Elizabeth Gasiorowski Denis
Among the hardships faced today by many workers are families and communities linked to a declining number of good jobs, dwindling incomes, and the soaring cost of living. Many families are existing in a state of almost constant financial stress. Way too many parents are spending way too many…
Tim Lozier
When it comes to quality management, there is a set of tools often used for managing common business processes, regardless of industry. Chances are you’re already familiar with how processes such as document control, audits, and corrective action work. The issue facing many companies isn’t how to…
Dave K. Banerjea
When we think about gauge calibration management, we usually think of the actual calibration process: sending the gauge to the calibration lab, comparing it to a traceable measurement standard, making changes to the gauge to bring it into the calibration range, entering the calibration results…
Dawn Bailey
Senior leaders often ask, “How will my investment in a criteria/award program impact my company’s bottom line?” This is a polite way of phrasing what they’re really thinking, which is, “What’s in it for my organization?”
For senior leaders in the home-building industry who have invested in the…
Phil Coy
Every part every interval (EPEI) is my favorite lean metric for high mix/low volume (HMLV) value streams, and it’s probably the least known. It’s especially helpful when changeovers are a significant portion of capacity, as frequently is the case with machine-oriented operations.
I want to share…
Jack Dunigan
I should have kept a running tally, but I didn’t. During 40 years of training and consulting, I’ve worked with a great number of leaders and managers at all levels, from team leaders up to corporate heads. I usually began by asking what should be a simple question: What is your vision for this…
Tom Kadala
With 90 percent of the world’s data created during the last two years, what can we expect our data vaults to hold two or even 20 years from now? Today we measure our lives in peta-bytes, but by 2020 estimates show a 2,300-percent increase in the bits and bytes that will define our lives.
How then…
Quality Transformation With David Schwinn
After Nelson Mandela’s death, I asked my students how Mandela’s life might inform our views of management and leadership. They were not very forthcoming with responses, and I asked them why this would be. As you can imagine, many of them are much younger than I. They responded that they had heard…
Alan Nicol
My wife coined the phrase “headless chicken leading the blind” last week to describe the phenomenon of her organization experiencing a bit of a crisis. It’s a common enough situation that we all feel familiar with it.
Something goes wrong that affects most or all of the business, and suddenly…
MIT News
MIT engineers have devised a way to measure the mass of particles with a resolution better than an attogram—one millionth of a trillionth of a gram. Weighing these tiny particles, including both synthetic nanoparticles and biological components of cells, could help researchers better understand…
Kevin Meyer
Once again I have the privilege to be part of Curious Cat’s annual management improvement blog review and will be taking a look back at three of my favorite blogs.
TimeBack by Dan Markovitz
Dan has become one of my favorite bloggers, and a good friend, by showing how lean can be applied to personal…
