All Features
Tripp Babbitt
In my last column, “Deming’s Challenge to Us, Part 1,” I sounded the alert that just being improvement people is not enough, and waiting for management to do something is a poor strategy. In this column, I’m focusing on our choices and options to move forward as change agents.
For a couple of…
Akhilesh Gulati
Editor's note: This article continues the series exploring structured innovation using the TRIZ methodology, a problem-solving, analysis, and forecasting tool derived from studying patterns of invention found in global patent data.
Lessons about TRIZ learned at the monthly meetings of My Executive…
Tom Somodi
It’s astonishing how businesses and people are continually influenced by solution providers and consultants of change methodologies. These consultants somehow have the ability to convince others that if they want to obtain a desired change, then all they have to do is “execute this” or “buy into…
Thomas Abrams
You probably have seen many consumer advertisements for prescriptions drugs—on TV, in magazines, or online. Although those ads are expensive, did you know that in 2010, pharmaceutical companies actually spent more money advertising to healthcare professionals than they spent advertising to…
Matthew E. May
I get the question all the time, especially from organizations that have significant investment in some process improvement program—like a lean Six Sigma or lean kaizen initiative. (I hear the ghosts of Toyota engineers booing.) These companies have picked all the low-hanging fruit, squeezed as…
Knowledge at Wharton
Customers describe how they feel about companies and brands in profoundly personal ways. We hate our banks; we love our yoga pants. We can’t stand the cable company, but we consider our smartphone one of our very best friends.
How are we making these judgments? According to a new book titled, The…
Mary McAtee
It was the end of a long day. While sitting over dirty martinis with extra olives, my long-time colleague, Tisha Tomlinson, and I were discussing a situation and trying to plan a strategy that met the needs of all involved. We had spent the day with various quality and environmental, health, and…
Quality Digest
They say the world is getting smaller all the time. Tell that to your supply chain manager.
It’s something of a conundrum that as technologies allow companies to deal with suppliers farther and farther away (for cheaper labor and reduced costs) the opportunity for a logistics nightmare increases…
Patrick Runkel
Design of experiments (DOE) is an extremely practical and cost-effective way to study the effects of different factors and their interactions on a response.
But finding your way through DOE-land can be daunting when you’re just getting started. So I’ve enlisted the support of a friendly golden…
Grant Ramaley
Many of us have heard horror stories about ISO certificates that were fakes, or of medical-device quality system audits being performed by persons who were not competent. A recent report published by the European Commission found that two out of 11 notified bodies were performing so inadequately,…
NIST
When it comes to detectors for dangerous chemicals, toxins, or nefarious germs, smaller and faster is better. But size and speed must still allow for accuracy, especially when measurements by different instruments must give the same result.
The recent publication of a new standard—a culmination…
Arun Hariharan
In “Standardize to Improve, Part 1,” I talked about how to map or document business processes, which I illustrated through the story of Grandma Cakes, a cake-baking business that boomed from secret recipes in one kitchen to eight factories in several cities. In this second part of the article, let…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Frequently, Quality Digest Daily has reported that many of our manufacturing readers say there is a lack of skilled talent to fill technical positions. For our audience, this has typically been in the area of metrology, which involves not only specialized knowledge but also a lot of experience,…
Arun Hariharan
Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, once said, “Where there is no standard [process], there can be no kaizen [improvement].”
In an earlier column, I wrote about how we used the customer-output-process-input-supplier (COPIS) method, which is a customer-first or an outside-in…
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
With winter around the corner, some homeowners may be thinking about plugging all the leaks in their homes to make them less drafty. Imagine if every homeowner in the country did that: How much energy could be saved? Using physics-based modeling of the U.S. housing stock, researchers from Lawrence…
MIT News
‘It’s all about the process,” says MIT professor Warren Seering. He’s referring to his product design and development class (identified as Course 2.739), but he could easily be talking about product development itself.
“We want 2.739 students to leave with a set of methods readily available to…
Harry Hertz
I am an introvert; INTJ for those who admire Myers-Briggs indicators. I remember being particularly pleased a few years ago when I read a Harvard Business Review article that extolled the virtues of introverts as effective leaders. The article stated conventional wisdom and a decade of academic…
Mark Schmit
Toward the end of summer, I was part of an assembled mass of governors and manufacturers at a Walmart-led summit in Florida. My boss, the Secretary of Commerce (or most accurately, my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss) was there, too.
There we all were, attending a summit designed to revitalize,…
Jack Dunigan
I was working with a group of mixed-age volunteers to decide on the type of advertising they should use for their charity. Because broadcast media was one option, we needed to know the radio stations that typical users of their services would likely listen to. The target audience would most likely…
LRQA Business Assurance
As ISO/FDIS 55001—“Asset management—Management systems—Requirements” (now in the final draft international standard stage) moves toward its formal publication around the end of this year, organizations that use and depend on a wide range of assets would benefit from spending some time reviewing…
Paul Naysmith
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… well, 10 years ago in The Midlands of England, I was introduced to the “Hawthorne Effect.” I remember sitting in the Black Belt class being taught about improvement projects. The course tutor, a wise old man with absolutely no physical resemblance to Obi-…
Quality Digest
Some of the [ISO 9001: 2015] requirements are relatively clear; others are more “euphemisms,” and you don’t know how to react… —James Lamprecht, author of ISO 9000: Preparing for Certification (CRC Press, 1992) and former member of ISO/TC 176
During an Aug, 16, 2013, interview on Quality Digest’s…
Alan Nicol
Recently I took a day to volunteer at my children’s elementary school. It was their annual field day where students get to spend half of the school day outdoors, on the game field, participating in a rotation of team-building and fitness events. It’s a great deal of fun.
I was one of a great many…
Knowledge at Wharton
In the “flying geese paradigm,” Japanese economist Kaname Akamatsu explains that companies restructure to find the cheapest labor costs by moving low-value activities to nearby less-developed countries. Today that story rings truer than ever as global value chains (GVCs) reach a critical turning…
Louis Columbus
From metal-fitting factories that keep machinery calibrated manually to high-tech companies whose production systems use self-diagnosing analytics, every manufacturer is continually working to improve shop-floor performance using analytics.
The best manufacturers I’ve worked with continually…
