All Features
Patrick Runkel
Defects can cause a lot of pain to your customer. They can also cause a lot of pain inside your body.
The picture below shows my broken right clavicle. Ouch! You might think of it as the defective output from my bicycling process, which needs improvement.
Sitting around all summer cinched up in…
Paul Naysmith
Arecent call with an old colleague from Europe got me wondering about a question that few are conscious of: Who is the customer of your quality document? Oh boy, did we have an interesting discussion about quality systems.
My friend was developing and reinvigorating his employer’s quality system,…
Juliana dos Reis Derceli, Juliana Jendiroba Faraoni-Romano, Regina Guenka Palma-Dibb
D ental erosion, a process that can cause demineralization and damage on dental substrate, is widely studied due to its high incidence within all age groups. Several techniques are used to analyze erosive lesions, including roughness measurement, profilometry, and morphological analysis of the…
Matthew E. May
As Napoleon once said, a picture is worth a thousand words. This isn’t just a trite cliché. Visual thinking is an invaluable skill, if not a leadership art.
In his book Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (Basic Books, 1996), Howard Gardner makes the point that visionary leaders rally people…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
When I was a boy, I heard a story about a hot-dog stand owner, who would put on a clown costume, then stand on the sidewalk every day and wave motorists into his business. He was so successful he was able to send his son to college. Upon graduating , the son, now worldly and sophisticated, was…
Dawn Bailey
A recent article in The Washington Post, “Company Town’s Decline Reflects New Mantra: Shareholders First,” got me thinking. The article begins with a look at Endicott, New York, where, during the 1980s, 10,000 IBM workers kept the upstate town thriving. Today, after years of layoffs and jobs…
Miriam Boudreaux
If your company is ISO-certified or thinking about becoming so, you may already know that meeting customer requirements and achieving customer satisfaction is paramount to the certification. However, it’s not always clear who should be in charge of determining whether customer satisfaction has been…
Dennis Payton
Given the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) increased findings for companies that must comply to CFR 21 Part 820—“Quality system,” it’s curious that the oversight body has not offered much guidance about product design control, particularly concerning sections 820.30 and 820.40 of the…
William Fetter
Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, has revealed his Hyperloop transportation system concept, a sort of pneumatic tube that promises to deliver passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes at speeds up to 760 mph.
While listening to the technical explanation of how the…
Kyle Toppazzini
Before my first book, Maximizing Lean Six Sigma (West Bow Press, 2013), was published, I’d begun work on a second book, which details a new approach to lean Six Sigma called FUSE—for formulate, understand, synthesize, and execute. It’s an approach that enables organizations to maximize enterprise…
Lean Math With Mark Hamel
The time observation form, also known as a process study form, is a basic and often-used tool for lean practitioners. Note that here we are talking about applying the continuous time-observation method and not the work-sampling method.
The form, in combination with a stopwatch, serves multiple…
U.S. Department of Energy
Anew Critical Materials Hub led by Ames Laboratory, located in Ames, Iowa, is the latest of the U.S. Department of Energy’s five innovation hubs—which combine basic and applied research with engineering to accelerate scientific discovery in critical energy areas.
Many of the fastest growing clean…
NASA
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft officially is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion km) from our sun.
New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas,…
Stanford News Service
People are more likely to conserve energy if it’s easy to do. Knowing this, students working on Stanford’s entry in the Solar Decathlon green-building competition have redesigned household mainstays to make reducing energy and water consumption a cinch.
When Stanford students began designing…
Alan Nicol
Engineers speak a different language. My fellow engineers will label me a traitor for confessing this, but it’s true. Of course, engineers use the same regional language as everyone else, but the words themselves have meanings that are specific to engineers and that are different than everyone…
Knowledge at Wharton
General Motors has joined the list of multinationals in the hot seat in India. In one of the largest vehicle recalls in the country, GM recalled more than 114,000 Tavera sports utility vehicles produced between 2005 and 2013 due to issues related to emission standards. But, as it turns out, there…
Carly Barry
Read part two here.
Failure. Just saying the word makes me cringe. And if you’re human, you’ve probably suffered through and overcome at least a couple failures. But when it comes to lean Six Sigma projects, there’s really nothing worse than having your entire project fail. Sometimes these projects…
MIT News
Moore’s Law predicts that every two years the cost of computing will fall by half. That’s one reason why tomorrow’s gadgets may be better, and cheaper, too. But in American hospitals and doctors’ offices, a very different law seems to hold sway: Every 13 years, spending on U.S. healthcare doubles…
Duke University
Chief financial officers (CFOs) throughout the United States are concerned by several risks on the horizon—including an overvalued stock market, interest rates that are expected to jump, and a shift toward temporary and part-time workers driven by the Affordable Care Act, and overall economic…
Gallup
Hospitals are facing ever-increasing pressure to evaluate and cut costs. This isn’t surprising. Medical supplies represent as much as 30 percent of an average hospital’s total operating expenses. Regulatory and economic changes, and initiatives such as value-based purchasing, are also pushing…
William A. Levinson
The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is supporting strikes by fast-food workers who want $15 an hour. According to Workers’ World, “Most earn the federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25 or close to it. They are demanding that McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, Yum Brand, and their other…
Rick Haynes
Measurement system analysis of uncertainty is one topic in lean Six Sigma training that is too often ignored or under-taught. I believe that it is under-taught because most instructors have never used or understood it. Therefore, this column will dive deep into what it is and why you should learn…
Bruce Hamilton
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Egg-Grading Manual, “Checks [aka “cracks’”] are an unavoidable problem in the marketing of eggs because eggs cannot be assembled, graded, packed, transported, and merchandized without some breakage.” Unavoidable. That’s the standard, I guess. The…
Tommaso Sgobba
During the past two years, almost at regular intervals, we hear news about the failure of a Russian rocket launch. A few weeks ago, on July 2, 2013, a three-stage Proton-M took off from Baikonour Cosmodrome. The rocket started veering off course right after leaving the pad, deviating from the…
Renishaw
Conroe Machine is doing what most machine shops only dream of: hard-turning a family of parts around the clock in an unmanned cell that operates a “self-controlled” process. The company is proof that the dream is achievable for any shop ready to use the talents of today’s automation experts to…
