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Pierre Huot
If a manufacturer were to ask its clients how they evaluated goods or services, the three most common metrics would be goods at a fair price, on-time delivery, and quality. Ask which could be most valuable and in all likelihood the most significant response would be quality. When included in the…
Barbara A. Cleary
A young man in PQ Systems' hometown survived a dramatic auto accident last summer in which police-captured video footage of his spectacular, airborne vehicle was broadcast throughout the nation. That was just the beginning of his problems, for during his hospitalization, his medical records were…
A new year always brings new hope, new plans, and new perspectives. While looking ahead is the most direct route to progress, looking back is essential to understanding the present. After all, the past creates the consequences that will shape the future.
With this in mind, the editors of…
Mike Richman
A recent article appearing in the Quality Digest Daily e-newsletter (“Why Lean? Why Now?” by Dean Bliss http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/health-care-news/why-lean-why-now.html) discusses the value of lean in a health care setting. In his editorial, Bliss writes about the manufacturing origins…
Mark Graban
Lean thinkers see the waste in health care when they are at the hospital gemba. I think this is true whether you are a lean person who is new to health care or if you’re a long-time hospital person who has learned lean. Experts (doctors) ranging from John Toussaint to Patricia Gabow to Don Berwick…
National Association for Healthcare Quality
The Toyota Production System and U.S. health care improvement share a long history. What lessons can health care leaders learn from Toyota’s recent production troubles? A few experts recently discussed this on WIHI, an audio program sponsored by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). Here…
(Academy Leadership Publishing: King of Prussia, PA) -- When news headlines trumpet story after story about fiscal mismanagement, unchecked greed, massive bankruptcies, and rampant downsizing, it’s hard to believe there’s any good news about the business world. Indeed, it’s almost impossible not…
Georgia Institute of Technology
The cross-functional team at Piedmont Newnan was made up of employees that deal with the process daily. For this process improvement project, they focused on case carts, which are used for pulling together all supplies needed for surgical procedures.
Pam Murphy, a…
Knowledge at Wharton
Toyota’s legendary lean processes didn’t come out of nowhere. They were forged by the fire of urgency in post-World War II Japan when resources were scarce. Toyota innovated—and continued to innovate. Today, the Toyota Production System is the most respected manufacturing and inventory control…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
In the early 1970s I was a young teenager who was completely caught up in the Zeitgeist. I admired the long-haired rebels and radicals who were engaged in protesting the establishment and developing the counter-culture. I didn’t really know what any of that meant, but to me it was all about…
H. James Harrington
The world is changing so fast today that it is almost impossible to keep up with the latest trends in your own profession. If you are not spending at least two hours per day updating yourself in your chosen profession, you probably are behind the current state of the art. It has been estimated that…
Mike Micklewright
Can you imagine producing products with a tremendous amount of variation? I’m sure many of you know this all too well. I mean, here you’re trying to produce the same products, trying to ensure consistency, and many of the products you produce have different shades of color, many function…
WILLIAM SCHERKENBACH
I’ve spent most of the past two years living in China where I have learned much on how enterprise is managed over there. Many people have said that this century belongs to Asia. That may be, but they have a lot to learn and change before that happens. They cannot depend on cheap rote labor to…
Malcolm Chisholm
I have just finished rereading Walter A. Shewhart's 1939 book Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (Dover Publications, 1986). Mine is the 1986 edition, which has a foreword by W. Edwards Deming. Shewhart, a Bell Labs man, pioneered quality control and was a major inspiration…
Mike Richman
Here at Quality Digest, we get a lot of mail: Some of it’s critical, some of it’s praiseworthy, some of it’s cantankerous, and some of it’s challenging. All of it is insightful. And then, every once in awhile, something comes along that simply... well...
The following was sent to us from a…
In 2005, according to a BBC News report at the time, operating rooms all over the United Kingdom were thrown into chaos and operations canceled due to broken, missing, or dirty surgical instruments. The Royal College of Surgeons called for a national audit of decontamination units, following a…
Bill Kalmar
Regular readers of my column know that I abhor surveys that don’t provide some type of incentive or discount on a future purchase for completing the survey. I realize that I may have discussed this subject ad nauseam, but have you noticed that every store, restaurant, gas station, doctor’s office…
A
n emergency response organization differs substantially from our usual public health organization for day-to-day business. However, as the spring 2009 H1N1 (also referred to as swine flu) outbreak highlighted, usual public health processes are fundamental for effectively responding to a…
John Stiller
Story update 9/23/09: Reference to 9.5.2.f was changed to 8.5.2.f in second paragraph.
As more suppliers are required by their regulators and customers to achieve ISO 9001 certification, and because certification symbolizes a point of competitive differentiation in a tight economy, emphasis on…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
“Writing is not a job; it’s a hobby!” thundered my father when I told him my plans for college. “You need to get a profession: Medicine, law, engineering, or accounting.”
I cheerlessly acquiesced and enrolled in a pre-med program, but at the end of my first year, after struggling through…
Donald J. Wheeler
Following my article on Leptokurtophobics (Do You Have Leptokurtophobia?) it was almost inevitable that we should hear from one. We were fortunate to have someone as articulate as Forrest Breyfogle III to write the response. However, rather than offering a critique of the points raised in my…
Bill Kalmar
The band “Chicago” sang those words about "time" decades ago. The second line “Does anybody really care?” seems to sum up what is still in vogue today, especially in the workplace. Just as with vacations where workers are reluctant to leave for fear that someone will discover that their job is…
Davis Balestracci
Click here to read part 1 of this series.
Analytic statistical methods are in very strong contrast with what is normally taught in most statistics textbooks, which describe the problem as one of “accepting” or “rejecting” hypotheses. In the real world of quality improvement, we must look for…
Donald J. Wheeler
Some authors recommend that you have to wait until you have the range chart “in control” before you can compute the limits for the average chart or the X chart. Why this is not true will be the subject of this column.
To illustrate the issues we will once again use the NB10 data. The 100 values are…
H. James Harrington
I often get assignments at organizations where I am required to take aside a group of people, either within the building facility or off campus, to focus on issues or problems. Typically these groups spend a considerable amount of time to summarize and present a well-defined problem. The next step…