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Mark R. Hamel
First, the introduction. This post was earnestly written by my friend, Jeff Fuchs. He’s the director of the Maryland World Class Consortia, a lean nonprofit assistance organization in the mid-Atlantic. He’s also president of Neovista Consulting, which works with large and small organizations on…
More than ever, businesses need ways to improve their operations to better gain, serve, and retain customers while reducing costs and improving margins. Implementing management systems and attaining third-party accredited certification can help businesses achieve success on all of these fronts…
Donald J. Wheeler
With the use of statistical software, many individuals are being exposed to more than just measures of location and dispersion. In addition to the average and standard deviation, they often find some funny numbers labeled as skewness and kurtosis. Since these numbers appear automatically, it is…
NIST
The electromagnetic force has gotten a little stronger, gravity a little weaker, and the size of the smallest “quantum” of energy is now known a little better. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has posted the latest internationally recommended values of the fundamental…
Minitab LLC
C
otton. Given that it’s the most widely used fiber in clothing, you’re probably wearing some right now. We love cotton’s comfortable properties and soft feel. But as everyone who’s ironed a cotton shirt or pants knows, these same properties can make cotton-based fabric particularly prone to…
Bruce Hamilton
Significant digits, the number of digits to the right of a decimal point that are warranted by the accuracy of the means of measurement, are a critical part of scientific investigation. In developing products and services, the concept is essential. For example, how many products have failed to “…
Productivity Press
Of the 100 companies named to Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s largest companies in 1956, only 29 of them remain on that list today. Many lost their way because they failed to recognize the changes taking place, or were too big to react quickly enough to shifting market conditions.…
John Flaig
Story update 7/08/2011: We corrected an error in Figure 2, and in the section preceded by "Expressed symbolically for a stable process...".
Two topics that have generated significant interest and frequent comments are, “Is normality required for control charts?” and “You need to estimate the tail…
Ryan E. Day
Standard: “A document, established by consensus and approved by a recognized body, that provides, for common and repeated use, rules, guidelines or characteristics for activities or their results, aimed at the achievement of the optimum degree of order in a given context” (ISO/IEC Guide 2:2004—“…
Miriam Boudreaux
You’ve heard about “measuring training effectiveness” but aren’t quite sure how to do it. You’ve been filling out training attendance sheets for as long as you can recall, and they have served the purpose. So why is training effectiveness all of the sudden a topic of discussion, and what exactly is…
Steven Ouellette
Although we may use the define, measure, analyze, improve, control (DMAIC) mnemonic to help guide us through our problem solving, that doesn’t really give us a lot of specific direction (as I bemoan in my Top 10 Stupid Six Sigma Tricks No. 4). Good experimental design technique is critical to being…
Robert Parsons
The aerospace standard, AS9100C—“Quality management systems—Requirements for aviation, space and defense organizations,” (aka AS9100:2009 Revision C) has been released for some time now, and the early results are in. For the most part, our customers, those of National Quality Assurance (NQA), that…
It seemed like a good idea at the time to Jon Shupenus, U.S. Army Forces Command’s process improvement specialist and lean Six Sigma Black Belt. Shupenus was attending a Department of Defense performance management seminar in 2010 when Kirk Nicholas, director of the Army’s continuous process…
Stewart Anderson
Not all customers are equally profitable. Different customers have different needs, and hence different costs to serve. The overall profitability of a business is a function of the profitability of individual customers and customer groups.
Many businesses measure customer satisfaction but they…
British Assessment Bureau BAB
According to data from The British Assessment Bureau’s (BAB) independent 2011 Client Satisfaction Survey, 44 percent of respondents said that they had won business as a result of becoming certified to ISO 9001, the quality management system standard from the International…
Paul Naysmith
I greatly believe in training. I have been fortunate to work in businesses that also believed in having trained and qualified professionals in their organization. I have personally and professionally benefited from that philosophy, and I have gained new knowledge as a result.
Since graduating from…
Stewart Anderson
Often a firm is confronted with the key question of whether the quality of its products and services should be improved. For many readers, the question may even seem illogical: How could it not be beneficial for a firm to improve the quality of its products and services?
On closer analysis, however…
Donald J. Wheeler
Whenever we present capability indexes the almost inevitable follow-up question is, “What is the fraction nonconforming?” What this question usually means is, “Tell me what these capability indexes mean in terms that I can understand.” These questions have resulted in multiple approaches to…
NIST
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a suite of green tea reference materials to help manufacturers evaluate the composition of their products and assure researchers of the accuracy of analytical methods for studying the human health effects of this popular…
Mike Richman
Last month I wrote an article entitled “Being Comfortable in a World of Never-Ending Change.” Editor in Chief Dirk Dusharme and I also covered this story on the April 29th edition of Quality Digest Live (QDL). QDL, by the way, is our live video show wrap-up of the week’s top industry news and…
Tom Pyzdek
Lean, Six Sigma, and quality provide a set of tools and a framework for achieving excellence in any process. Quality professionals are able to help organizations determine if customer requirements are properly defined and if the organization is meeting those requirements. Lean practitioners have a…
Mark R. Hamel
Among other things, an effective lean management system drives process adherence and process performance. The daily accountability portion of the system includes brief tiered meetings with the stakeholders.
At the tier I level, the core meeting participants are pretty much the natural work team…
Ryan E. Day
For those of us frustrated by the prevalence of mediocrity and apathy in the management theater, there may yet be hope. The Avery Point Group’s annual employment study found a sharp increase in demand for lean and Six Sigma skills this year. That would seem to indicate companies and businesses…
William A. Levinson
The cause-and-effect diagram is one of the seven basic quality improvement tools, and this article will illustrate its synergy with the affinity diagram. The article will then discuss how modern computer technology can enhance both techniques to create keyword-searchable quality records that…
John Flaig
In the article, “Four Control Chart Myths from Foolish Experts,” by Davis Balestracci (Quality Digest Daily, March 30, 2011) the following comments were made regarding what Balestracci considers statistical process control (SPC) myths:
“Myth No. 4: Three standard deviation limits are too…