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David Schwinn
As we continue our sabbatical journey, more opportunities for the improvement of management practices continue to appear. This month, the overriding theme that I have observed is the lack of front-line performance that seems to be a result of the system. I have been reminded of the many times we as…
Denise Robitaille
The headline’s question seemed a bit far-fetched to me when it was originally posed. The answer provided another delightful illustration of the myriad analogies we find in our everyday lives that relate so effortlessly to our work as quality professionals. The comparison demonstrated the complexity…
Cor Groenveld
How safe is our food? It is a question asked all over the world on a daily basis as food-scare stories fill the media and governments act to calm consumer fears. There is a real and tangible concern among the public; an IBM consumer confidence survey in 2009 found that 80 percent of those…
Angelo Lyall
It seems the most popular way to improve a process these days is by applying the glorious "Lean Toolkit." Many companies focus on learning and implementing process improvement practices introduced by Toyota without realizing the same success that Toyota achieved. How can it be that so many firms…
Mark R. Hamel
Every once in awhile people will ask me to (discretely) evaluate a kaizen event team’s effectiveness. I don’t necessarily relish doing that when it is intended for the purpose of team comparisons, but it’s not an unfair request from senior leaders.
Someday, I should probably try to pull the…
Donald J. Wheeler
One-hundred-percent inspection is commonly used to avoid shipping nonconforming product. Each of the items produced is measured and judged to be either conforming or nonconforming. The conforming items get shipped, and the nonconforming items get set aside for use as factory-authorized replacement…
Jim Benson
There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking. —Alfred Korzybski
Over the last several years, I’ve studied a lot of processes and watched communities grow around them. I’ve been a member of many of these communities.…
Mike Richman
Welcome to Quality Digest Daily 2.0! This new format represents a significant re-imaging of our flagship brand (the industry’s only daily newsletter), which we first launched nearly two years ago. I hope you notice that we’ve added more video content to the newsletter as well as greater editorial…
Minitab LLC
Ford Motor Co. is one of the largest automakers in the United States, producing millions of automobiles each year at 70 plants worldwide. According to J. D. Power and Associates Initial Quality Survey, Ford has received more top rankings than any other automaker since 2007. It’s no surprise that…
William A. Levinson
The first part of this article illustrated the kinds of problems that can happen when data from non-normal processes are plotted on traditional control charts, and when traditional process capability assessments are applied to these data. This second part will show what to do about these problems…
Davis Balestracci
My March 30, 2011 article ended with wisdom from Yogi Berra as a warning to the quality profession. Some prickly reactions to it got me thinking about the last 30 years or so of quality improvement.
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The 1980 NBC television show, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” introduced the…
Laurel Thoennes @ QD
“What makes a personal kanban any better than a to-do list?” asked Julie, crossing out a completed task on her “ta da!” list with exaggerated strokes.
“With personal kanban you visualize your work, it becomes tangible, you get kinesthetic feedback, it’s flexible, contextual, and it promotes…
Bruce Hamilton
Gary was a talented, creative welder with an idea that made perfect sense to him but was not supported by conventional measures. Gary was determined to implement his idea and pressed for a closer evaluation by his supervisor when the idea was not immediately accepted. This was Gary’s idea:
A…
Lisa Lupo
Companies aren’t perfect, and neither are the people who work for them. Since this is a fact rather than a judgment, it’s reasonable to expect errors in manufacturing and process management. When an audited company continues to show a flawless record for, say, a food-safety audit, chances are it…
John Schultz
Problem solving is much more than arriving at an elegant solution. It is a twofold progression that includes problem resolution and solution implementation. Six Sigma and process improvement methods are examples of this sequenced approach to developing and deploying a remedial action that improves…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
Story update 4/13/2011: We corrected a misquote regarding who first said, “As goes GM, so goes the nation.”Every day, it seems, business as usual gets a bit more unusual. I’ve been haunting the news portals and blogs, curious to see how experts are viewing potential supply shortages following the…
Mark Graban
I was in Los Angeles on Tuesday, and I had a little extra time on my way to the Burbank airport, which meant a rare treat—lunch at the famed In-N-Out Burger. I don’t mean to be that guy who tweets what he eats, but my lunch is pictured at right.
The main picture I wanted to share is a simple…
Joseph A. DeFeo
How many times have you heard, “Lean is in and Six Sigma is out” from a colleague? The funny thing about this is that I used to hear the same thing 23 years ago. Only then it was, “Lean is in, and quality improvement teams are out.” Little has changed since then. Everyone is looking for a simple…
Miriam Boudreaux
In my March 24th column, I discussed how you should handle audits that point out a minor or "Mickey Mouse" nonconformance. In this column, I am going to look at this from the auditor’s point of view, when it’s obvious that the auditee did not take a nonconformance seriously and didn’t bother to do…
Mark R. Hamel
Understanding a process’ cycle time is extremely important, especially in the context of takt time. In a mixed-model environment, cycle time can be a bit less straightforward. That’s where weighted averages may make sense.
Weighted-average cycle time, also known as “average weighted cycle time…
Danita Johnson Hughes Ph.D.
Read this. It won’t be a waste of time.
Time gets lost. People kill time. Time flies. It gets wasted. Time weighs heavy on our hands. We spend time. Time passes. It drags on or it hurries by. Those behind bars are said to be doing time. Sometimes, we have no time left; we’re out of time.…
Donald J. Wheeler
Measurement error is generally considered to be a bad thing, and yet there is very little written about how measurement error affects the way we use our measurements.
This column will consider these effects for four different uses of data. But first we need to describe how to characterize…
Donald J. Wheeler
Measurement error is generally considered to be a bad thing, and yet there is very little written about how measurement error affects the way we use our measurements.
This column will consider these effects for four different uses of data. But first we need to describe how to characterize…
Davis Balestracci
There are four statements regarding control charts that are myths and in my experience, just refuse to die. The next time you're sitting in a seminar and someone tries to teach you how to transform data to make them normally distributed, or at any point during the seminar says, “Normal distribution…
Tom Pyzdek
Story update 3/29/2011: We corrected an error in the next to last sentence. "p < 0.05" was changed to "p > 0.05."
One of the exercises I assign to students in my training involves creating two histograms from normally distributed random numbers. The results often look similar to those shown…