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Changes and Implementation Strategies for AS9100 Revision D
Chad Kymal
The aerospace standard AS9100 Revision D was originally planned to be released in April 2014. Many of us close to the standard expected it to be released in May 2016 after the April International Aerospace Quality Group (IAQG) meeting in Singapore. However, this was not the case; the IAQG decided…
Lean Manufacturing: Don’t Run Your Business Without It
Mike Beels
It’s amazing that, in this day and age, some manufacturers have not yet heard of “lean.” How are they surviving in today’s competitive market without it? The issue is that, in many ways, the customer sets pricing. If manufacturers want to be profitable, they must find ways to become more efficient…
Presidential Candidates Want to Bring Back Millions of Outsourced Jobs
Stephan Manning, Marcus M. Larsen
One of the big themes in the current presidential race is how decades of free trade have dealt a heavy blow to the U.S. worker as millions of jobs were shipped overseas to take advantage of cheap labor. That’s even turned some pro free-trade Republicans into protectionists. As a result, the…
What Is a Leader to Do?
Harry Hertz
I recently read an HBR blog by Sunnie Giles that reported the results of a study of 195 leaders representing 30 global organizations. The leaders were asked to identify the most important competencies for leadership. The study reminded me of a complementary article in Forbes, written by Glen…
Safety Standards for Ambulances—STAT
Jennifer Marshall
For as long as we have had automobiles, we have had traffic accidents. Even the vehicles that we depend on to take care of us in the event of an accident—ambulances—get into accidents nearly every day. Because ambulances are basically a small emergency room on wheels, the occupants in the back are…
Healthy Growth Management
Evan Miller
Sponsored Content PLZ Aeroscience is North America’s largest custom aerosol manufacturer and packager. It produces its own private-brand products and custom formulations, and provides contract filling for other customers. PLZ has been in business for more than 100 years and during the last six…
Kaizen Equals Getting Closer to the Final Process
Takehiko Harada
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from the book, Management Lessons From Taiichi Ohno: What Every Leader Can Learn From the Man who Invented the Toyota Production System, by Takehiko Harada (McGraw-Hill Education, 2015). The phrase, “kaizen equals getting closer to the final process” was hardly…
What We Mean When We Talk About EvGen, Part 2
Rachel E. Sherman, Robert M. Califf
In an earlier article, we discussed a pair of concepts—interoperability and connectivity—that are essential prerequisites for creating a successful national system for evidence generation (or “EvGen”). Here, we take a look at how we would apply these constructs as we go about building such a…
Thinking About Systems Thinking
David Schwinn
The map is not the territory. —Alfred Korzybski This column is a tribute primarily to Jamshid Gharajedaghi, a long-time teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. My wife Carole and I recently visited him while in Philadelphia doing a presentation for the International Society for Performance…
Would You Like Coffee With Your Muda?
William A. Levinson
Colonel Paul M. A. Linebarger’s authoritative Psychological Warfare (Infantry Journal Press, 1948) defines propaganda as any planned communication with the  purpose to influence behavior, but this definition is actually too narrow. Propaganda consists of any action or communication, whether…
Visual Scheduling: A Problem-Solving Mechanism
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Visual scheduling is a plain, two-dimensional format that maps out which products, parts, or subassemblies need to be produced, and when, in what quantity, and in what order. Nothing could be simpler. In companies where schedules aren't published in a single, centralized location for all to see…
Dealing With Cans of Worms
Jim Benson
We are all cursed with “surprises” at work. We come in, sit down, get ready for the day. We select a task to start on, and about halfway through, it explodes on us. The seemingly simple task now has 30 subtasks all lined up, ready to destroy our day. This is stressful. Since we’re likely already…
National Inventor’s Month: You Can Make It If You Try
Mark Esser
Depending on whom you ask, May (or August or April—it would be great if someone were to standardize this, but we’re going with May) is National Inventor’s Month. Lots of people have dreams of being a famous inventor. Even I’ve had “ideas” for inventions before. For instance, during the 1990s,…
When Chemistry Meets Marketing
Taran March @ Quality Digest
They sound like words and have a mysterious dignity rolling off the tongue. Their meanings seem both apparent and elusive. If an alien delegation landed on Earth, words like these might feature in their formal greetings. They are the most expensively researched neologisms in use around the globe.…
Passing an FDA Quality System Inspection
Grant Ramaley
The Quality System Regulation (QSR) 21 CFR Part 820, aka FDA current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) for Medical Devices, is what regulatory professionals should be referencing in their quality system procedures. Part 820 embodies all the major parts of the FDA quality system that are shared…
The Yin and the Yang of Standardized Training
Mike Micklewright
Quiz time: What significance does the yin and the yang have in discussing standardized training? I suggest that you pause and guess (and then read on for the answer). OK, we all get it, standards are a part of our lives in the business world, and they are gaining more and more focus as companies…
Make a Mint Using Measurement Science
Richard Gates
Put your hands together. Now move them back and forth to rub them against each other. Feel that heat? That’s from friction. No matter if it’s between siblings or the gears of an engine, we usually think of friction as a bad thing, and often it is. Friction can cause things to heat up, wear down,…
Sleep: Your Workflow’s Most Important Form of Slack
Tonianne DeMaria
“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.” —John Steinbeck In Personal Kanban (Modus Cooperandi Press, 2011), Jim Benson and I discuss how workflow should be optimized for throughput, not capacity. Work…
The Order for Kaizen
Harish Jose
Today I’d like to talk about kaizen—specifically, the order for kaizen. The term has come to mean “continuous improvement,” but kaizen originally translates from Japanese as “change for better.” To help clarify this useful concept, I’ll present three different views for approaching kaizen: Taiichi…
Photonic Pressure Sensors vs. Mercury-Based Standard
Jennifer Lauren Lee
When a team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Physical Measurement Laboratory (PML) first tested a new kind of pressure sensor two years ago, initial results showed it was faster and had higher resolution than the centuries-old mercury-based method for…
Benefits of Environmental Certification
Jeffrey Eves
Sponsored Content There are many paths for organizations to become good, sustainable, low-footprint citizens of the business world. Production processes can be redesigned to be more efficient, corporate campuses can be located so as to reduce employees’ dependence on fossil fuels, and buildings…
Chemical Detective Hot on the Vapor Trail
NIST
Recently on the Taking Measure blog, we asked Tara Lovestead, a recipient of the 2016 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), a few questions about her life and work. She was recognized for her extensive application of new methods to rapidly and inexpensively detect…
Modernizing the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Base
Lawrence Yu
If we used a time machine to transport a pharmaceutical scientist from the 1960s into a current pharmaceutical production plant, it might be surprising to learn that he would already be familiar with most of the processes and production techniques being used. That’s because not much has changed in…
Four Steps to An Audit-Proof Measurement System
Eric Gasper
An upcoming audit can be one of the more stressful times of the year for a quality team. Whether you are pursuing a new certification or retaining your current one, audit preparation can be a daunting challenge to even the most diligent organization. Although standards such as ISO/IEC 17025, ISO/…
The Quiet After the Storm
Ryan E. Day
Ihave never been accused of being an early adopter of cutting-edge technology. On the other hand, I don’t dance the Luddite jig, either. True to my own type, I hung on to my old M-1A tank, aka a Motorola flip phone, for as long as I could, but was pleased as punch when circumstances led me to…