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Davis Balestracci
April Fool’s Day (today) and the opening of baseball season (this Sunday) are upon us. To mark the first event, I’ll let my distinguished colleague Donald Wheeler make some eloquent and crucial statistical points that turn out to be, well, laughably simple. (No fooling!) Regarding the baseball…
Dan Jacob
Airbags, ignition switches, and even emissions software; although large recalls make the news at a regular pace, these are surrounded by scandal. News reports include claims of illegal or unethical activity executed by individuals or larger groups of people. Unfortunately, as new reports expose…
Matthew Barsalou
The start of a failure investigation may involve brainstorming, but empirical methods will be required to actually identify a problem's cause. Implementing an improvement action without a confirmed root cause risks a reoccurrence of the issue because the true root cause has yet to be addressed.…
Mike Micklewright
When considering any effort toward performance improvement, you should always start by looking at the organization’s principles and culture, and making sure these are aligned so they not only permit positive changes to occur, but also ensure that the changes will be sustained over the long run. By…
Kevin Meyer
Those of us in the lean world are accustomed to discussing "flow"—where work is performed in an even manner to reduce mura or lack of regularity, one of the three forms of waste. Activities are synchronized, layouts are optimized, resources are available exactly where and when they are needed, and…
Eston Martz
There’s plenty of noisy disagreement about the state of healthcare, but when you look beyond the controversies, a great deal of common ground exists.
Many agree that the way we’ve been doing things is wasteful and inefficient, when healthcare should be delivered as efficiently and effectively as…
NIST
Medical implants and spacecraft can suddenly go dead, often for the same reason: cracks in ceramic capacitors, which are devices that store electric charge in electronic circuits. These cracks, at first harmless and often hidden, can start conducting electricity, depleting batteries or shorting…
ISO
With medical devices ranging from simple needles to life-saving high-tech implants, ensuring the highest possible level of safety is one of the industry’s greatest priorities. Here, as the chair of the ISO technical committee for quality management and related general aspects for medical devices,…
John Flaig
Sometimes when authors try to make a technical concept more understandable, it’s simplified but unfortunately, less accurate.
For example, when the developers of Six Sigma wanted to explain control charts and process capability analysis, they needed to include how the signal can be separated from…
Stephen Mundwiller
One of the more enjoyable discussions I’ve seen on the Internet recently has to be about what to do with the quality manual. A common question is, “So what do I call this thing I put all the procedures in, now that we can’t have a quality manual?” It’s part of the panic brewing among quality…
Beth Savage
Out-of-control gas prices reported in the news have our attention. Nearly every media outlet, from the small-town daily news to The Wall Street Journal, has a gas price story on a weekly basis: “Gas Prices Are Plunging,” and “How Low Will Gas Prices Go?” It’s news when they rise and news when they…
Michelle LaBrosse
Your project teams seem to have all the right pieces—team members with technical proficiency, good internal communication, an organized project manager—but something still isn’t quite right. Your team still struggles to get projects done on time and isn’t as productive as it could be. What’s going…
Davis Balestracci
This article is based on some ideas from my respected colleague Mark Hamel. Despite the lean framework, these ideas apply to any improvement approach—all of which come from the same theory, lean included.
During the past 35 years, quality has evolved from the necessary evil of quality control to…
Jim Benson
When you are a consultant, or worse yet, seen as a thought leader, people hire you expecting that you’ll know “the answers.” At best, what you actually know are paths to make sense of problems, communicate them, and then solve them. No consultant should ever arrive knowing the answers. If they do…
Bruce Hamilton
Here’s a personal reflection from my distant past that might describe a current state for some of you.
When I began working in manufacturing during the pre-lean era, the quoted lead time for my company’s products averaged 12 to 16 weeks. By the 1980s, however, many customers began to routinely…
Manufacturing Extension Partnership MEP
Whether it’s for performance management or for risk, it’s important to know who your suppliers are and have a close business relationship with them.
It’s a given you should already have a strong relationship with your key suppliers, but how often does your supplier request the following items? •…
Donald J. Wheeler
Here we look at a simple example to discover the commonalties of various data analysis techniques widely used in industry today. Careful consideration of the following may result in insights that were not part of your introductory class in statistics.
Our example uses the gate oxide thicknesses…
Timothy Lozier
There’s been a shift in how companies view quality and compliance, and as a result, businesses are looking for a more comprehensive method for measuring operational efficiency. Risk management processes are proving to be an effective option for this. ISO 9001:2015 now promotes risk-based thinking…
Dawn Bailey
Dorothy: Now which way do we go? Scarecrow: Pardon me, this way is a very nice way. Dorothy: Who said that? Toto barks at the scarecrow. Dorothy: Don’t be silly, Toto. Scarecrows don’t talk. Scarecrow: [points other way] It’s pleasant down that way, too. Dorothy: That’s funny. Wasn’t he pointing…
William A. Levinson
ISO 9001:2015 has created a new focus on risk with regard to context of the organization and the needs and expectations of interested parties.
The Army Techniques Publication ATP 5-19 Risk Management, by the United States Government, U.S. Army (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014)…
Mark Esser
The nefarious Major Uncertainty has kidnapped Monsieur Kilogram, putting the world’s measurements of mass in jeopardy. As the world spirals into “Mass Hysteria,” the remaining SI Superheroes, champions of the metric system, leap into action to save the day, and hopefully Monsieur Kilogram as well…
Scott Berkun
Many of our most popular stories of discovery are portrayed as accidents or matters of luck. We love these stories because they make creativity seem easy and fun. Nevertheless, they are misleading.
In a recent New York Times opinion piece titled “How to Cultivate The Art of Serendipity,” author…
Bob Emiliani
Nearly 30 years after the start of the lean movement, there is widespread agreement that things have not gone according to plan. Of course, there have been some notable successes (particularly from those who worked with Shingijutsu), yet they are far fewer in number than anyone expected, given the…
Michelle LaBrosse
When you run a small business (perhaps as small as just you), does failure ever really occur? I hear often in the media about this or that business being “too big to fail,” but in reality isn't it more like “too small to fail?”
I ask myself this question, more rhetorically than anything. I’ve…
Mike Micklewright
In October 2014, 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer. In November 2015, footage of the shooting was released and has been viewed all over the world. The footage shows an aggressive attack by a police officer, a supposed person of service to the community, as…