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Brian Maskell
I work with companies that are serious about being lean organizations. Most of them use lean accounting. It’s not about changing your accounting system. It’s about embracing lean principles and methods. Lean changes the way people look at management accounting. Here are 10 things to think about.…
Donald J. Wheeler, Henry R. Neave
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. During the past three months we have looked at three families of probability models and found that they share some remarkable properties. These properties provide a theoretical explanation of how and why process…
Bill Kalmar
My wife Mary has an obsession—she always checks the expiration and freshness dates on food products that we purchase. Mary also marks purchase dates on products such as ketchup, mustard, and salad dressings when she places these items in our refrigerator. I think she has an expiration date on me…
George Chemers, Patricia Cronin
Although information is readily available about applying team-building techniques to Six Sigma projects, there’s not much about how learning styles affect the success of Six Sigma teams. Knowing that the “people side” of an otherwise technical and statistical-based methodology is important to a…
Christine Schaefer
In early 1989, Michael Whisman, MBA, MBB, was trained by his then-employer, Baxter Healthcare, to be an examiner within the company’s newly announced Baxter Quality Award. To determine award winners for the performance recognition program, the company was using the first edition of the Criteria…
Mike Micklewright
Finally... the new version of ISO 9001:2015 has been released. I can hear many of you screaming, “Hurray!” Or not. More realistically, I’m sure many of you living in the kaizen world are thinking, “Yeah, so what? This stuff has nothing to do with real kaizen, and in fact, it often creates…
Quality Digest
Born in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, Wayne Visser, Ph.D. is, as CSRWire USA says, “. . . one of the most prolific, creative, and original thought leaders on corporate social responsibility.” That begs a question, however—should we use the term “social” or “sustainable…
Chad Kymal
The outward focus of an organization comes from defining the context, mission, vision, policies, and interested-party expectations. A company’s goals and objectives provide the lens through which this outward focus can be seen (figure 1).
Setting the strategic direction
An organization uses its…
Bob Emiliani
During the early days, late 1970s to late 1980s, there existed just a few small organizations to help people learn about and implement Toyota’s production system (TPS). They were led by people with decades of hand-on practice at Toyota and its affiliated companies. Some organizations, however,…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
As a sort of character-building exercise, I recently opened an unsolicited email from my health insurance provider. I was intent on doing a quick purge of sham, spam, and flimflam, and I figured this one would be no different. But I also know I’m biased against health insurers, so I decided to set…
Matthew Barsalou
I gave a rather successful talk on communicating design of experiments (DoE) at the recent ENBIS 14 conference in Linz, Austria. Things went mostly well, but it’s also fair to say many attendees had one major criticism: I didn’t explain why one factor at a time testing (OFAT) isn’t ideal. That…
Akhilesh Gulati
The big data revolution is requiring a seismic shift inside organizations, both in the way we build relationships and the way we make decisions. Each is now driven by data rather than intuition.
In general, decision making is accomplished via a thought process of selecting a logical choice from…
Arun Hariharan
In my previous article, “Is Poor Quality ISO 9001’s Fault?” I shared the example of the chairman of a large company who ridiculed ISO 9001, saying, “Even the municipal office of this city is ISO 9001-certified. And we all know how bad the municipality is. I don’t believe ISO 9001 can do my…
Bob Emiliani
There are many ways to improve your thinking skills. One way is by practicing critical thinking. Teachers require their students, from elementary school on through college and graduate school, to do research to gather information, analyze the validity of data, determine the strengths and…
Arun Hariharan
The chairman of a large company once ridiculed ISO 9001, saying, “Even the municipal office of this city is ISO 9001-certified, and we all know how bad the municipality is. I don’t believe ISO 9001 can do my business any good.”
The chairman had similar uncharitable things to say about other…
Barry Johnson
The adage “if you aren’t moving forward, you’re falling behind” is true more often than not. Regardless of the type of business, all organizations need to improve to survive. The last words uttered by managers in failing organizations are, “We’ve always done it this way.”
The key to long-term…
Donald J. Wheeler
The best analysis is the simplest analysis that provides the needed insight. Of course this requires enough knowledge to strike a balance between the needed simplicity and unnecessary complexity. In parts one and two of this series we looked at the properties of Weibull and gamma probability…
Ryan E. Day
Sponsored Content
I can tell you all about the California coast, its cultural and economic dynamics, my favorite hideaway beaches and eateries, and I can attest to the wisdom of never turning your back to the surf. I know these things because I've lived in The Golden State most of my life, but I'…
Mike Micklewright
I mean it! If your company can’t master 5S, try “1S” and stop! Stop the entire lean transformation until 5S is mastered in at least one process-focused area of the facility.
It’s a tremendous waste for a company to spend thousands, if not millions, of dollars on a “lean transformation” only to…
Tim Lozier
Sponsored Content
We’ve all heard it before: Change is the only constant. This isn’t just cliché but a truth that all companies will come to recognize. Change is the driving force behind improvement. And all of the changes that take place within an organization, whether to products, processes, or…
Dan Somers
As a person working in quality manufacturing, it’s probably in your DNA to look at a quality challenge and choose Six Sigma or something similar as the framework for getting to the answer. It’s also likely that you’re spending a lot of time gathering and analyzing data, applying hypothesis…
Gurdeep Mahal
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One of the most common misconceptions about ISO 9001 certification is that it’s only for big businesses. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The standards set forth by ISO are generic by design so that they may be applied to businesses of any size, type, and product line. As…
Darin Marcuz, Laron Colbert
This article describes a novel approach to calculating the financial aspect of overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), with the result referred to as $EE (as in monetary units). By using $EE, a management team readily can “SEE” their operation in financial terms. Employees are then better able to…
Mary McAtee
Technology is evolving more rapidly than at any point in history. We tend to think of seminal moments in history, such as the inventions of the steam engine or powered flight, as literal moments in time.
The reality is that the invention of the steamboat by Robert Fulton was only possible…
Eston Martz
When we take pictures with a digital camera or smartphone, what the device really does is capture information in the form of binary code. At the most basic level, our precious photos are really just a bunch of 1s and 0s, but if we were to look at them that way, they'd be pretty unexciting.
In its…