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Eston Martz
In part one, I shared a case study of how a small bicycle-chain manufacturing company in India used Six Sigma’s DMAIC approach to reverse declining productivity. After completing the define, measure, and analysis phases, the team had identified the important factors in the bushing creation process…
Mike Figliuolo
PowerPoint is the devil’s instrument, and when you use it, you risk becoming a musician in his demonic orchestra. All of us are required to give presentations in some form or fashion at various points in our careers. If you’d like to succeed in those efforts, there are three things you should never…
Eston Martz
Using data analysis and statistics to improve business quality has a long history. But it often seems like most of that history involves huge operations. After all, Six Sigma originated with Motorola, and was embraced by thousands of other businesses after it was adopted by a little-known outfit…
Akhilesh Gulati
Editor’s note: This article continues the series exploring structured innovation using the TRIZ methodology, a problem solving, analysis, and forecasting tool derived from studying patterns of invention found in global patent data.
Belinda started the My Executive Council (MEC) meeting on an upbeat…
Davis Balestracci
The various improvement approaches are, in essence, all pretty much the same. Any competent practitioner would neither want to be called a “guru” nor have any problems dealing with another competent practitioner of another improvement philosophy.
In my opinion, any approach should also involve the…
Donald J. Wheeler
Last month in “The Analysis of Experimental Data,” I presented a method for analyzing experimental data that was built on the use of the range statistic as a measure of dispersion. In this day of computers and software, why should we even consider using ranges in our analysis of experimental data…
Rob Fenn
O ne reason why ISO’s management standards are so highly regarded is that in order to claim ongoing certification, organizations must be audited continually to ensure they still meet the requirements of their chosen standard. This independent verification gives clients and other stakeholders the…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
This past November, three winners of the 2013 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality awards were announced, one in education and two in healthcare. Quality Digest Daily is fortunate that one of the winners, Sutter Davis Hospital (SDH) is practically in our back yard. This gave us an opportunity to meet…
Carly Barry
I had the opportunity to speak with a great group of students from the New Jersey Governor’s School of Engineering and Technology—a summer program for high-achieving high school students. Students in the program complete a set of challenging courses while working in small groups on real-world…
Harry Hertz
The results are in for the annual Best Places to Work in the Federal Government. The overall survey results are not surprising based on history, the current environment, and where many organizations—both government and business—have been challenged during recent years in the area of workforce…
Tom Kadala
With 90 percent of the world’s data created during the last two years, what can we expect our data vaults to hold two or even 20 years from now? Today we measure our lives in peta-bytes, but by 2020 estimates show a 2,300-percent increase in the bits and bytes that will define our lives.
How then…
James Lamprecht
Anyone who has done an online search using the terms “risk analysis,” “managing risk,” “risk management,” or any other variation will have discovered that the subject has been around for a long time and been covered by numerous authors. Still, the daunting challenge remains: How can one conduct…
Cognex Corp.
The produce industry is moving to implement a systematic, industrywide approach to closely track where fresh produce comes from and where it goes. One of the great challenges in this effort is the automatic recognition of a wide range of different package designs and hand stamps currently used to…
Christine Schaefer
Last month in Missouri, the Governor’s Conference on Baldrige in Education kicked off a large-scale improvement initiative that has the backing of key education groups in the state. With a mission to “facilitate school districts’ deployment of the leadership and management principles that have…
Tripp Babbitt
W. Edwards Deming is often given as the source for the following quote: “Managing a business on historical data is like driving a car while looking in the rearview mirror.” Deming actually borrowed the quote from Myron Tribus. The idea is that management should be looking ahead and not behind.…
Dan Nelson
Paul Batalden, M.D., professor at The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, once said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” This idea seems applicable to any system of human design. Phrased slightly differently using ISO 9001 parlance, “Every…
Davis Balestracci
For all the talk about the power of control charts, I can empathize when audiences taking mandated courses on quality tools are left puzzled. When I look at training materials or books, their tendency is to bog down heavily in the mechanics of construction without offering a clue about…
Rob Fenn
So, you’ve decided that you really need to embark upon ISO 9001 registration. Perhaps it’s being requested by a client, or you’ve worked at a company before that had implemented it to great effect. Or maybe you’ve just been convinced by the numerous studies that have elucidated the strong benefits…
Shimadzu
International standards ISO 6892 and JIS Z2241 for tensile testing of metallic materials have been revised with the addition of another test item: strain rate control.
When strain is measured with an extensometer, strain rate control has been added as a test item to the current stress rate…
Jim Frost
Ihave written a number of blog posts about regression analysis, and I think it would be helpful to collect them in this post to create a regression tutorial. I’ll supplement my own posts with some from my colleagues.
This tutorial covers many aspects of regression analysis, including choosing the…
Dan Nelson
Nobody likes to be told they’re doing something wrong. But if you were doing something wrong due to a misunderstanding, and it was actually hindering your operations while adding unnecessary cost, wouldn’t you want to know?
For example, let’s assume that you are using a tool consistently with…
Dan Nelson
Based on a reading of the ISO 9001:2015 Committee Draft (CD), the 2015 standard will further clarify and emphasize the requirement to apply a process approach. Although the requirement has been resident in the standard since 2000, this fundamental requirement has been overlooked often enough to…
Gurdeep Mahal
According to a report from the London-based Centre for Economics and Business Research, a dollar invested in improving an organization’s approach to quality management results in a six-fold return in increased revenues, and a 16-fold reduction in expenses. The promise of dramatic improvements is…
Carly Barry
In my first post in this series, I mentioned that Minitab reached out to our customers who are practitioners of quality improvement to better understand how they complete projects, what tools they use, and the challenges they come across in achieving quality initiatives. One area they said they…
Arun Hariharan
I know the CEO of a group of large companies who is a big believer in small, continuous improvements—primarily through ideas from employees on how to improve their own work or processes. This group also has Six Sigma experts, some of whom privately believed that small improvements weren’t worth…