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Find all articles across all article series listed in reverse chronological order.
Early in my career during a period of low commodity prices, a high-level executive sent an email to middle management with the following context:
We are not willing to spend money on new software, projects or ideas. If an engineer comes to you with an idea. tell them to look into how we’ve always done it and get them to do it that way. [Read more…]
As working at home and virtual teams grow, so does the need for effective online meetings. Having done this in our corporate and consulting life, including with international organizations, we thought we should share some tips with you. [Read more…]
“Good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from poor judgment.” Will Rogers
Much is learned by observing the mistakes companies have made in doing FMEAs. Based on the experience of over 2,000 FMEAs and working with many companies in a wide variety of applications, certain common mistakes show up repeatedly. In this article, I’ll share ten common FMEA mistakes and how to convert them into quality objectives.
There are basically two types of risks on a project. They are programmatic risks and technical risks. A project cannot meet schedule (hence cost) without resolution of issues that affect the schedule. Events that impact the schedule are programmatic risks. These types of risks determine the risk level of the project. The assumption in making this statement is if the schedule cannot be made, then the project will be over budget. [Read more…]
This myth, is about who should plan your work and there is plenty of confusion around this one. For the most part, I’d agree that planners should do this, but not all – see below.
First understand that all jobs should be planned and those plans should be saved as “standard jobs” (or whatever you want to call them) in a job plan library. Plans should be written once and then used many times. Each use, subjects the plan to what is happening in the field and therefore each plan is subject to upgrading with each use. Feedback from the trades in the field triggers that continuous improvement loop that keeps plans current and ready for next use. [Read more…]
A lot of us are heading back to the office, back to the plant or back to the facility and the game has changed. Lock-down has changed our companies and our jobs in different ways. Are you seeing more tracking, more monitoring, more metrics, less trust? Are you seeing more love, more compassion, more human-centered leadership? How has your job changed? Are you excited or anxious about going back to work? [Read more…]
People like the idea of working from home but how can we be most effective? This video provides tips from over 14 years of experience working from home full time. [Read more…]
The clock in my ’79 Porsche 911 works perfectly. I don’t remember the last time I set it. Maybe I made a small adjustment six months ago, a year ago, don’t know? A modern day quartz clock does this no problem, a mechanical spring clock might struggle in such a rough environment. So was it quartz or mechanical? the ’70s was when quartz came on the scene, so either was a possibility. First I wanted to find out if it was ever replaced or serviced. So what did I do? I contacted the previous two owners. One purchased it new in ’79 and the other owned it for a five year period before I bought it. Neither recalls it ever being serviced or having a problem.
Yesterday, I got a question from the subject matter expert (SME) for one of the equipment types for which I manage the capital strategy. He asked me who was in charge of the operating scope (when and how long to run the equipment). My first reaction was that it was supposed to be him. [Read more…]
The CERM Risk Insights article #262 by Tom Taormina and the comments by Paul Simpson and Greg Hutchins, open an important discussion on the future of the quality profession. This piece builds on that discussion. The discussion is important because the quality profession is being disrupted. Both the business approaches and professional organizations which have supported and advanced the quality profession are being affected by this disruption. [Read more…]
This myth is about who should schedule work.
There are three roles involved here: planners who plan the jobs, supervisors who supervise their crews and schedulers who create the work schedule.
Planning, as stated before, is all about what work gets done and how.
Scheduling is about when the work gets done. The practical constraint is that no work goes on a schedule until you are sure you have everything you need to execute that work when you schedule it. [Read more…]
The “D” is 8D stands for “disciplines”, and the 8D process is a problem-solving methodology employing eight sequential disciplines or steps that can be applied to a wide range of industries, situations, and disciplines.
The 8D process was developed in the late 1980’s by the Ford Motor Company to give its engineers a standardized method for dealing with design and manufacturing problems. Ford’s predecessor to 8D was called “TOPS”, Team Oriented Problem Solving. This is a fitting name to the methodology since it strongly emphasizes a team-based approach. In fact, the first of the eight D’s is “Assemble the Team”. [Read more…]
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a widely implemented metric that characterizes the performance of a plant, and is expressed as a percentage of the total planned or scheduled production time. OEE essentially measures your plant’s performance in terms of equipment reliability and availability. It is calculated as the product of 3 factors – performance, quality, and availability:
Development challenges are rarely simple. Is your team rolling the dice in hopes it gets resolved quickly? Do you start with two dice in your hand, yet are hoping for a Yahtzee? Understand the risks and impacts and make sure the plan is appropriate. [Read more…]
We have all heard and/or read the oft quoted “40% of all businesses experiencing a crisis go out of business within one year…”. Ever wonder where that statistic came from? For many years a colleague of mine, unfortunately now deceased, searched for the answer; to no avail. No one could actually cite the source for this statistic. Many refer to FEMA or the US Small Business Administration:
“According to a report from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 40 percent of businesses do not reopen following a disaster. On top of that, another 25 percent fail within one year”. [Read more…]
