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Home » Archives for Ray Harkins » Page 4

Ray Harkins — Active Contributor

Author of The Manufacturing Academy articles offers Reliability and Quality Engineering Statistics, An Introduction to Reliability and Quality Engineering, Process Capability Analysis, Root Cause Analysis and 8D Corrective Action Process, and Return on Investment Analysis for Manufacturing courses.


This author's archive lists contributions of articles and episodes.

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

What Reliability Engineers Can Learn from Quality

What Reliability Engineers Can Learn from Quality

a.k.a. “the dark side”

Reliability engineering and quality engineering are closely related disciplines that both focus on ensuring that products, processes, and systems are efficient, effective, and meet the required standards. As such, there are several ways in which reliability engineers can improve their skills by learning about quality engineering.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Understanding First Article Inspection

Understanding First Article Inspection

For the seasoned manufacturing quality professional, First Article Inspection (FAI) is a familiar process performed after the first production run of a new or redesigned part. But for those outside of or newer to the quality profession, the requirements of FAI may provoke a lot of questions and uncertainty.

In short, FAI is the process of planning, conducting and reporting the verification of a production process. This verification “closes the loop” between the customer’s expectations — usually described on the part’s engineering drawing — and the actual output of the supplier’s process.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins 2 Comments

Understanding Job Satisfaction with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Understanding Job Satisfaction with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

In a season 2 episode of AMC’s acclaimed TV show “Better Call Saul”, its lead character Jimmy McGill asks his assistant Omar to “take a letter” as he dictates a handful of disjointed phrases to tender his resignation from his lucrative position at the Davis & Main law firm1. During a pause between Jimmy’s thoughts, Omar blankly states, “I just didn’t realize how unhappy you were here.” Jimmy’s response, while puzzling and a bit comical, describes a concept key to understanding the nature of job satisfaction. He replies to Omar, “Not unhappy, per se. More like not happy.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins 1 Comment

The Window and the Mirror; A Framework for Building Credibility

The vast majority of professionals will never rise to the heights of leading a major corporation. But because of the public nature of executives and the companies they oversee, business leaders and their management methods often form effective case studies for those who manage smaller projects and organizations.

Over time, professionals who make a habit of reading trade journals and analyzing business reports can begin spotting both the useful and the futile patterns among these executives’ leadership styles. One such pattern, coined by the bestselling author of “Good to Great” Jim Collins, is called “The Window and the Mirror”.1

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

To Change is to Change Twice

To Change is to Change Twice

As a teenager in the 1980s, I was an avid reader of Omni, a now defunct magazine dedicated to the future—a far-off world filled with super humans, artificial biospheres and frequent encounters with extraterrestrial beings. Omni catered to armchair futurists like me with science and science fiction stories by A-level writers like Bernard Dixon and William Burroughs.

Future-oriented mass media such as Omni and “Star Wars” gives its consumers a plausible vision of everyday life for future generations. What these sources don’t typically deliver, though, is the path of change to get there. 

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

The Cost of Opportunity

The Cost of Opportunity

Everyone working in a decision-making role has at least an intuitive understanding of the concept of opportunity costs-the value of the thing you didn’t choose. Simply stated, when you say ‘Yes’ to one thing, you simultaneously say ‘No’ to everything else you could have chosen instead. And those things to which you say ‘No’ have a value that you’re relinquishing. When I was a teenager, I heard an older gentleman quip, “When I said ‘I do’ to my wife, I was also saying ‘I don’t’ to all the other girls out there”. That man understood opportunity cost.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Expanding your Opportunities

Expanding your Opportunities

As the quality manger for a tier two automotive supplier, I recently had the opportunity to hire a quality supervisor following the retirement of a long-time member of our team. Our company’s human resource manager and I worked together through the entire selection process. Given the status of our region’s economy and the recent closure of several large factories, I wasn’t surprised when our mailbox started filling up with resumes in response to ads on the popular Internet job sites. The typical respondent was a mid-career professional with over 15 years of experience in manufacturing that had either been recently laid-off due or who wanted to move up in their career.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Sharpening the Axe – Developing a Process Inspection Plan

Sharpening the Axe – Developing a Process Inspection Plan

Abraham Lincoln taught the value of adequate preparation when he said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” By training, quality professionals are often focused on verifying the correctness of a product. A traditional inspector at the Lincoln Timber Company might have dutifully marked in her audit log the date and time, the type and size of tree, followed by the comment, “Cut down.”

But Honest Abe would have advised her to take a closer look at the tools and process used to complete the job.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

What is Design Thinking?

What is Design Thinking?

With all the buzz these days about design thinking, some of you may be wondering what it’s all about. How does it relate to design? And what can non-designers gain from it?

Design thinking is far more than simply designing products and services—it’s an approach to problem-solving that can be applied to an incredibly wide range of applications.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

What is Probability?

What is Probability?

with co-author Mark Fiedeldey

The definition of the term “reliability” begins by specifying that reliability is a probability.  Therefore, the concept of a probability, while sometimes intimidating to reliability practitioners, is fundamentally important.

Probability can be defined as the extent to which an event is likely to occur. Just as an average is a measure of central tendency, probability is a measure of uncertainty in a particular event or outcome. That’s all … Nothing intimidating here.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins 1 Comment

Cautiously Confident

Cautiously Confident

with co-author Mark Fiedeldey

Working with data, we often choose a model to represent that data. We then use the data to estimate the parameters of the chosen model and we then calculate a confidence interval about the model’s parameters. The confidence interval gives us a numerical assessment of how certain we are, based on our data, of the true value of the distribution parameter we estimated.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Overcoming Decision-Making Biases

Overcoming Decision-Making Biases

In measurement science, “bias” refers to the systematic error component of the measurement system. Unlike other types of measurement error that are randomly distributed, a bias predictably shifts a measurement in the same direction.

For instance, I recently facilitated a “round robin” measurement correlation study with two other companies, where we compared the outputs of our hardness testers using the same set of test samples. While preparing for that study, I realized that one of our hardness testers, on average, tested 1.1 Rockwell B points higher than the reference sample. It wasn’t testing exactly 1.1 points over, but instead ranged from .8 to 1.4 points over across a series of tests. In other words, we had two error components: a bias of +1.1 points and a random error of +/- .3 points. To compensate for this bias, we shifted down the output reading of the tester by 1.1 points, leaving only the random error component in our tester’s output values.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

The Hard Facts About Soft Skills

The Hard Facts About Soft Skills

A version of this article was previously published in the December 2015 edition of Quality Progress magazine.

Last summer while visiting my hometown, I ran into Sam, an old friend who works in a senior technical position for a very large organization. In the course of our conversation, Sam told me about a recent discussion he had with his division’s manager about the possibility of moving up in the company. He was trying to find out if his boss would recommend him for a promotion to a particular supervisory level position that had just opened. His manager’s reply was provocative.  He said, “Sam, you’re excellent at your job. I don’t know what we’d do without you. But before I could recommend you for a team leader position, you’re going to have to work on your soft skills.”

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins Leave a Comment

Process Monitoring with Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

Process Monitoring with Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)

Aside from meeting specific quality system standard requirements—such as those found in ISO 9001 or IATF 16949—well-designed quality system metrics also can serve as meaningful indicators of the strengths and weaknesses of an organization’s various processes.

As a quality manager, I often consider how precisely our quality system objectives and other metrics describe the effectiveness of our systems. One metric I started using recently—overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)—has provided our management team with a composite measurable that encompasses three major branches of our operation: maintenance, production and quality.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

by Ray Harkins 1 Comment

Understanding the Geometric Distribution

Understanding the Geometric Distribution

Coauthored with Mark Fiedeldey

The geometric distribution is a discrete distribution often encountered in reliability work, which contains some valuable properties worth understanding. Let’s take a look at some of these characteristics.

This model is useful when trying to answer the question, “How many trials are needed to get a particular result?” So, the number of trials is not set initially; we need to figure that out.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Articles, on Tools & Techniques, The Manufacturing Academy

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