on Tools & Techniques

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.”

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.

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.

Coauthored with Mark Fiedeldey

The binomial distribution is a discrete distribution useful for estimating the probability of success or failure when these are the only two possible outcomes. Thus, the prefix, “Bi”. Understanding the binomial distribution — how it’s used and under what conditions – is therefore a valuable analytical tool for reliability engineers.

One of the most important skill sets you could master to prepare you for business leadership is sales and negotiation. Some of you may be thinking, “Gosh, I’m not going into sales or marketing. I can skip this blog post!”

But I want to assure you, regardless of your field, sales and negotiation are part of it. 

If you’re working in operations and want to expand your department, you need to sell that idea to your executive staff. If you’re a designer with a bright idea for a new line, you’re going to have to sell that idea to the people you work with … to the other managers, engineers and stakeholders in your organization.

Regardless of your technical background, the higher you move within an organization, the more you need to understand about the organization’s finances.

Accounting is often referred to as the language of business. And I believe it. Before I studied corporate finance and accounting, I often felt lost. I didn’t speak the language. I remember sitting in a board meeting where other managers and board members were reviewing the financials for the organization. And I simply didn’t understand what all the numbers meant. By the time I starting making some simple two connections, the meeting had moved onto the next topic.