Co-location describes dissimilar processes being placed near each other to facilitate flow. This typically happens when you are creating a product-oriented work cell on the shop floor, or when you use value stream management and have administrative teams assigned to specific product groups in the office. Like all things, there Read more…
Generally speaking, people view inspections as a good thing and a sign of good quality. The truth is that inspections are generally a sign of the opposite. Unless mandated by some legal requirement, inspections are an acceptance of poor quality. Think about why we inspect. We do it because we Read more…
AQQ is a non-profit based out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It lists its mission as: ASQ empowers people, communities, and organizations of the world to achieve excellence through quality. ASQ claims members in 130+ countries. It is difficult to find current enrollment numbers, but it reportedly had 80,000 members in 2013. Read more…
Eli Whitney (December 8, 1765 – January 8, 1825) is most widely known for his invention of the cotton gin. What is more applicable to Lean, though, is his focus on quality, specifically interchangeable parts. The legend goes that he was awarded a contract to make muskets for the fledgling Read more…
John Shook is a Lean author, and currently (as of 2020) the chairman of the Lean Global Network and a senior advisor to the Lean Enterprise Institute. He co-wrote Learning to See, the book that is most responsible for introducing Western manufacturing to value stream mapping. He also has the Read more…
Mike Rother is an author of several books, two of which are associated with the LEI (Lean Enterprise Institute) and received the Shingo Publication Award. Mike is also affiliated with the University of Michigan. His biggest contribution to the Lean community lies in his promotion of the concept of value Read more…
Dr. Joseph M. Juran (December 24, 1904 – February 28, 2008) is well known for his work in managing to produce better quality, specifically in post-World War II Japan. Because of the timing and his area of expertise, he is closely associated with Deming. Deming, however, emphasized statistics in his Read more…
The 4 P’s of marketing are a core lesson in any business education. They define the marketing mix strategy. The 4P’s of Marketing are: Product Price Promotion Place The origin of the 4 P’s is credited to E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960, so the concept has had some staying power. Read more…
Consumer’s risk, also known as beta risk or type-II risk, is the chance of a bad product being identified incorrectly as good and escaping to the purchaser. In technical terms, it is the act of accepting the null hypothesis (that the product is good), when the alternate hypothesis (that the Read more…
Tolerance stackup is the cumulative effect of the components of a product being skewed towards the same side of the specification limits. Tolerance is the range between the lower specification limit and the upper limit of a part. Imagine you have a product that lines three or four or more Read more…
Error proofing, also referred to as mistake proofing or poka yoke, is the art of building processes that make it nearly impossible to make a specific mistake. Error proofing is targeted at specific errors—they are not general in nature. This concept is predicated upon the concept that errors cause defects. Read more…
DPMO is the abbreviation for defects per million opportunities. It is a metric commonly used in six sigma. Presumably, if you are engaged in an active process improvement effort, you will have made (or will eventually) make significant improvements to your quality. For that reason, it can be difficult to Read more…