Tag Archives: Quality tools

Visual Instructions Example

Posted on July 4, 2007 by John Hunter

How to get people to actually use instructions for using your product: make it easy to do so. This blog post illustrates a well designed instruction guide for the Seagate FreeAgent backup drive. Simple pictures make it very obvious what … Continue reading →

Posted in Management, Quality tools | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Lean Progress at Label Printing Companies

Posted on June 6, 2007 by John Hunter

Continuous Improvement [the broken link was removed], an article from the Label and Narrow Web trade magazine (“for the narrow web segment of converting and printing”), is an article with some nice anecdotes of successfully applying lean thinking. “The dollar … Continue reading →

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Standardized Work Instructions

Posted on April 29, 2007 by John Hunter

Standardized work instructions are in important part of Deming and lean manufacturing management systems. Processes need to be standardized and continually improved (kaizen). Without a documented standard process variation normally increases over time as processes drift away from the desired … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Process improvement, Quality tools | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Lean Six Sigma Efforts

Posted on February 10, 2007 by John Hunter

Lean/Six Sigma: The quest for efficiency in manufacturing [the broken link was removed]: After years of working with lean and Six Sigma principles, many companies realize that, to continue improving, they need to get suppliers and even customers involved — … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Management, Management Articles, Six sigma | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Performance Measures and Statistics Course

Posted on January 20, 2007 by John Hunter

Performance Measures and Statistics Course [the broken link was removed] – free course materials from a 2 day training course by Steven Prevette. Topics include: Dr. Deming’s red bead experiment, operational definitions, selecting performance targets, SPC, theory of variation, case … Continue reading →

Posted in Education, Statistics | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Epidemic of Diagnoses

Posted on January 3, 2007 by John Hunter

What’s Making Us Sick Is an Epidemic of Diagnoses by Dr. Welch, Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Woloshin: For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system. True, and … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Health care, Management, Process improvement, Psychology, Quality tools | Tagged , , , , , | 4 Comments

Messiness is Good?

Posted on January 2, 2007 by John Hunter

Time to get organized? Not so fast [the broken link was removed], interview of David Freedman on Marketplace. Marketplace is a great show on PBS that covers economics and related matters. This interview, though, fails to inspire me. RYSSDAL: Is … Continue reading →

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How to Improve

Posted on December 12, 2006 by John Hunter

My management philosophy is guided by the idea of seeking methods that will be most effective.* There are many ways to improve. Good management systems are about seeking systemic adoption of the most effective solutions. What this amounts to is … Continue reading →

Posted in Deming, Management, Process improvement, Quality tools, Respect, Systems thinking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 12 Comments

Toyota Production System for Sales…

Posted on December 4, 2006 by John Hunter

Corporate profile: the Toyota Production System [the broken link was removed] by Sarah Perrin: Within Toyota itself, non-production personnel support the TPS approach. “We very much value the Toyota way,” says David Betteley, managing director of Toyota Financial Services (UK) … Continue reading →

Posted in Lean thinking, Toyota Production System (TPS) | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Meeting Like Google

Posted on September 29, 2006 by John Hunter

How to Run a Meeting Like Google [the broken link was removed], offers good advice like agendas distributed ahead of time, having a note taker… Instead, she encourages such comments as “The experimentation on the site shows that his design … Continue reading →

Posted in Google, Management, Quality tools | Tagged , , | 1 Comment