Tag Archives: Quality

Customer Service Opportunities

Today was traveling on behest of a large corporation, so the travel arrangements were made through them. It all went about as routinely as could be expected on the last weekend before Christmas… for me.
Unfortunately the guy I am supposed to meet here had flights going through D.C. that were on a collision trajectory with [...]

Looking at the wrong stuff: America’s Best Hospitals: The 2009-10 Honor Roll

This news piece,
America’s Best Hospitals: The 2009-10 Honor Roll, originally got my attention because I hoped someone might be actually be paying attention to the things that make a real difference in our national debate about health care.
Unfortunately, it looks like more of the same.
This survey looks at things like technical capability – what [...]

How Many Production Decisions?

Whether in service delivery (including health care delivery), manufacturing, or any other production environment, your team members are likely having to make lots of decisions under perceived time pressure. Even with great visual aids, many of these processes are mistake-prone.
One of the reasons I like pre-kitting parts for a specific option configuration is that it [...]

Cool Email Mistake Proofing

My main desktop computer runs
Ubuntu Linux. The default email client is called
Evolution. A recent upgrade introduced a very cool feature. When I hit “Send” it looks for language in the email that might indicate I meant to include an attachment. If there is no attachment, it pops up this handy reminder:

Maybe Microsoft Outlook [...]

Is Quality Losing to Cost?

Tom posed an interesting question on The Whiteboard.
Has anybody else noticed that quality is taking a back seat lately due to the tough economic conditions? Things are tough everywhere, but I’m seeing more and more evidence of companies taking short cuts (to cut costs) where the end result is poor quality.
I’ll say what I think, [...]

Reprise (again) – Know Your Supply Chain

AP IMPACT: Chinese drywall poses potential risks

Although I hate to judge before all the facts are in, it’s beginning to
look like a huge set of customers got burned (once again) by quality problems from China.
Before I go any further, I have to say that I have spent loads of time in China. I have very [...]

A Morning Market

In past posts, I have referred to an organization that implemented a “
morning market” as a way to manage their problem solving efforts.
Synchronicity being what it is:
Brian asked me to fill in some more details with a post on “
The Whiteboard” and
Barb, the driving force in the organization in my original story, wrote to tell [...]

How Strong Is Your Immune System?

Each day you are exposed to an unimaginable number of viruses and bacteria. Any one of them has the potential to overwhelm your body and kill you. But your immune system detects the foreign body, responds, swarms the source of infection, defeats it, and learns so that your immunity is actually strengthened in the process.
Some [...]

Listening to the Customer vs. the HiPPO

Microsoft has an internal initiative to start running controlled experiments to determine what is actually better for users. I have no data (as I have no inside scoop from Microsoft, even though they are right down the road), but there is general opinion out there is that one of their latest efforts turned out to [...]

Dealing With High Turnover

Jim left a great post on
The Whiteboard way too long ago.
His problems seem to sum up to these statements:
Every valve is hand made one by one in batches through several processes.

…about a 10% turnover rate…Consequently we are always training new people…the supervisor needs to make sure the worker understands the job

My inclination is to [...]