Category Archives: Uncategorized

I spent many years in Southern California, so I have been introduced to palm trees, they grow quickly and everywhere. The amazing thing to me about palm trees is the root system – it grows out horizontally instead of deep down in the soil. This means that transplanting or removing a palm tree is aContinue reading “Setting down roots.”

I want to thank Cole Miller for putting me onto this from 1980. This predates Six Sigma, Lean, and ISO 9001. Eye-opening reporting on how the United States compares in flexibility and responsiveness to other countries; in this case Japan.

Nothing strikes fear into the hearts of managers and employees alike as much as the words Performance Review. Typically this is the annual kick in the groin delivered from management to employees telling them why they aren’t getting a raise, or what they did wrong eleven months ago. W. Edwards Deming famously wrote that theContinue reading “Annual Performance Review”

Let’s talk about SMED. Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) is the philosophical approach to changeover that says “What do we need to do to make this changeover happen in under one minute?” Odds are good that the one minute changeover is impossible, impractical, or unaffordable – but that doesn’t change the philosophy. The goal,Continue reading “Tools and timing”

I want to share some of my observations on continuous improvement philosophy in the United States.  Let me start by saying I teach and preach both Six Sigma and Lean methods. I have found the process capability tools inherent to SPC to be great tools to stabilizing processes and giving comforting data to quality. I amContinue reading “Flavor of the Month”

Everywhere you look in Engineering you see teams and companies embracing Six Sigma, and Lean, and Toyota Production System, and various forms of Continuous Improvement. It’s wonderful! The big winner in this is the customer, of course, who gets better products for less cost. Who could ask for anything more? I worked with an angryContinue reading “The Tactical Focus”

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis. That’s what FMEA is all about. This tool is used extensively in Automotive, Aerospace and Med Device because they have to. That fact has a bad habit of producing crap. When you tell you people they have to do a paperwork exercise as part of their design, they will findContinue reading “Chapter 15 – Critical Tools: FMEA”

(This is a sample chapter from “A New Mechanical Engineer’s Handbook”, due to be published later this year.) Loads of folks go to high school with the end goal to get out of high school and go get a job. They often spend a lot of time afterwards wondering why they can’t get ahead. TradeContinue reading “Chapter 43 – Long Term Career Growth in Engineering”

When you are in college studying engineering, you are offered the opportunity to become an EIT – Engineer in Training. They don’t go into why this is good, they don’t push it real hard. Then you get out in the world and find a plethora of environments nobody gave you a heads up about inContinue reading “Engineer as a trade.”

This whole Covid experience should have educated us as a people and as a country. There are loads of folks pointing to the political and control things we should have done, or did, or didn’t do. I’m not going there, though. As an engineer I am more interested in looking at what we could haveContinue reading “Lessons Learned?”