5S involves five terms that can help businesses organize their workplace operations.

In these days of tightened belts and lean manufacturing principles, manufacturers are pushed to perform better, offer higher quality, and lower prices--all at the same time.

Quite often in manufacturing, an inspection department is treated primarily as a necessary overhead expense required to assure compliance to customer specifications. Sometimes an inspection department may also be treated as a profit center for compliance to a variety of test protocols dictated by external agencies, or perhaps internal procedures to demonstrate traceability to certain quality standards. 

Garbage in, garbage out. It’s a term born in the early days of the computer and computer programming. The phrase, and its popular acronym, GIGO, are said to have been taken from the business strategies of LIFO and FIFO—last in, first out and first in, first out—as it pertains to inventory management.

“Lean isn’t going to help you if your quality is bad. Why just make bad stuff faster?”

Quality sat down with Eric Hayler, past chair of ASQ and Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, BMW Manufacturing, to discuss his work as ASQ’s 2017 chair and his work now as past chair.

It did not happen quickly but advocates of Six Sigma and lean methodologies have worked together to achieve a partnership of both approaches.

Lean and agile can work alone but they can be very powerful together. Reducing waste keeps your company sustainable. Being agile keeps your company ahead of the competition.

To be Lean, in process improvement speak, is to maximize customer value by eliminating waste. This means that an organization can create more value for customers with fewer resources if they can understand customer value and focus key processes to continually improve.

Deposition Sciences appointed Jerry Camotta as its new operations manager.