Process Improvement To succeed today you need to stay ahead of the competition. Process improvement plays an integral role in the modern organisation and keeping up to speed on the latest happenings is vitally important. See what others are up to and consider if it may be of benefit to you.
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LearnSigma blogger and Six Sigma black-belt Rob Thompson offers an insight into Kansei Engineering including the process behind it and to what it can be applied. He also provides a case study on Mazda from the QFD Institute
Kansei is a Japanese term where the syllable kan means sensitivity and sei means sensibility, together it addresses the psychological feeling or image of a product. It is used to express the quality of an object for producing pleasure through its use taking into account subjective issues (emotion, affect, perceptions, sensations…) in user experience. It is sometimes referred to as “sensory engineering” or even “emotional usability.”
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Saturday 1 November, 2008 12:29 AM |
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“A camel,” states an old adage, “is a horse designed by committee.”
“Design by committee” implies a lack of vision or discipline, while “design by collaboration” relies upon crystal clear vision and multiple disciplines. It has to — market pressures demand that a company gets first to market and “right to market,” winning brand loyalty and not letting it go.
A company hasn’t the luxury of finessing a stellar design over time. It needs to be good, first and fast, industry experts say.
“Look at high-tech household appliances,” says Stacy Graiko, a Boston-based ethnographer and brand strategist consulting to Sentient Design Science (SDS) in Portsmouth, N.H. “There are always new companies coming onto the scene, creating a frenzy of competition. It drives those product design and manufacturing timeframes shorter. Another influence is the Chinese market, which can manufacture quicker and more cheaply than lots of other countries.” In 15 years of consulting to clients such as Snapper and Novartis, Graiko has observed product development timeframes to have shrunk by about half.
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Friday 17 October, 2008 04:20 PM |
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Manufactures could improve their engineering and process efficiencies by up to 30%, according to simulation and management software specialist AspenTech.
Mark de Guiran, AspenTech’s vice president of business consulting for EMEA, says that by modelling their processes and examining potential improvements, using its software’s ‘what ifs’, they could be increasing capacity while cutting costs – and improving profitability. |
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Monday 6 October, 2008 03:28 AM |
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Scoreboards have been as big a part of sports as measurements have been of business. But measurement by itself adds no value. A common but flawed concept is that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. It would be more accurate to say you can’t manage what you can’t understand. Measurement is nothing more than a tool to aid in understanding the current state. As Albert Einstein said: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
When I was a supervisor, before I earned the privilege of disrupting other supervisor’s lives, I endured a barrage of daily direction. This incessant direction-setting was based on fragmented information, flawed decision-making and misunderstood reactions, all derived from measurements but not from understanding.
This happens every day in organizations. An executive or manager asks a question about a safety issue and everyone immediately drops everything else to work on safety. Then a quality issue draws questions on the factory floor and the organization gets a short-term no-holds-barred focus on quality. One inquiry at a time based on some chart that’s a bit off kilter and the organization runs first to the cost side of the ship, then to the quality side of the ship, and soon the ship is just rocking with no direction at all. |
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Thursday 2 October, 2008 02:33 AM |
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Nissan Motor Company Ltd . on September 25 announced details of its quality improvement program "Nissan GT 2012 – Quality Leadership", one of the three commitments outlined in the company's five year mid-term business plan, Nissan GT 2012 announced in May 2008. The program aims for leadership in four quality areas, perceived quality / product attractiveness, product quality, sales and service quality, and quality of management.
In this program, objectives are formulated across six indices with seven Nissan Excellence Program (NEP) global teams setup to achieve these goals. Headed by a corporate officer, the NEP teams will address seven key issues including improvement in engineering quality, production quality, breakdown quality, customer service qualities in sales and service, countermeasure lead time, and supplier quality. The NEP teams already started preparation of "Nissan GT 2012 – Quality Leadership" in May, 2007 and moved into the operational phase in April this year. |
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Friday 26 September, 2008 11:15 PM |
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From cyborg housemaids and waterpowered cars to dog translators and rocket boots, Japanese boffins have racked up plenty of near-misses in the quest to turn science fiction into reality.
Now the finest scientific minds of Japan are devoting themselves to cracking the greatest sci-fi vision of all: the space elevator. Man has so far conquered space by painfully and inefficiently blasting himself out of the atmosphere but the 21st century should bring a more leisurely ride to the final frontier.
For chemists, physicists, material scientists, astronauts and dreamers across the globe, the space elevator represents the most tantalising of concepts: cables stronger and lighter than any fibre yet woven, tethered to the ground and disappearing beyond the atmosphere to a satellite docking station in geosynchronous orbit above Earth. |
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Tuesday 23 September, 2008 06:40 AM |
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Some critics say that many human resources departments and professionals are reactive, process-driven and service-oriented instead of being strategic business partners. Stephen Coco, associate principal of Intellilink, comments, “Everyone wants HR to do more succession planning, organizational design support – in short, ‘strategic HR.’ However, how do you make yourself more available to be strategic?”
The workload for HR is already overwhelming in many organizations and it may seem impossible to add any more work. Coco suggests that using some of the concepts from Six Sigma, specifically the “lean” process management philosophy, can help free up time so you can focus your resources on being more of a strategic business partner in your organization. This back door entrance to strategic HR helps you examine processes and tasks that might be eating up the time of your HR executives and professionals. |
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Wednesday 17 September, 2008 05:31 AM |
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Bangalore, IT major Citrix Systems will invest $200 million (Rs 8.5 billion) to expand its research and development (R&D) operations in India, a top company official said Wednesday. “The investment over the next five years in our second R&D facility in Bangalore will enable us to hire another 500 engineers in phases and ramp up our headcount to 750 by 2012,” Citrix chief financial officer David J. Henshall told reporters here. |
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Monday 23 June, 2008 06:24 AM |
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LOWELL, Mass– Dassault Systèmes (DS) a world leader in 3D and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, today unveiled important updates to ENOVIA Materials Compliance Central™ for automotive and high tech industries regulatory compliance
Built on the ENOVIA V6 platform, ENOVIA Materials Compliance Central is a business-process application designed to empower companies to adopt proactive environmental compliance strategies throughout a product’s lifecycle, from design to disposal. New “Eco-Design” capabilities enable automotive and high-tech manufacturers to meet the increasingly-stringent regulations mandated by the EU, specifically the End-of-Life Vehicle (ELV), the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) and the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) directives. |
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Thursday 19 June, 2008 11:12 PM |
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Intercim LLC , a global leader in manufacturing and production operations management software solutions for
advanced and highly regulated industries and Dassault Systemes (DS) (Nasdaq:
DASTY; Euronext Paris: No.13065, DSY.PA), world leader in 3D and Product
Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions, have signed a Memorandum of
Understanding focused on combined solutions for the aerospace and defense
industry |
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Wednesday 18 June, 2008 01:06 AM |
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Stacks of paper files overflowing from file cabinets and crammed in storage rooms managed thousands of orders at VirTex Assembly Services Inc . for 10 years.
The Austin manufacturer built the latest routers, laptops and other computer necessities but ironically used little technology to track orders.
Finally fed up with the clutter, President Brad Heath made a change -- one that has helped him grow the company. |
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Monday 16 June, 2008 05:14 PM |
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The phrase “Lean maintenance” lends itself to an onslaught of requisite punch lines …
“Our maintenance is so lean …
* “You can read through it.”
* “If it turned sideways and stuck out its tongue, it would look like a zipper.”
* “It has to run around in the shower to get wet.”
Most professional plant leadership understand that Lean maintenance has nothing to do with thinning out warm bodies, or more directly, reducing maintenance resources. Rather, it has to do with enhancing the value-added nature of our reliability efforts. |
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Sunday 15 June, 2008 11:50 PM |
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It’s Sunday afternoon . Thousands of fans cheer wildly as race cars fly by at speeds nearing 200 mph for 200 laps. They whiz down the pit road making pit stops, changing tires and refueling. Only, the tanks are not being filled with gas; they’re being filled with air. |
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Monday 9 June, 2008 01:41 PM |
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SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. LAI International, Inc ., a strategic supplier of precision components and sub-assemblies for original equipment manufacturers, has completed a Kaizen event that has reduced the cycle time of a key process in the production of a gas turbine component by 58 percent. |
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Friday 6 June, 2008 07:11 PM |
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MARAND Precision Engineering has attributed its winning of the 2008 Manufacturer of the Year Award to its investment in technology such as computer aided design (CAD).
The fifth annual Manufacturers’ Monthly Endeavour Awards at the National Manufacturing Week in Sydney saw Marand winning the Manufacturer of the Year, Exporter of the Year and Global Integration awards. |
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Wednesday 4 June, 2008 05:21 PM |
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Lawrenceville, NJ - RosettaNet today announced a new standard that can help manufacturers increase product speed to market by allowing trading partners to communicate new designs, design changes and engineering details in an automated electronic format in near real time. The new Engineering Information Management (EIM) standard helps ensure that design specifications will be communicated quickly and exactly as documented. Using the EIM standard, all documentation travels together so all information can be found in one place and one format, simplifying business processes, eliminating manual paper-based formats and reducing errors.
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Monday 2 June, 2008 12:53 PM |
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Engineers hold the key to solving the problems of the future, says Lord Browne of Madingley, president of the Royal Academy of Engineering
The engineering profession brings to society a unique combination of scientific analysis, and problem-solving. The key to engineering is its practice because the particular skills of engineers are developed by solving real-world problems. And the complex nature of engineering challenges means that engineers more often than not need to engage with communities, politics, economic realities and environmental considerations. |
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Monday 2 June, 2008 11:39 AM |
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"Then, you are looking down on our line workers," said a former director of Toyota's Production and Research Department , the epicenter of its just-in-time system. "If we make a production line simple enough that anyone can work at it, we are eliminating skills from our company."
I was interviewing him for an article about Toyota's production sites. And my question was if he is planning to change production lines so that even inexperienced workers can work at them without difficulty. |
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Saturday 31 May, 2008 05:59 PM |
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Dedham, Boston, United States and Bangalore, Karnataka, India,
ARC Advisory Group India , will host their Fifth International Forum, ‘Winning Strategies and Best Practices for Process Industries’ in Hyderabad on July 10-12, 2008. The Forum will deliberate on process industry challenges and lay the roadmap to successfully overcome them. The focus of the forum is on Process Industries, such as electric power, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage, chemical, oil and gas, metals, cement, and pulp and paper. Industry leaders from manufacturing companies, engineering procurement consultants, OEMs, suppliers of automation systems and enterprise solutions, and other stakeholders would discuss and deliberate on the appropriate competitive strategies and manufacturing models ensuring future success. |
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Saturday 31 May, 2008 07:46 AM |
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From an engineering perspective, this story has several very interesting areas regarding design and application -
A single mother of four from New York is accusing Victoria’s Secret of ripping off her bra.
Katerina Plew says that the lingerie maker’s real secret is that they stole her patented design for a better bra that can be adjusted to prevent the straps showing.
Ms Plew, 38, has filed a suit in New York seeking triple damages after discovering a display for the company’s “Very Sexy 100-Way Strapless Convertible Bra” in a shopping mall near her home in Selden, Long Island.
“It’s my bra,” she told The Times yesterday. “It’s my patent. I am the one who invented it and I had an appointment to meet with them about it.”
....click the link to read more |
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Monday 5 May, 2008 03:03 PM |
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PUNE: Should the engineering colleges in the state operate in two shifts to bridge the demand-supply gap for qualified skill sets? The private unaided institutions here have favoured such an idea in the wake of the state government's plan to introduce double shifts for polytechnic institutes from 2008-09.
The institutions have incorporated the idea as one of their recommendations in a document that is to be forwarded to the state government in a week's time. The idea was spelt out in presence of state minister for higher and technical education Dilip Walse-Patil during a meeting held on Thursday to commemorate 25 years of the government's decision to allow private institutions in higher and technical education.
....click the link to read more |
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Saturday 3 May, 2008 07:49 PM |
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