Lemons are disappearing from the auto industry

My kids have had the good fortune of never riding in a really bad car. Even the used Carolla we owned years ago was very reliable. My parents worked through their share of crappy cars from the Vega with an unreliable engine block to the Fury III that was prone to stalling just as it [...]

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Better emergency rooms

Hospitals present a host of operational challenges. Patients arrive with a variety of ailments and the mix of work changes by the day or even by the hour. Resources are always limited and time can be of the essence. This is especially true in the emergency room. Sure there are challenges up in, say, the [...]

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Will Google ever be as reliable as Ma Bell?

So one of the challenges in managing services is managing quality. When you can’t touch something, it’s hard to know whether you have gotten it right. Of course, there are some exceptions in which measuring quality is pretty straightforward. The easiest examples are settings in which “quality” maps seamlessly to reliability. When I turned on [...]

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Midterm elections, voting machines and process improvement

Tomorrow we have midterm elections.  That is not just an excuse to see an excellent School House Rock parody, it is also a chance to talk about managing quality and process improvement. But first, let’s get that parody out of the way. The process improvement angle comes from a pair of NPR stories on voting [...]

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Hospital infections and processes

I have written in the past about attempts to increase the standardization of practices in hospitals. A recurring example in this area is inserting (and maintaining) a central line (also called a central venous catheter). This example is appealing for two reasons.  First, it is both commonly used and a frequent source of infection. Basically, [...]

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A car company that has grown through the recession

Quick name the world’s fourth largest car maker! What did you come up with? Ford? Renault?  Would you believe that the right answer is Hyundai? If like me you associate Hyundai with its earliest entries in the US market (like the Excel), that might surprise you.  Even if you can look past those woeful models, [...]

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Who to blame for health care errors

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article a few weeks ago about how hospitals respond to errors (New Focus on Averting Errors: Hospital Culture, Mar 16). The article suggests that a shift in the mindset of tackling these occurrences is brewing: Hospitals are taking what might seem like a surprising approach to confronting the [...]

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Parrots and mortgages

The Wall Street Journal had a surprising picture on Thursday’s front page: Why a lady and a parrot?  It’s not even stippled! What’s with that? Is it just evidence that Rupert Murdoch really is out to dumb down one of the great American media outlets? It turns out that the story behind the goofy  picture [...]

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Toyota gets ready to fight

An interesting semi-defense of Toyota in the Washington Post written by a mechanical engineering major turned journalist (Why it’s so hard for Toyota to find out what’s wrong, Mar 7). His key argument is that Congress doesn’t understand what it takes to figure out what is driving Toyota’s problems. It was made painfully clear at [...]

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The fabric of fashion

It’s apparently fashion week in Milan which gets us a fun article on Italian textile makers (In Italy’s Mills, a New Spin Emerges, Wall Street Journal, Feb 25).  There have been some interesting changes in the apparel industry in the last decade or so.  Cheap now truly rules.  Indeed, some argue that fast fashion retailers [...]

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