continuous improvement

Reading Time: 9 minutes

WE LOVE OUR POST-ITS! When I’m asked who our primary competitors are, I quickly and simply reply ‘Post-Its’

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The majority of times that a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is ‘required’ is often due to some type of threshold of pain being met. Someone is hurt, we’ve had an environmental excursion, we lost a lot of money in throughput or equipment damage, we violated some regulation, etc. Essentially, when the ‘suits’ show up, something bad has happened and we

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Should a Procedure = Practice?  I often ask my classes ‘If we follow our procedures to the letter, do nothing more and nothing less; would we optimize our system productivity, safety and reliability?’ The answer is NO. If anyone on this forum has ever worked in a union environment in the manufacturing world, they will attest that doing this (follow

Reading Time: 10 minutes

Grade Your RCA Effort and Print Out Your Private Report Card… Abstract: If you had to give a grade to your current Root Cause Analysis (RCA) initiative, what would it be? How would you come to that conclusion (grade)? The paradox many face with such initiatives is drawing the distinction between compliance and actual effectiveness. What would our RCA grade be based on? In this

Reading Time: 10 minutes

The Need to be a “Little Bit Bold & Outrageous” the man who taught us how This phrase ‘a little bit bold & outrageous’ was constantly used by my father, Charles J. Latino early in his Reliability career. Charles founded and led one of the first corporate, global Reliability Engineering R&D groups in the U.S. for a company called Allied