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No, I’m not talking about lipstick and blusher despite the tongue-in-cheek introduction. Cosmetic Inspection refers to the quality of the surfaces of products or equipment, especially those surfaces that are visible to the customer. Nothing is perfect; no material is entirely defect-free (especially if you look hard enough), so what scratches or blemishes or discolouration […] Ignore some of the more disparaging descriptions of what ‘M.T.B.F.’ means; it actually stands for Mean Time Between Failures (or, for products that can’t be repaired, the term Mean Time To Failure is often used instead). It’s the inverse of the annual failure rate if the failure rate is constant. And it isn’t quite what […] No, it isn’t a Madonna song or anything written by New Order for the England football team! In order to go somewhere that you want to be you need to know where you are now, otherwise how do you know in which direction to travel? A key element of many Quality Management Systems – for […] Poka Yoke (“poh-ka yoh-kay”), translated as mistake-proofing, was developed by Toyota manufacturing engineer Shigeo Shingo in the 1960s. (Its original name, ‘fool-proofing’ was changed because some people were offended by its implications.) It’s another preventive technique that I recently promised to explain in more detail. Poka Yoke is a simple but effective approach to reducing […] I worked in one of the large Cambridge-based technology consultancies for many years and was privileged to have clients from small, inexperienced start-ups to large, established mature enterprises. Sometimes we developed products from scratch but sometimes we were brought in late in the day to sort out a client’s project that had gone wrong. One […] I’d like to take an overview of what quality is… and why it’s strategically important to your business. What is Quality? Quality means meeting requirements. It isn’t about providing more features, or complexity, or performance that increases cost, takes longer to provide or makes it more difficult to use and may not be required. A […] Many moons ago I was blogging about Corrective Actions and said that, whilst they were invaluable, taking Preventive Actions was even better, as it should stop the problems occurring in the first place, but is considerably more difficult! I thought I should elaborate… It is obviously more difficult to say whether it will rain tomorrow […] It seemed like a good idea to contribute to the 2010 Windsurfing 4 Cancer Research event, having lost both an uncle and a friend to the disease recently and with a member of the family currently undergoing treatment. And yes it will be cold and knackering but it wouldn’t mean as much if it was […] I’ve just returned from a very interesting visit to a Contract Electronics Manufacturer in Shenzhen, China. Many of the things I have blogged about recently were clearly demonstrated including rigorous application of the 5S methodology along with good SPC and TQM, and we were made very welcome. We had an interesting demonstration of Hawthorne and […] The Hawthorne Effect was first described by psychology researcher Henry Landsberger in the fifties when he analysed work done decades earlier at Western Electric’s Hawthorn Works near Chicago. Western Electric ran a study to see if its workers would become more productive if the light levels were raised. This did indeed happen, there was a […] |
Welcome to my blog, which I hope you'll find to be an interesting mixture of real-world experience, ideas, comments and observations.
Tom Gaskell
I've worked in industry as a consultant, manager and quality trouble-shooter for most of my career.
After spending 14 years in a multi-national consulting organisation and 10 years working in telecomms design and manufacturing start-ups, I set up the Cambridge (UK)-based quality, manufacturing and business consultancy Primilis (http://www.primilis.com) in 2006. |
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