December Is For Cynics: IET Post Graduation, Pre Employment

To piggyback on the post “Why Do We Need To Know This Stuff” I too have been thinking about my future and my IET minor. I can think of many ways to apply Six Sigma, quality management, and other things I have learned to many engineering jobs, including those in my main major of Mechanical Engineering Tech. But when I graduate in December I wonder still "what am I going to use all this for?" Will I be applying Six Sigma projects on my mom’s cooking? Making sure snow shoveling is up to ISO standards? Examining Baldridge criteria on our Housing Community?

But thankfully for a month and a half,  I’ve found escape through my fraternity. I will be in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico working as an intern for the American Leadership Academy. While my family, brothers, and friends will be thigh deep in snow, I’ll be on the beach enjoying highs in the upper 70s, lower 80s.

But it won't be a vacation. I will be interning and helping with every little task to make sure the program runs effectively. One of the requirements is to issue surveys about speakers and the program at large. Can I use my IET skills to effectively wrangle the data into useable chunks? I sure can. I can use my Six Sigma training to find cause/effect situations, my training in various quality classes to do regression analysis and various charts. I can find out what speakers actually did well and which ones were just mediocre by removing outliers, people who always vote low, and other variables.

While IET might only seem to be applicable to manufacturing, plants, or service industries, I can applying it to a unique internship opportunity.

-J. Matt

Quality: Is it becoming assumed?

 Quality is something that is a given in almost all products and services. Quality is what makes or breaks a company. If you are not going to provide your customer with a quality product or service will you even have a customer at all?

I feel that in the eyes of the customer, quality is an assumed and rarely considered aspect of the product or service being purchased. When a consumer goes to purchase an item it is usually not noticed that a company is ISO certified or that there were Six Sigma Black Belts working on the project to create such item. For the most most part customers care if its faster, cheaper, better and in most cases the color they prefer when purchasing an item. I also feel that this assumed quality is not only implied by the customer but also by the managers and supervisors on a facility floor.

This may be a mistake. Quality is an aspect of design that requires a great deal of work and effort to implement it correctly and without fail. Due to this producing a quality product is not normally a cheap or easy process to implement. It can require a great deal of time and money and even the training and educating of employees. Yet it is a very important aspect of producing anything whether it be a simplistic product like a flashlight or a complex product like a car.

There is assumed quality in everything you see around you and this needs to be realized and noted that although costly and time consuming, quality is something you cannot get around and something that you cannot take short cuts to produce.

By: SW

Winners and Losers

Upon reading an article titled "Baldrige Benefits", I realized something very remarkable about the Baldrige process as a whole. As stated in the article "its not about winning or losing but how you played the game", to me this quote spoke volumes.  I found this quote to be very eye opening to the fact that not all companies that are examined by a Baldrige team of examiners are "winners" yet all gain the knowledge that the examiners find and conclude.

Based on this reason I would find it safe to say that all companies that enter into the Baldrige program are "winners" from the beginning just for being open, honest to expose them selves to the world or as Sandy Feola likes to say,  "open up their kimono". As an individual I would be nervous to have an examiner poke and prod as they searched through all my deep dark secrets and judged me bases of how well I do me. I feel that this is the same for companies that apply for this examination. Sure you have the opportunity to gain all sorts of insights and knowledge into your own company that can result in the positive changes and advancements that will keep you as a company in business, but at the same time is it overall worth it? I feel that in the case of a Baldrige examination it is. 

Therefore in the terms of stating your "winners and losers" for the Baldrige examination there are no such titles. It is not so much about being the best as it is about continuous improvement and recognizing that you can get help in evaluating and making your company better. Sure there is a fee involved and an "open Kimono" policy, but if you are willing to put up the the slight draft and the payment your job is a little easier. After everything is said and done all you have to focus on is the improvement and working towards the ultimate goal of being the best out of the best, being a Baldrige WINNER!

By: SW

Experience

If there is something I have learned while I have been in school over the past four years at the University of Dayton, it is that you can never experience too much and you can always learn from an experience be it a good experience or a bad experience. This is something my mom always told me but I typically never listened and dragged my feet when there was something I did not want to do.

My goal this year was to jump into any opportunity that I could to learn. Therefore I took the opportunity Sandy had given our class to attend the ASQ Dayton Chapter meeting. I would be lying if I said I was entertained the whole time, understood everything, and it was the best experience I have ever had. However, I did enjoy the overall experience. It gave me an idea of how I can still be involved with a group once I graduate. Also, the group of individuals that I was able to meet and connect with gave me great insight into what they do, how they got there, and where they are going with their career. I am always asking questions about people around me and their career/life journey.

Not only did it give me personal experience but it gave me a connection point for class. I was able to see how my quality and lean management class are used in the workforce outside of the examples given by my professors and textbook. The presentation given was about six sigma and how it can benefit people if it is used correctly. In class we talk about how it is so beneficial but I never thought about how it may be learned by individuals in a company and look great a ones personal title, but they may in fact not be executing it once they have earned their belt.

For me I tend to find most experiences a breath of fresh air. A way to see things in a new light. It gives me the opportunity to find what I think I want to do, what I know I never want to do, and what I never considered doing.

By MD

Perceptions

When we got married, my husband and I received a Black Forest German CooCoo clock.  As a pendulum and weight clock, I have had to wind it and reset the time once every eight days.  For years now, the clock has lost 5 minutes per week.  For years, I have been annoyed that the clock hasn't kept time better than that!  Five minutes a week! 

A few weeks ago, I read a Smithsonian article on pendulum and weight clocks.  The article discussed their construction in detail.  Different types of construction results in different levels of accuracy.  Due to the nature of the mechanisms, the very best pendulum and weight clocks lose only five minutes every eight days. 

Well, that was a show stopper.  For over 20 years, I've been annoyed with the clock for losing five minutes every eight days.  Then, I learn.  I learn that it is actually a very fine clock.  My perceptions have changed.  I am now very happy with the clock.

When we use the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Criteria, we are trying to learn. If we truly learn, our perceptions will change.  What have you learned so far?  How have your perceptions changed?

Why Do We Need To Know This Stuff

Most people have goals, reasons why they are doing a particular set of activities.  Understanding why we do the things that we do is critical for staying motivated.  When learning anything new, whether on-the-job or in a formal education setting, learners often ask why.  In business, saavy individuals also often ask why.  Consider the business owner that wants to know why his/her company isn't performing at its best.  Or how about company leaders who are wondering why their competitors were chosen to provide a particular product or service.  What about asking why some places are better places to work at than others.  And here's a question that might be more applicable to you as you begin your career: why should I chose to work at one company over another?

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award asks a lot of whys.  The MBNQA is more than a list of criteria, it is a training ground for asking why.  Smart business people use the MBNQA to help them determine why an organization is performing at a particular level.  Over the last 30 years, the MBNQA criteria has evolved into seven categories that describe what an organization absolutely must do well in order to be a world class organization.  Isn't that the sort of organization that you would like to be a part of?  One that will be able to withstand the multitude of changes and challenges presented by a global economy.  How will you identify such an organization during your interviewing and job hunting process?  How will you convince them that you are able to fit into a world class organization?

IET 321, with its focus on the MBNQA is interested in training you to recognize performance excellence in seven categories that are vital to an organization's success.  If you look closely (and check out those end of chapter 'Are You a Quality Person?' exercises), you will see that these seven categories are vital to your career success also.

Facebook at a national level

Many of us use Facebook to catch up with old friends, connect with lost friends, and share recent updates on our lives. This was what Facebook was initially used for. It was a way college students could connect with their friends that went away to other schools and even that evolved into bringing in the high school and grade school aged students and eventually our own parents! This social network phenomenon has become much more than a way to let ones social network know what is going on in ones life. Facebook has become a way for people to advertise their companies, create awareness of organizations, fundraising events, a way to stay up to date on current events from news postings and anything else someone can think of.

This is where an article I found on CNN.com comes in. The San Diego State University natural disaster experts used participants from 15 countries to research how people and social media would work in communicating crisis by sending out a test message about an earthquake. The ultimate goal was to see what kind of response and how fast the response would be using social media such as Facebook and even Twitter.

I thought this was appropriate seeing that we are using social media throughout the duration of this class. It is interesting to think that something that started out as a social network for college students has turned into a way for teachers and participants to track progress on a group project and has now started to evolve in a way to help to get quick response in the case of a natural disaster or other national crisis.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/social.media/09/24/emergency.drill.online/index.html?iref=allsearch

-Meredith Daniels-