product quality – OM in the News

Inside Your Running Shoe

Could top quality products be within everyone’s reach?

Think how nice it would be if all the little defects inside your running shoes could be identified and eliminated before you buy them. No more rubbing, burning, itching, aching. This attention to design and quality control may soon become the norm even for ordinary consumer products. Lumafield has designed a CT scanner that enables engineers to see inside their products and identify problems and opportunities for improvement. Their product may not be […]

By Corinne M. Karuppan, Ph.D.|2022-05-03T20:52:52+00:00May 6, 2022|Tags: competitivness, product design, product quality, productivity, quality assurance, respsonsive supply chain design, value analysis|

NAND Memory Loss due to Contamination

As if the shortage of computer chips was not enough, flash memory is now also in short supply.

Contamination issues were reported in two factories making NAND flash memory for Western Digital and Xioxia. The contamination affected a large amount of the production output, further disrupting the supply chain of solid-state drives and NAND flash-based products. The costs of poor quality are substantial for both companies. Combined with a squeezed supply, these higher costs will likely push prices […]

By Corinne M. Karuppan, Ph.D.|2022-03-02T22:04:59+00:00March 4, 2022|Tags: costs of quality, lead time, product quality, quality control, short term capacity, shortage, six sigma|

Generic Pills Can Be Hard to Swallow

The drug production system is broken. Fixing it requires putting quality first.

Generic drugs are supposed to be affordable alternatives to name-brand medications. Contrary to what the F.D.A. claims, a pill is not always a pill. In the quest for ever-cheaper generic drugs, quality has sometimes – not always! – been sacrificed both in the US and abroad, and without a transparent rating system, health consumers are kept in the dark. Furthermore, the reliance on a few foreign suppliers of active […]

By Corinne M. Karuppan, Ph.D.|2021-09-29T18:49:34+00:00October 5, 2021|Tags: process capability, product quality, quality control, shortage, six sigma, sourcing|

Made in Italy at Amazon

The pandemic has been a boon for Amazon. Worldwide.

Even in places like Italy where people prefer to shop in stores, Amazon has been able to assume a dominant role during the pandemic. When stores were forced to close, Amazon filled a genuine need for goods. As the economy reopened, the appeal of convenience triggered a sudden, but durable, consumer behavior shift. Can small merchants that depend on the “old world” image rethink their operations to survive e-commerce? Based on the […]

By Corinne M. Karuppan, Ph.D.|2020-10-06T22:19:13+00:00October 8, 2020|Tags: product quality, service quality, strategy|