ABB of Västerås, Sweden, is a pioneer among world industrial robot manufacturers when it comes to using laser-based measuring technology to ensure robot precision. ABB, with an installed base of 125,000 robots, stands out as the world’s largest in the arena of industrial automation. And Leica Geosystems’ equipment is instrumental in a unique calibration method that offers customers exact robot positioning accuracy throughout the entire life cycle of their robots.

As Europe sets ambitious targets for energy that is clean and inexhaustible, wind energy is predicted to meet approximately 25 percent of Europe’s power demand within 25 years. Today’s wind turbines measure 70–150 meters and feature bladed rotor diameters of 100 meters or more, translating into a swept air area of 8,000–10,000 square meters. Wind turbines convert wind power into bladed rotor mechanical torque and subsequently into 1.5 to 4 MW of electrical power.

A joint project of NCMS called Volumetric Accuracy for Large Machine Tools (VALMT), partnering Automated Precision, Boeing, Siemens and Mag Cincinnati, has pioneered an innovative process and established new methodology in volumetric error compensation for large machine tools. Volumetric error compensation or VEC, is a true volumetric calibration that improves close tolerance and working accuracy of complex five- and six-axis machine tools throughout their entire working envelope.

The financials of an enterprise are a result of the integration and interaction of its processes, not of individual procedures in isolation. Using a whole-system perspective, one realizes that the output of a system is a function of its weakest link or constraint. If you're not careful, you can be focusing on a subsystem that, even though improved, doesn't affect the system's overall big-picture output.

At the 2009 National Association for Healthcare Quality conference, I gave a speech on lean Six Sigma simplified. At the end of the session, one of the attendees asked, "If Six Sigma is so easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?" My answer: Because we’ve made it too complicated, expensive, and hard to learn.

The Acme Widget Co. needed to increase revenue and profits, so they undertook an initiative to attract new customers: They launched a new advertising campaign and offered special deals to first-time buyers. They were initially delighted to see a significant and immediate increase in new customers. Their joy was short lived, however, as they saw revenue and profits actually decline.

When you think about equipment that is used for measuring and test activities, you think about important equipment that is used to pass or fail product but may not necessarily see its correlation with a supply chain. However, this very equipment—whether it is calibrated in-house or off-site—does involve a supply chain one way or the other and therefore adherence to suppliers and supply-chain requirements is imperative.

Ten years after the Institute of Medicine released its influential report "To Err Is Human" (www.iom.edu/en/Reports/1999/To-Err-is-Human-Building-A-Safer-Health-System.aspx), hospital care still has many safety problems, and the quality of care remains lower than it should be in many institutions.