A workshop focusing on using the senses as quality tools will be held June 6–10 in Florida. The course will be facilitated by Nancy McDonald, president of M&M Consulting & Laboratory Inc. She will show participants how to use their senses of taste, smell and sight to evaluate the overall quality of food and beverages.

A consultant who helped Xerox Business Services win a Baldrige Award will be speaking about organizational performance improvement at an upcoming seminar.

Minitab recently started offering its software to academic customers at discounted rates through e-academy.com, an online provider of brand-name software. The site offers MINITAB 14 in multiple languages, MINITAB French 13 and Minitab Quality Companion for as little as $29.99 per semester. Free, fully functional 30-day demos and perpetual-use versions of Minitab software are also available.

A recent study shows that hospital administrators are heeding advice to integrate and embrace quality improvement efforts.Researchers from the Yale School of Medicine interviewed 100 directors from a randomly selected cross-section of all acute-care hospitals and compared their responses with those from a similar study performed in 2001.

A new book concludes that medical practitioners need a better grasp of quality management principles, methods, programs, systems and experiences. The issue is the topic of a recently published book, Core Curriculum for Medical Quality Management, (Jones and Bartlett Publishers Inc., 2005). It features the contributions of nationally recognized leaders in medical quality management and encourages greater accountability within the industry.

In an effort to improve the quality of instruction in its classrooms, the Los Alamos Public School District in New Mexico has adopted the Baldrige Award criteria. The Los Alamos Monitor reported the Baldrige Award criteria adoption has already been met with some success.

RABQSA International and the National Quality Institute of Canada have joined forces to promote personnel training and certification throughout Canada. The agencies will temporarily allow people and organizations currently registered to standards by NQI to also be registered to one or more of RABQSA’s certification schemes.

Rath & Strong recently released a new pocket guide for practitioners of GE Work-Out, a methodology that helps improve Six Sigma and lean projects. GE Work-Out was developed by General Electric as a companion to already-established quality improvement programs. It creates a method to deal with important problems not suitable for lean Six Sigma or Six Sigma, integrates within the DMAIC process and creates behavioral habits that improve projects.

User satisfaction with federal e-government Web sites leveled off after nine months of steady improvement, according to the latest quarterly findings of the American Customer Satisfaction Index. The new data shows a slight decline to an aggregate government Web site score of 71.9 from the December index score of 72.1 on the ACSI’s 100-point scale. The index indicates that agencies could improve by focusing on specific citizen priorities.

APQC and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals are collaborating to provide no-cost supply chain measurements for benchmarking. The organizations developed and are promoting online supply chain surveys as a reliable and cost-effective way for organizations to learn how their performance measures up against that of their peers.