Quality Digest

Teams are complicated, complex structures because they are comprised of individuals with different personalities, biases, strengths, and weaknesses. Before people can form into an effective team, they must first learn to work together. Participants must work through personal differences, find strengths to build on, and balance collective commitments against the demands of individual job requirements.

Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurers, is paying increasing attention to climate change, according to Carol Matlack, author of the special report “How Munich Re Assesses Risk,” published in the Dec. 2, 2010 issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Story update 2/2/2012: We inadvertently used the wrong graphic for the Third Estimates. This has been fixed.

BusinessAssurance.com, the world’s first online management systems community, which is sponsored by Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance Inc., brings to you an interview with Mike Toffel, a leading management systems expert and an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Toffel discusses some of the outputs of his research into corporate environmental sustainability and specifically discusses the importance and benefits of ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and SA8000.

I don’t know how much is spent on the benchmarking industry, but companies and governments seem to spend an awful lot on it. The idea of benchmarking seems plausible enough—compare your organization against competitors, and voilá… you can provide many years’ worth of projects and plans to bridge the gap. Many organizations choose to do so, but is it really worthwhile?

No.

The objective of all improvement projects should be to improve the effectiveness, or the efficiency, of the core processes. Everything else should be secondary to this objective. If you improve the efficiency of a support process, or even a portion of the core process, but at the same time lower the overall efficiency of the core process, what have you gained?

This is part two in a three-part series where we assess what information we can obtain from the various estimates of quarterly GDP growth using statistical analysis and a control chart. Read part one here, and part three here.

There are substantial changes in the third edition of IEC 60601-1, and understanding all aspects of them is the key to turning the standard into a benefit for medical-device manufacturers.

When the parts you manufacture pass through numerous processes such as deep hole drilling, machining, hobbing and grinding, and coating, a coordinate measuring machine (CMM) is essential when your customers require 100-percent in-process and final inspection.

Not long ago, MIT political scientist Suzanne Berger was visiting a factory in western Massachusetts, a place that produces the plastic jugs you find in grocery stores. As she saw on the factory floor, the company has developed an innovative automation system that has increased its business: Between 2004 and 2008, its revenues doubled, and its workforce did, too.