All Features
Craig Cochran
Lean means doing the most with what you have. It’s efficiency and intelligence. In the modern economy, lean is a fact of life. Management systems must absolutely be lean, or they will be abandoned as impractical dinosaurs. In the October 2003 issue of Quality Digest, we began exploring…
Denise Robitaille
We all love exceptions. They afford us unfettered permission to break the rules. They are the vehicles we use to get around “things”—whatever those things happen to be.
For those of us who attended elementary school in the sixties, the tradition of exceptions reaches deep down to our grammatical…
Quality Digest
President George W. Bush recently signed into law the Standards Developing Organizations Advancement Act of 2004 (H.R. 1086), providing new shelter for standards developers from treble damage liability in current antitrust laws. The approval amends the National Cooperative Research and…
Quality Digest
The International Organization for Standardization will develop a standard for social responsibility, although it will not be intended for formal certification. The decision was made at a senior ISO management meeting this June in Stockholm, following an international conference in the…
Quality Digest
Hitachi Computer Products’ American division will replace its quality management processes with MetricStream software, the company announced recently. The solution is currently being implemented at Hitachi’s Oklahoma manufacturing division, where it manufactures large disk storage systems…
APQC
In an effort to revolutionize the way worldwide organizations measure and improve organizational performance, the American Productivity & Quality Center recently announced a new alliance with industry leaders. The Open Standards Benchmarking Collaborative seeks to establish, lead and…
Quality Digest
The American Society for Quality awarded John E. (Jack) West with its Freund-Marquardt Medal for his longtime service to the quality profession and to the organization. West is a consultant with Silver Fox Advisors in The Heartland, Texas. He mentors senior managers to help them achieve…
Quality Digest
An online database of standards related to homeland security is another step the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is taking to improve defense procedures. The American National Standards Institute is combining forces with the DHS to provide a reliable resource to enable federal,…
Quality Digest
The Society of Manufacturing Engineers recently announced five keynote speakers for its upcoming fuel cell conference. The conference, which will focus on emerging fuel cell technology and its impact on manufacturing, will feature the following speakers: Ulf Bossel, PhD, director of…
Quality Digest
The Registrar Accreditation Board and the Quality Society of Australasia Ltd. have agreed to form a new global personnel certification body by the end of this year. The new organization will combine the auditor certification and training course accreditation of RAB with QSA’s…
Quality Digest
Cognex Corp. will host a series of free seminars designed to show how its vision sensors perform automated inspection tasks in the automotive, medical, pharmaceutical, food and beverage, and electronics industries, officials announced recently. The seminars, Understanding and Applying…
Quality Digest
The International Organization for Standardization recently announced a new standard to help organizations satisfy dissatisfied customers. ISO 10002 is a standardized complaints-handling process that can be easily integrated into established quality management systems—especially ISO…
Quality Digest
It took upward of two years, but System Improvements Inc. announced recently that it has developed its TapRooT software into an advanced management system. The new software is written with an SQL database that allows it to be set up for a single user working on a local hard drive, as a…
Quality Digest
FARO Technologies is putting its proverbial show on the road with a summer concert tour. FARO Gage’s Screaming For Accuracy tour will visit 15 U.S. and Canadian cities this summer, along with eight cities in Europe and seven cities in Asia. Members of the media, machinists and quality…
Quality Digest
Relex Software Corp. recently announced that its Relex FRACAS Management System 2.2 is now available to the public. FRACAS is an acronym for Failure Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action System. Relex 2.2 gathers and tracks failure data in a centralized database, allowing underlying…
Quality Digest
The Civil Aviation Safety Symposium has been approved for Federal Aviation Administration training credits and RUs from the American Society for Quality. Attendance at the CASS is now FAA-approved for 16 hours under 14 CFR 65.93(a)(4) and AC 65-25BU, and meets Board of Certified Safety…
Quality Digest
After he’s done with his daily duties as an electronics manufacturing service engineer, Bill Clarke uses his skills in creating workstations and computers to re-create a piece of American history. Clarke uses CoCreate Software’s OneSpace Designer Modeling solution to model the U.S.S.…
Quality Digest
StatSoft will hold a training seminar for its STATISTICA software program in Toronto, Aug. 12-13. The course is designed to instruct participants on how to take advantage of the software’s numerous statistical and graphical tools. Step-by-step examples will be given on how to enter and…
Quality Digest
The National Committee for Quality Assurance recently announced that it plans to establish a new certification program for Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set software. Many types of organizations use the HEDIS software to meet specialized data reporting and quality…
Quality Digest
Global purchasing executives from DaimlerChrysler Corp., Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. will speak about the importance of collaboration between automakers and suppliers at the Auto-Tech conference on Sept. 1. Speakers include Thomas W. Sidlik, DaimlerChrysler Corp. executive vice…
Quality Digest
Help is just a click away for executives, engineers or anyone else looking for an accredited lab to perform vital testing services. Launched in June, the Web site www.accreditedlaboratories.com lists labs accredited by A2LA, ACLASS, LAB, NVLAP and NQA-LS, among other state and federal…
Quality Digest
The Quality Group recently entered into an agreement with the authors of the best-selling Memory Jogger series and Sailing Through Six Sigma to supply content for TQG’s online e-learning solutions. Over the past decade and a half, Michael Brassard and Diane Ritter have authored and…
Quality Digest
Carl Zeiss Industrial Metrology and the Italian company Coord3 recently reached an agreement to develop and distribute bridge-type coordinate measuring machines. Both companies hope the deal will increase their profit shares in the competitive industry. For Carl Zeiss, it also presents…
Quality Digest
Pilgrim Software, a provider of enterprise quality and compliance management solutions, announced recently that Genzyme Corp. has successfully implemented Pilgrim’s SmartCAPA solution at its Framingham, Massachusetts facility. Prior to implementing SmartCAPA, Genzyme, a global…
Quality Digest
Caterpillar Inc. and StatSoft Inc. are collaborating to develop and market software solutions for the modeling, optimization and simulation of complex manufacturing processes. The software will be based on the integration of Caterpillar’s analytic processes with StatSoft’s STATISTICA…