All Features
The cost of poor quality in health care ranges from 30 to 60 cents of every health care dollar. Until recently, however, there have been few financial consequences for health care providers’ failure to address the underlying root causes. This article describes Medicare’s new policy of not…
Quality Digest
Metryx Ltd., a supplier of mass metrology equipment to the semiconductor manufacturing industry, has announced that it has entered into a joint development program with Interuniversity MicroElectronics Center (IMEC ) of Belgium, a leading research institute. The program is designed to evaluate…
William Tandler
Back in the 1940, when Stanley Parker, Mr. GD&T, decided it was time to create a set of tolerancing tools that realistically dealt with reality, two objectives were near the top of his list.
The first was to find a way to encode the fact that as bores get larger they may become ever more offset…
Fred Mason
Happy New Year! One resolution many people have made is to cut costs. One way to do that is to manufacture in China. Just transfer your current manufacturing processes, use China’s lower-cost labor, and increase profits. It’s not that easy. If you rush into it you may find costs actually go…
Quality Digest
The four images (taken with scanning laser confocal microscopy) show variations in surface roughness of an aluminum alloy as produced by increasing amounts of strain: A – 1 percent, B – 4 percent, C – 8 percent and D – 12 percent. Mark Stoudt, Joseph Hubbard and Stanley…
Anne Willimann
The Airbus A380 is the most modern, spacious, and capable civilian aircraft ever. The project was launched in December 2000, christened “The Flagship of the 21st Century,” and developed in close cooperation with air carriers, airports, and air traffic authorities.
The A380 incorporates the most…
Quality Digest
(ASTM International: West Conshohocken, Pennsylvania) -- Manual 56, Guide to Friction, Wear and Erosion Testing is now available from ASTM International. The manual, authored by Kenneth G. Budinski, is a resource for newcomers to tribology, which is the science and technology of interacting…
Denise Robitaille
There’s a great scene in The Agony and the Ecstasy where Pope Julius, played by Rex Harrison, reacts to the paint dribbles from Michelangelo’s perpetual work on the Sistine Chapel. He’s processing out of the chapel after Mass and Charlton Heston, in his role as the great artist, has unceremoniously…
Quality Digest
(ANSI: New York) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently issued an updated list of consensus standards for use in evaluating medical devices before they are approved by the agency for market entry. The Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 authorized the FDA to…
Quality Digest
(Standards Council of Canada: Ottawa) -- The Standards Council of Canada has announced that Jacques Régis has began his three-year term as president of the International Electrotechnical Commission. Régis, who becomes IEC’s 32nd president and the first-ever Canadian elected to lead the…
Richard Lepsinger
Companies frequently develop vision and mission statements about being No. 1 in their industry, the great service they provide to customers, and their rewarding work environment. More often than not, these statements are so far from reality that they become joke fodder for customers and…
Quality Digest
(ISO: Geneva) -- A suite of new ISO standards offers practical tools to address the challenge of effectively managing water resources so as to provide access to safe drinking water and sanitation for the world’s population. ISO recently published three standards providing guidelines for…
Quality Digest
(ANSI: New York) -- The Japanese Industrial Standards Committee recently submitted a proposal to the International Organization for Standardization for a new field of technical activity on industrial furnaces and associated thermal processing equipment.This type of thermal equipment is used…
Quality Digest
(NQI: Toronto) -- Canada’s National Quality Institute will present “Improving Your Business Through Benchmarking Best Practices” on April 23–24, 2008 in Toronto.Participants in this workshop you may expect learn how to plan and conduct benchmarking as a strategic and operational tool to…
Bill Kalmar
In the last couple of months, two topics have become particularly vexing to me. First, how can we be environmentally responsible by purchasing E85 fuel when there are few service stations that provide this new elixir? Second—even more difficult to comprehend—why do companies eliminate products and…
Allen Huffman
With all the emphasis today on quality, and studies showing that quality is very important to the leaders of American business, why are so many organizations struggling to achieve and sustain quality systems? The answer is that managers have been inundated for 20 years with a parade of quality…
Quality Digest
(PowerSteering: Cambridge, Massachussetts).--PowerSteering, the only on-demand, enterprise project portfolio management (PPM) software used to manage information technology, Six Sigma, product development, and other enterprise initiatives, recently announced that its 2007 sales increased by 58…
Bill Kalmar
Now that I have your attention, let me explain. This year I will enter a very special age group, namely, those people eligible for Medicare. The magical age of 65 provides one with certain mystical rights—Medicare benefits, of course, which means we’ll be swimming in extra disposable income. Yeah…
Georgia Institute of Technology
Unique three-dimensional solar cells that capture nearly all of the light that strikes them could boost the efficiency of photovoltaic systems while reducing their size, weight, and mechanical complexity. The new 3-D solar cells capture photons from sunlight using an array of miniature “tower”…
Quality Digest
(CSPI: Washington) -- On several Web sites, the Sara Lee Corp. muses about how consumers are likely to mistakenly believe that many “whole grain” breads are actually more like whole wheat bread than white bread, and chides its competitors for not being “100-percent whole-grain.” Sara Lee helps…
Quality Digest
(NIST: Gaithersburg, Maryland) -- A team of computer scientists and mathematicians from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Texas, Arlington, is developing an open-source tool that catches programming errors by using an emerging approach called “combinatorial…
Quality Digest
(Best Practices: Chapel Hill, North Carolina) -- Many companies believe that they deliver superior customer experience, but far fewer customers agree with this assessment. Because the many elements that add up to the customer experience can have such a profound effect on business performance and…
Quality Digest
(The Center for Business Intelligence: Woburn, Massachusetts) – CBI will host the conference with the theme, “Implement a Strategy for Continuous Quality Systems Improvement in Accordance with ICH Q10 Guidelines,” January 24–25, 2008, in Philadelphia.ICH Q10 describes one comprehensive approach…
Quality Digest
(AHRQ: Rockville, Maryland) -- An array of toolkits designed to help doctors, nurses, hospital managers, patients, and others reduce medical errors was recently released by the U.S. Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.The 17 toolkits, developed by AHRQ-funded…
Georgia Institute of Technology
Research reported recently in the journal Advanced Materials describes a potentially promising strategy for encouraging the regeneration of damaged central nervous system cells known as neurons.The technique would use a biodegradable polymer containing a chemical group that mimics the…
