All Features
Douglas C. Fair
Just weeks after earning my industrial statistics degree, I hired on with a major aerospace company. My first “real” job entailed working with engineers and operators to deploy statistical process control (SPC) in a large machine shop. I quickly found out that the warm, coddling confines of a…
Scott Deming
Today’s world is filled with savvy consumers. They know how to find the best deals. They’re up on all the latest trends. If there’s a hot new product on the market, they don’t want to miss it. (Remember those iPhone lines!). A remarkable blend of exuberance and skepticism leaves many business…
Quality Digest
(ISO: Geneva) -- From shampoo to toothpaste to make-up and skin cream, hundreds of thousands of cosmetic products will now benefit from improved quality and safety, thanks to a new standard published by the International Organization for Standardization.Cosmetics are articles intended to be rubbed…
Quality Digest
(ASQ: Milwaukee, Wisconsin) -- How can education leaders ensure that schools reach their full potential and meet the needs of the business community? The 15th annual National Quality Education Conference explores solutions to these challenges through this year’s conference theme: “Building Better…
This figure shows the 3-dimensional dose distribution of the prostate upon completion of implanted seeds. Based on patient tests, Lee’s inverse planning system uses 15% fewer seeds. Photo by Eva Lee A California medical software company has launched…
Quality Digest
(FDA: Washington, D.C.) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently announced that manufacturers of certain drugs approved to treat Type 2 diabetes have agreed to add a stronger warning on the risk of heart failure, a condition that occurs when the heart does not adequately pump blood.…
Quality Digest
(HHS: Washington D.C.) -- As part of the efforts to design and establish a public-private partnership to succeed the American Health Information Community by fall 2008, HHS has issued the final white paper describing the vision for and attributes of a successor to the AHIC. The purpose of the…
Quality Digest
(ISO: Geneva) -- A new International Organization for Standardization technical report is aimed at reducing the number of patients harmed, or even killed, due to the misuse or malfunction of software for health care. In the past, health-related software was primarily applied to relatively…
Quality Digest
(NCQA: Washington) -- Preferred provider organizations (PPOs), which cover nearly two-thirds of all privately insured Americans, will be required to report on the quality of care and service their members receive under standards that were released on Aug. 1 by the National Committee for Quality…
Quality Digest
(Commonwealth Fund: New York City) -- As health care quality and patient safety concerns rise, the latest Commonwealth Fund health care opinion leaders survey finds leaders united behind several key reform measures: more than half (56 percent) support the creation of a new public-private…
Anthony V. Fasolo
As a regional director for loss prevention for the Marriott Corp. in the 1980s, I attended an “Insight To Time Management” seminar conducted by Charles Hobbs of Salt Lake City. The ideas in this article I got from that seminar and from more than 40 years of personal experience, with Marriott and…
Quality Digest
(Tufco Technologies: Green Bay, Wisconsin) -- Tufco Technologies Inc., a provider of contract manufacturing and business imaging services, recently announced that as of July 20, its employees had worked 2 million consecutive hours without a lost-time injury at its Green Bay facility.“We have…
Quality Digest
(ANSI: New York) -- Seven of the world’s leading retailers, including U.S.-based Wal-Mart, have agreed to rely upon food safety and quality management systems that have been certified as meeting rigorous standards for production, preparation, transport, storage, and handling. Agreed at a recent…
Quality Digest
(ISO: Geneva) -- A new ISO technical report is aimed at reducing the number of patients harmed or killed due to the misuse or malfunction of software for health care. These incidents have affected the reputations of health organizations and led to substantial legal damages.In the past, health-…
Quality Digest
(NIST: Gaithersburg, Maryland) -- Officials from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute recently signed a memorandum of understanding designed to expand significantly the scope of joint research and educational activities in…
Quality Digest
(Open Source Six Sigma: Scottsdale, Arizona) -- Open Source Six Sigma recently announced six new products in addition to their popular DMAIC v8.1, including the individual define, measure, analyze, improve and control phases as stand-alone products. In addition, OSSS will introduce a business…
Steven Ouellette
I spent my June and July articles beating up on the “sigma” index commonly associated with Six Sigma (and continue to do so over in my discussion board.) Let me sum up by saying that, while not wrong, “sigma” isn’t an efficient metric for accomplishing what we are trying to do in today’s business…
Quality Digest
Mitch Matheny, top, and Jon Krug (Nexenergy: Columbus, Ohio) -- Nexergy, a designer, integrator, and manufacturer of battery packs and chargers, recently announced that two of its manufacturing and quality engineers have earned the Six Sigma…
Quality Digest
(SigmaFlow: Dallas, Texas) -- SigmaFlow, a leading provider of best practice execution software, recently announced that The United States Internal Revenue Service’s Wage & Investment Division has selected SigmaFlow’s project portfolio…
Quality Digest
(ISO: Geneva) -- From national identity cards to security checks for air travel, a wide variety of biometric applications may now benefit from improved reliability and performance, thanks to the technologies described in a new technical report.Biometrics uses personal characteristics to…
Quality Digest
(NQI: Toronto) -- The National Quality Institute will present the 2007 Performance Excellence Summit and the 23rd Canada Awards for Excellence in Toronto on Oct. 24, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.Special guests will include Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEOs of Research In Motion,…
Dan Coughlin
If you have only $10,000 to improve your business, should you pour it into a marketing initiative or a performance initiative? I vote for improving performance every time. The long-term payback will be extraordinary.
The quality you provide to customers is the value that they receive from the…
Fred L. Eargle
Meet Chet, industrial engineer and manager of a small manufacturing department. He just came to this company a few months ago. This is his second job since graduation. He was a line supervisor for about a year at his previous company. He felt that job was too confining and prevented him from using…
Quality Digest
(ANSI: New York) -- “Building Consumer Confidence” will be held on Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007, at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C. ANSI will bring together a broad spectrum of stakeholders to address concerns about consumer goods—particularly imports—and to develop a coordinated action plan…
Quality Digest
(NQCA: Washington) -- Preferred provider organizations (PPOs), which cover nearly two-thirds of all privately insured Americans, will be required to report on the quality of care and service that their members receive under standards released today by the National Committee for Quality…
