All Features
Denise Robitaille
Years ago, when my kids were in middle school, I volunteered as a coach for the Future Problem Solvers, a competitive academic program designed to help young people develop the creative thinking skills they will need as tomorrow’s leaders.While the bulk of the time was spent teaching…
Quality Digest
Certification bodies around the world have until Sept. 15, 2008 to implement ISO/IEC 17021:2006, the new standard designed to increase confidence in management system certification. The International Accreditation Forum set the deadline in consultation with the International Organization…
Quality Digest
COLA, a clinical laboratory education and consultation accreditation organization, recently received renewed approval from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to accredit laboratories to meet requirements set by the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments. A…
Quality Digest
Eighty-three percent of organizations contacted suffer from problems caused by poor master data, according to “Master Data Management: Consensus-Driven Data Definitions for Cross-Application Consistency,” a report issued by The Data Warehousing Institute.TDWI, a worldwide provider of…
Quality Digest
EFQM will present a workshop March 5 and 6 dealing with best practice methods of process improvement, assessing the effectiveness of an organization’s process improvement approach and how these approaches can fit into different organizational cultures.This workshop will show how…
Quality Digest
Siemens Medical Solutions recently completed the EUR 4.2 billion ($5.5 billion) acquisition of Bayer Healthcare’s diagnostic division and merged it with Diagnostic Products Corp., creating Siemens Medical Solutions Diagnostics.The new wholly owned subsidiary of Siemens Medical Solutions…
Mike Micklewright
In the past several months, registrar auditors strongly recommended to three former or current clients that they develop and install turtle diagrams for each of their processes. Two auditors from one registrar actually taught a former client how to develop a turtle diagram during a surveillance…
Quality Digest
Eighty-three percent of organizations contacted suffer from problems caused by poor master data, according to “Master Data Management: Consensus-Driven Data Definitions for Cross-Application Consistency,” a report issued by The Data Warehousing Institute.TDWI, a worldwide provider of…
Quality Digest
Pepperweed Consulting, which provides various process improvement and Six Sigma consulting services, has announced the acquisition of JCube Consulting. JCube Consulting specializes in information technology services, and has headquarters in San Diego. The compay also produces the JCube…
Quality Digest
Gen. Colin Powell, former secretary of state, will deliver the keynote address at the upcoming 8th Annual Six Sigma Summit,presented by IQPC.The event will be held Jan. 22–25 at the Hyatt Regency Miami, and will include a full day of events tailored toward the needs of Six Sigma…
Quality Digest
MoreSteam.com recently released software that’s designed to track lean Six Sigma projects. TRACtion is a Web-based interactive project management tool that helps lean Six Sigma teams reduce project cycle time through enhanced communication, easy access to analytical tools, project road…
Praveen Gupta
Six Sigma was officially launched January 1, 1987, at Motorola, and it took more than nine months to make Six Sigma real. Twenty years later, Six Sigma has grown from a good baby methodology into a mature system that affects thousands of corporations and millions of people and that saves billions…
Quality Digest
Bill Evanson, a Six Sigma Black Belt and former Kodak supply chain executive, recently accepted a position as vice president and general manager of a warehousing and product delivery company. Evanson will manage JDF Distribution’s facility in Texas, which provides warehousing and…
Quality Digest
The Turkish Society for Quality (KalDer) held its 15th Annual Quality Congress in Istanbul, Turkey, in late November. More than 2,200 quality professionals attended the three-day event, including Grace Duffy, vice president of the American Society for Quality. The conference featured…
Quality Digest
In November 2006, the Pentagon sent a letter to Sikorsky Aircraft criticizing its management for quality control and delays in the production of Black Hawk helicopters. Sikorsky, a division of United Technologies, subsequently submitted a plan for addressing the concerns in a Level III…
Quality Digest
The 2007 Baldrige criteria for performance excellence in education and health care, and in business and nonprofit organizations, were recently published on the Baldrige National Quality Program Web site, along with the 2007 Baldrige award application forms.The Baldrige criteria help…
Quality Digest
EFQM will offer a workshop on May 10–11 designed to allow business, process and quality managers to meet like-minded people, to learn new ways to define their innovation agenda, and to measure their innovation performance and improve their competitiveness.Innovation brings added value…
Quality Digest
Accelper Consulting recently published ISO 9000:2000: An Implementation Guide (BookSurge Publishing, 2006) to help small to large corporations achieve an effective quality management system.The book contains a summary of ISO standards requirements and methods for conducting value-added…
Quality Digest
Trying to raise awareness of and promote standardization, the International Organization for Standardization recently introduced the ISO Award for Higher Education in Standardization to encourage a positive appreciation of and involvement in standardization among children—the future…
Bill Kalmar
Those of us in the acting profession hear those words regularly at the end of a particularly grueling day from a director attempting to extract perfection from a group of actors. (I’ll discuss my own celluloid exploits later).It’s appropriate to utter similar words at the end of 2006—a grueling,…
Quality Digest
Abbott Laboratories has completed its acquisition of Kos Pharmaceuticals Inc., which specializes in treatments for cardiovascular, metabolic and respiratory diseases, and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Abbott Labs. Abbott reports that the acquisition broadens its portfolio of products…
T. J. Becker
In our increasingly wireless world, the air is chock-full of electromagnetic signals carrying data from one place to another. Yet, while new wireless technologies advance our options in security, commerce and entertainment, they also produce interference that may cause problems for…
Quality Digest
The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) recently kicked off a multimedia campaign to raise public awareness of diabetes. Nearly 21 million Americans know they have diabetes, and as many as 6.2 million more have it and don’t know that they have it. The purpose of…
Quality Digest
Pharmaceutical services company i3 has entered the next phase of its global expansion which includes organic and acquired growth in India, Latin America and Europe. Coupled with acquisitions in Canada and Asia Pacific that i3 made earlier this year, the additions will help i3’s…
Quality Digest
Three out of four life sciences companies polled in a recent survey said that their current documentation practices are inefficient. The survey was conducted in November and focused on key areas of life sciences firms that are heavily involved with complex documentation practices,…
