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Quality Digest
George Eckes, who is widely credited with helping to formulate and clarify Six Sigma’s use in varied industries, recently joined the faculty of Villanova University’s online Six Sigma program. Eckes, founder and president of Eckes & Associates Inc., has more than 20 years of…
Quality Digest
The implementation of Six Sigma in financial services is the topic of a new book written by two leading consultants. Six Sigma for Financial Services: How Leading Companies are Driving Results Using Lean, Six Sigma and Process Management (McGraw-Hill, 2007), by Roland Hayler and Michael…
Quality Digest
Oriel Inc. recently published “Achieving Lean Success: A Pathway for Implementation,” which unites lean concepts with specific tools and techniques in a manner designed to make it easy to implement lean throughout an organization. The paper includes an “Ask an Expert” feature that’s…
Quality Digest
iSixSigma magazine recently named software from PowerSteering Software Inc. as the top solution for project tracking. The magazine cited PowerSteering’s best-in-class home page, multiple methodology support capabilities and feature-search capability as key performance indicators in the…
Quality Digest
e-TQM College and the University of California at Berkeley’s Management of Technology new joint program will include staff exchanges, mentorship and executive education in total quality management. The Leadership Excellence and Advancement Program, started with $500,000 from e-TQM…
Douglas C. Fair
Last month’s column, “The Top 10 SPC Mistakes,” outlined five mistakes to avoid when building a successful statistical process control (SPC) system. Here they are:
10. Training everyone 9. Charting everything 8. Segregating control charts from manufacturing 7. “Pinching” the SPC coordinator 6…
Quality Digest
True Opportunity software calculates the profit potential of manufacturing operations and breaks down this total by reason, allowing an organization to focus on the problems or opportunities that will realize the greatest results.“Our software evaluates opportunities in terms of profit,…
Quality Digest
Ipanema Technologies has launched a universal indicator of application performance over a wireless area network, Application Quality Score.AQS is a universal indicator that can be applied to all types of applications, data-transfer such as back-up, interactive such as Citrix or real-time…
Quality Digest
International Water-Guard Industries Inc., a Canadian aerospace company, recently got its AS9100 certificate of registration. The AS9100 standard specifies quality management system requirements for aerospace industry suppliers.“We had a good quality management system in place, and we were…
Quality Digest
Stabilix Health Companion’s primary objective is to simplify health care for individuals. It helps people track expenses and reimbursements, keep personal health records and manage their health care costs.“As the health care marketplace moves toward a consumer-directed model,…
Quality Digest
California’s biomedical industry has grown significantly in recent years and is one of the biggest employers in the state and the second-largest contributor to its high-technology economy, according to new research. The research was performed by the California Healthcare Institute and…
Quality Digest
The National Committee for Quality Assurance has announced that 12 software vendors are seeking certification for its Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) program. HEDIS uses automated testing to validate software designed to sift through health plan databases, collect…
AssurX
AssurX Inc. recently released CATSWeb Complaints Management & Regulatory Reporting System, its next-generation suite for the medical device manufacturing industry. A comprehensive solution, CATSWeb Complaints Management & Regulatory Reporting features solutions for business-…
A worsening epidemic of sophisticated antimalarial drug counterfeiting in Southeast Asia and Africa is increasing the likelihood of drug-resistant parasites, which yield false-positive results on screening tests and risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of malaria patients—mostly…
Quality Digest
LaBarge Inc., an electronics manufacturer for regulated technology organizations, recently achieved registration to ISO 13485. The certification was issued to the company’s Pittsburgh manufacturing facility, which is also registered to ISO 9001. The new registration to ISO 13485 will…
Quality Digest
An upcoming regulatory affairs conference will be held in Paris with focus on current registration procedures in the European pharmaceutical market. Key topics to be discussed at the event include centralized and decentralized procedures, mutual-recognition procedures, business-opportunity…
Quality Digest
AssurX Inc. recently released CATSWeb Complaints Management & Regulatory Reporting System, its next-generation suite for the medical device manufacturing industry. A comprehensive solution, CATSWeb Complaints Management & Regulatory Reporting features solutions for business-…
Quality Digest
World Energy, Griffin Industries and Cargill Inc. have embraced BQ-9000 and recently earned the distinction of becoming accredited producers of biodiesel fuel.BQ-9000 includes procedures for fuel production, storage, handling and management designed to ensure fuel quality. The…
Quality Digest
Widespread Linux-based application development in business, mission and life critical areas prompted McCabe Software to develop McCabe IQ, hosted directly on RedHat Linux.“The same software quality management benefits that our customers have come to expect are now available directly on…
Quality Digest
Mikel J. Harry, founder of Six Sigma Academy in 1994 and one of the world’s leading authorities on the methodology, is rejoining the company as chief knowledge officer and vice chairman.
“We are delighted that Mike is joining us. We love that he has chosen to return to his company,” says Scott…
Brian Copeland
Every day, I hear from frustrated quality assurance (QA) managers who’ve been informed by project management that their six-week testing schedule has been reduced to two weeks or less. It usually involves some sob story about how the development team is a month late because of the…
Quality Digest
Thailand’s Public Service Management Quality Award (PMQA), modeled on the Singapore Quality Award, will be presented for the first time next year. The PMQA’s seven criteria are those of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award—leadership, strategy development and deployment planning…
Quality Digest
A recent letter to the U.S. Congress and other elected officials from information quality professionals expresses concerns about the provisions of the 2002 Help America Vote Act (public law 107-252), which sets guidelines for replacing punch card or lever-type voting machines with electronic…
Steven Ouellette
So far, we’ve discussed Stupid Six Sigma Tricks #10: Conflating systems, methods and tools and #9: Confusing breakthrough with continuous improvement. This month, I’ll spend some time on a more subtle, and no less costly mistake that, in its extreme form, we’ll call Stupid Six Sigma Trick #8:…
Quality Digest
While more than 50 percent of respondents in a new report indicated that they had implemented Six Sigma programs, only 16 percent of the programs meet the methodology’s core requirements. The survey, performed by the Aberdeen Group, also found that the 16 percent of programs that…