All Features
Quality Digest
Six Sigma IQ recently announced the finalists in its 2006 Six Sigma Excellence Awards competition. The awards will be presented Jan. 24 at the 7th annual Six Sigma Summit in Miami. In the Best Six Sigma Project in Health Care category, the finalists are: i3, an Ingenix business…
Quality Digest
Rath & Strong recently introduced a new road map to simplify the integration of lean and Six Sigma under the define, measure, analyze, improve, control (DMAIC) methodology. Rath & Strong’s Integrated Lean Six Sigma Roadmap: New Revised Edition is designed to take the guess-work…
Steven Ouellette
“The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.” Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) What’s distance learning? Six Sigma Black Belt training has long been the realm of the elite. It used to be so expensive and required so much time that only companies with the cash and resources to…
Quality Digest
Conference-planning company IXPERION is planning two major Six Sigma conferences for this spring. The 5th annual Six Sigma for Financial Services Summit will be held March 7–8 in New York City. The conference will feature presentations by Six Sigma users in the financial sector and two…
Ken Levine
Lean Six Sigma and other continuous improvement initiatives require effective teamwork, and effective teamwork requires good meetings. Ineffective meetings are the reason many organizations fail to improve continuously. Therefore, effective meeting management should be an integral and early part…
Quality Digest
Quality conference organizer WCBF has issued a call for entries for the Global Six Sigma Awards, which will be awarded in June in Las Vegas. Entries are now being accepted for the following categories: Best achievement of Six Sigma in manufacturing Best achievement of Six Sigma in service…
Quality Digest
The 2005 National Health Quality Report suggests that a push for health care quality improvement by U.S. quality improvement organizations (QIO) has been successful. The report found significant improvements in the delivery of diabetes, heart disease, respiratory, maternal and child health and…
Quality Digest
Minitab recently began offering direct client assistance through its new statistical support services. Minitab established the service under the premise that successful quality-improvement initiatives require accurate analysis of performance data, but most companies lack the advanced…
Quality Digest
Quality industry professionals have a new opportunity of learning the secrets of lasting success through a new book that compares Toyota Motor Co.’s fabled management practices to DNA that passes down as “genes” to its plants and managers. Inside the Mind of Toyota—Management Principles for…
Quality Digest
The California Council for Excellence will host its 12th annual Conference & Awards Gala April 6–7 at the Hyatt Regency Irvine. The event will feature dozens of workshops and seminars, along with a host of celebrity look-alikes including Theodore Roosevelt, Joan Rivers, Groucho Marx,…
Quality Digest
Intertek Automotive Services, which operates the first commercial automotive test lab of its kind in China, is now offering buzz, squeak and rattle (BSR) testing at its facility in Shanghai. The company uses a newly purchased MB Dynamics low-noise vibration system for the BSR testing. IAS is…
Quality Digest
FARO Technologies Inc. has combined two of its top-selling portable coordinate measuring machines into a single package called the TrackArm. The new offering unites the FARO Laser Tracker, which has a range of up to 230 ft., and the Platinum FaroArm, a long-reach probe with six degrees of…
Quality Digest
Instron Corp. is now offering on-site temperature-calibration services for a wide variety of equipment. With more than 100 field-service engineers located all over the United States, the company offers temperature, force, speed, displacement, strain, and alignment calibrations. Instron’s…
Laser scanning makes it easy to keep older military equipment running by enabling companies to create spare parts that perfectly duplicate the originals at a reasonable cost. Manufacturers of weapons systems are taking advantage of new technologies, particularly the ModelMaker laser scanning…
Quality Digest
Quametec Corp., a consultancy, proficiency-testing organization and training provider, has released a new course for metrology professionals.Quametec Trainer is a self-paced, multimedia training system based on the company’s popular ISO/IEC 17025:2005 uncertainty-analysis seminars. It’s been…
Quality Digest
Leica Geosystems’ line of Universal coordinate measuring machine (CMM) products was recognized by the Chinese trade magazine Automobile Industry for its new technologies and manufacturing equipment for the automobile industry. It took 67 industry experts three months to select the winner from…
Denise Robitaille
Some ISO 9001 requirements simply don’t get as much attention as others. One such example is found in clause 6.4, which relates to work environments. It states: “The organization shall determine and manage the work environment needed to achieve conformity to product requirements.” What…
Quality Digest
The International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission recently published a new standard that addresses the quality of information service-management processes. ISO/IEC 20000:2005 Information Technology—Service Management has two parts: one that…
Quality Digest
As of Jan. 6, the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation is accepting applications for product-certification body accreditation. A2LA accreditation demonstrates that a product-certification body has proven its competency to perform specific product certifications or types of product…
Quality Digest
D.L. Newslow & Associates Inc. has announced a series of wintertime seminars to be held in Daytona Beach, Florida. The organization will host Internal Quality Auditing from January 24–26; Enhancing Your Quality Management System will be held January 25–28. These two seminars can be…
Quality Digest
The deadline for ANSI-accredited U.S. technical advisory groups to the International Organization for Standardization to complete their 2005 Annual Reports is Jan. 31, the American National Standards Institute recently announced. ANSI requires that its U.S. TAGs complete annual reports, which…
Quality Digest
The International Organization for Standardization recently introduced WorldSID, the world’s most advanced crash-test dummy, which will allow the automotive industry to improve vehicle design and increase passenger safety. WorldSID (World Side Impact Dummy) was developed to allow a single,…
Quality Digest
Seven books on TQM will be published and translated into Arabic, according to e-TQM College, a Dubai-based provider of online courses in total quality management. The move is an attempt to address the lack of TQM resources in the Middle East and to increase awareness of TQM in the area, while…
Quality Digest
An upcoming conference will focus on the use of total information quality management (TIQM) to improve varied organizations’ quality and processes. The TIQM Mastery Series will be held March 6–10 at the Nashville Convention Center. It’ll feature three courses: IQ 101: IQ Principles &…
Bill Kalmar
You see and hear them everyday--signs and commercials heralding “Customer service is No.1,” “We treat you like family,” or “The customer is always right.” The other day I came across a particularly revealing motto: “We’re better than we used to be!” Whatever the slogan or motto is, people expect…