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Quality Digest
The Strategic Research Institute will hold its second annual Six Sigma Strategy for Health Care forum, April 28-29 at the Millennium Knickerbocker in Chicago. Financial pressure, limited resources, workforce shortages and increased scrutiny on medical errors have hit the health care sector…
Quality Digest
Intel Corp. has awarded 16 companies its most prestigious award for suppliers, the Supplier Continuous Quality Improvement Award. The award recognizes Intel suppliers that exhibited outstanding commitment to quality and performance excellence during 2003. The group of winning companies…
Quality Digest
When Allen Witherspoon, general manager of GASCO Manufacturing, needed to write a quality manual to satisfy the requirements of one of his top customers, he had no idea where to start. "I knew I couldn’t simply sit down and do it," says Witherspoon. "I didn’t have the time or the…
Quality Digest
Plastics and advanced materials, micro-machining technologies and lean manufacturing will be on tap at the EASTEC 2004 Advanced Productivity Exposition. EASTEC is scheduled for May 25-27 at the Eastern States Exposition Grounds in West Springfield, Massachusetts. It’s the East Coast’s…
Quality Digest
"More vehicles will be produced in the next 20 years than were manufactured in the previous 110-year history of the industry," says Garel Rhys, director of the Centre for Automotive Industry Research Cardiff University Business School in Wales. Rhys’ statements came at an address to…
Quality Digest
Nikon Instruments Inc. has opened the Nikon 2004 Small World Photomicrography Competition. Nikon’s International Small World Competition began in 1975 to recognize excellence in microscopic photography. The competitionÂ’s reputation has grown exponentially throughout the years and is…
Quality Digest
EtQ Inc., a provider of enterprise quality, compliance and environmental management software, has launched the EtQ Quality Server, a package equipped with the full EtQ quality management suite, including more than 20 modules and all the tools to run an enterprise quality management system…
Quality Digest
Three of the world’s leading measurement laboratories, including the U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology’ have lined up the hash marks from four of the world’s best optical frequency rulers and declared that they match. The experiments, reported in…
Quality Digest
Agilent Technologies Inc. has signed an agreement with eBay, allowing sellers to offer pre-owned test equipment that has been assured through the new Agilent Advantage Assurance program. The program gives customers the option to purchase on eBay Agilent test equipment that has been…
Quality Digest
The largest missile manufacturing facility in the world, an appliance manufacturer and 10 automotive suppliers are 2004 recipients of the 2004 Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing. Dubbed the "Nobel Prize of Manufacturing" by Business Week, the Shingo Prize focuses on lean…
Quality Digest
GOAL/QPC has published Six Sigma for Business Leaders, (GOAL/QPC, 2004) a book authored by Gregory H. Watson. The book provides practical guidance to executives and managers as they design and implement Six Sigma programs. It’s the fourth in GOAL/QPC’s series of books on Six Sigma. "Our…
IQS
(IQS: North Olmsted, OH) -- IQS Inc. has released its OptiMetrix Integration Engine, an enterprise performance management application that enables real-time, bidirectional transfer of APQP information throughout the automotive manufacturer supply chain.
OptiMetrix IE uses native messaging agent…
Quality Digest
Hexagon AB has agreed to acquire the South Korean company Korea ErFa Systems Engineering Co.’s metrology business. Hexagon will continue Korea ErFa’s operations under the name Hexagon Metrology Korea. The company will initially have a sales turnover of $1.3 million comprising commissions…
Quality Digest
Acxiom Corp. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will collaborate to research customer-centric information quality management. Richard Wang, director of the MIT Information Quality Program, and John R. Talburt, director of the Acxiom Laboratory for Applied Research, will lead the…
Quality Digest
PQ Systems Inc. has released an updated version of its popular CHARTrunner application, which includes a Microsoft Excel add-in that allows users to draw charts from within Excel. CHARTrunner, a stand-alone charting tool for general statistical process control charting, eliminates data…
Quality Digest
The National Quality Institute has offered a new line of customer and employee satisfaction online surveys. The surveys were developed in response to the increasing desire of organizations to better understand the needs of their customers, clients and patients--as well as the needs of…
(Publisher’s Note: This article, is reprinted with permission from THE INFORMED OUTLOOK, in which it first appeared in Nov. 2003.)
Following the ISO 9001:2000 transition, the future of quality management continues to align with that of business management. The challenge in both cases is for…
Ronald Ames
As a methodology, Six Sigma has been around since the 1980s. Yet it took a couple of U.S. industry giants, Allied Signal and GE, to draw the world’s attention to the benefits the program offers businesses. Even so, many companies fail to integrate Six Sigma into their corporate cultures due to a…
Quality Digest
A recent study indicates that most leading companies target quality by incorporating lean simplification and demand flow techniques with Six Sigma defect reduction. The survey, conducted by Best Practices LLC on behalf of the Global Benchmarking Council, features 84 companies in…
Quality Digest
Seagate Technology, a leading disc drive company, has earned sixsigmaIQ’s annual Six Sigma Excellence Award for the best design for Six Sigma project. Seagate received the award for its project, "Deployment of Design for Six Sigma in Seagate’s U Series Disc Drive." Other finalists for the…
Quality Digest
George Group, DeLeeuw Associates Inc. and iSixSigma have formed a strategic alliance to create an Internet portal for the financial services industry, focused specifically on the application of Six Sigma. The cobranded portal, named iSixSigma Financial Services, is intended to facilitate…
Quality Digest
Specialized Technology Resources Inc. has expanded its battery testing capabilities at its headquarters in Enfield, Connecticut. STR has developed proprietary automated equipment that conducts Determination of Service Output (draw-down) testing, as outlined in ANSI C18.1M, Part 1. The…
Quality Digest
Nikon Instruments Inc. has signed an exclusive agreement with Bacus Laboratories Inc. to integrate Bacus’ WebSlide virtual microscopy software with the enhanced version of its digital COOLSCOPE VS. The agreement will enable pathologists, educators and researchers to produce, view and…
Quality Digest
Powerway Inc., a provider of product development process solutions for manufacturers, has launched Powerway.com v. 2.0. Powerway.com is a Web-based workplace that facilitates visibility and real-time communication throughout multiple tiers of the supply chain during product development.…
Quality Digest
BSI Management Systems is offering its suite of medical devices management system training courses in Minneapolis and Boston this spring. BSI’s courses are intended to help organizations registering to ISO 13485:2003. The first course, "Understanding ISO 13485," is an introduction to the…