All Features
Association For Manufacturing Technology AMT
(AMT: McLean, VA) -- Manufacturing technology suppliers reacted with cautious optimism over reports that Ford Motor Co. posted the first sales gain in two years and that U.S. manufacturing activity slowed less than expected in July. But that’s not to say that tough times are over for the…
FDA
(FDA: Silver Spring, MD) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) today announced an agreement to launch a bilateral good clinical practices (GCP) initiative, designed to ensure that clinical trials submitted in drug marketing applications in the…
NCQA
(NCQA: Washington, DC) -- The National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) has released its latest edition of Quality Compass, one of the nation's leading databases of comparable information on clinical performance and patient experience for 415 commercial health plan products serving 94…
The White House
(White House: Elkhart, Indiana) -- Further accelerating the manufacturing and deployment of electric vehicles, batteries, and components here in America, and creating tens of thousands of new jobs, President Obama today announced 48 new advanced battery and electric drive projects that will…
Intevac Inc.
(Intevac, Santa Clara, CA) -- Photonics, a division of Intevac Inc., has announced the availability of DeltaNu's RAPID-ID, an innovative tool for the plastics industry. RAPID-ID is an industrial quality instrument that supports a lean manufacturing process by reducing waste at all stages of…
X-Rite
(X-Rite: Grand Rapids, MI) -- X-Rite Inc. has introduced its VS450 spectrophotometer that gives laboratories an advanced and affordable technology to accurately control the quality of color by measuring a wide range of wet and dry samples without touching test surfaces.
The VS450 offers:
•…
Miriam Boudreaux
Well, a simple answer is no, you don’t need a consultant to achieve ISO 9001 certification. In fact, many companies achieve ISO 9001 on their own, by appointing key employees to the task. The implications, however, of trying to implement a system on your own can be a set back to your business if…
ASTM International
(ASTM: West Conshohocken, PA) -- ASTM International Committee 11 on Quality and Statistics is continuing the conversion process of popular military acceptance standards based on Military Standard 105E, Sampling Procedures and Tables for Inspection by Attributes.
The U.S. Department of Defense (…
Donald J. Wheeler
The symptoms of leptokurtophobia are (1) routinely asking if your data are normally distributed and (2) transforming your data to make them appear to be less leptokurtic and more “mound shaped.” If you have exhibited either of these symptoms then you need to read this article.
The origins of…
(Baumer: Southington, CT) -- Baumer, a Swiss-based manufacturer of high performance sensors and digital cameras, has become a member of the Cognex Acquisition Alliance. This partnership will facilitate vision system integration by unifying Baumer digital camera and VisionPro vision software…
Renishaw
(Renishaw: Hoffman Estates, IL) -- Renishaw's new MODUS CMM software application works with the company's UCC2 universal CMM controller and full range of sensors, including the REVO five-axis measuring system, to form a single-source coordinate measurement machine (CMM) retrofit package, installed…
(SME: Dearborn, MI) -- Quality equipment is essential to a quality education. 3M’s in-kind gift of 250 Super Close Projection Systems 700 Series, valued at about $720,000, which includes projectors, speakers, and wall-mounts, has been donated to the SME Education Foundation for distribution to the…
Samar Azmashly
(Eurojar: Damascus, Al-Hayat) -- Syria has decided to open its economy to the world after long years of centralized economy and to broaden its economic options east and west. Despite the opposition of the United States, it is also striving to join the World Trade Organization (WTO), which includes…
As quality professionals, we find ourselves in a never-ending search for breakdowns in systems, targeting opportunities for improvement with a relentless eye on the ever-out-of-reach but always-in-sight goal of total quality. Today, quality has multiple roles from assuring product quality,…
WENZEL Group
(WENZEL Group GmbH: Wiesthal, Germany) -- The acquisition of Steintek GmbH, located in Greding, Germany, by the WENZEL Group GmbH & Co. KG that was already announced at the Control exhibition in Stuttgart, Germany, this past May, has now been successfully concluded. The contracts for the 100…
DNV
(DNV: Katy, TX) -- DNV is pleased to announce a webinar around a topic every company in every industry deals with... customer satisfaction. This free, live webinar, "Customer Satisfaction—Guidelines for the Complaint Handling Process—ISO 10002" will be held on August 27, at 1 p.m. CDT.
Hosted…
What does an innovator do when existing methods of calibrating a critical environment pressure sensor are cumbersome and produce shoddy results? Richard Deyoe and Stephen Stout, ASRC Aerospace meteorologists based at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, decided to design and build their own calibration…
MoreSteam.com
(MoreSteam: Columbus, OH) -- MoreSteam.com, a provider of online lean Six Sigma training and support technologies, has increased the content of SigmaPedia, their free online lean Six Sigma encyclopedia, now offering more than 400 terms and definitions. With the addition of the new terms,…
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(Olympus: Center Valley, PA) -- The LEXT OLS4000, the newest laser scanning confocal microscope from Olympus, is the next generation in noncontact optical measuring solutions. It advances scan accuracy, accelerates scan speed, and puts the power and flexibility of dual confocal technology into the…
The Conference Board
(The Conference Board: New York) -- The number of U.S. companies with an offshoring strategy has more than doubled from 2005 to 2008 and very few plan to relocate activities back to the United States, according to Duke Offshoring Research Network's fifth annual report on offshoring trends,…
Raissa Carey
Takt is a German word for the baton used by maestros. Just as musicians must be synchronized with the conductor, the rate of production within an organization must be synchronized with the rate of its delivery.
In a nutshell, takt time is a theoretical figure that indicates how much time is…
Bill Kalmar
Sometimes in our attempt to correct a quality oversight we end up creating more havoc than if we had done just nothing. Looking for problems in an otherwise smooth running operation can result in confusion and, in the case I am about to describe, can have adverse consequences on hundreds of people…
It was her first flight. Her parents had finally settled a bitter divorce resulting in her dad moving three states away. The 10-year-old was nervous about pretty much everything. As soon as she was settled in her seat, after being handed off to a flight attendant, the pilot announced there would…
(Stanley Vidmar: Allentown, PA) -- Stanley Vidmar, a manufacturer of premium custom storage solutions for use in a wide range of industries, is now offering its customers another lean manufacturing solution: the 5S Cabinet. Made with a durable cabinet case featuring metal pegboard inserts and…
David C. Crosby
When I say quality manager, of course I’m talking about the department he or she manages as well.
I’ve been in the “quality business” for fifty years now. That’s right, fifty years. Much of my career—from source inspector to quality engineer, to corporate director of quality—was spent in other…
