All Features
Bill Kalmar
Sitting in my home office contemplating the upcoming holidays reminds me that I have yet to submit my wish list to Santa. It’s a long list, crammed with lots of items for me, and I have included some requests for you, the readers. Of course it’s also an opportunity for me to rant about some…
Quality Digest
Navin S. Dedhia of San Jose, California, received the Harrington-Ishikawa Quality Professional Medal for 2007 during the international conference of the Asia Pacific Quality Organization in October in Shanghai.Dedhia has served many distinguished professional and civic organizations and was…
Quality Digest
(ANSI: New York) -- The International Organization for Standardization today announced that the development process has begun on ISO 21500, a new international standard for project management.The first meeting of the project committee, ISO PC 236—“Project management,” drew fifty delegates to…
Quality Digest
(ISO: Geneva) -- The 14 ISO International Standards currently making up the ISO 9000 family of generic quality-management standards are now available in new paper and compact disc editions of The ISO Standards collection. Two standards now at the final draft stage, plus a technical…
Quality Digest
(Cardinal Health: Dublin, Ohio) -- Cardinal Health, a global provider of products and services that improve the safety and productivity of health care, recently announced a new service to help hospitals combat methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections that are responsible…
Quality Digest
(CBI: Woburn, Massachusetts) -- The Center for Business Intelligence will hold the Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) Process Improvement Summit for Bio/Pharmaceutical & Medical Devices on Jan. 24-25, 2008 in Philadelphia. This conference focuses on industry-specific tools and…
Quality Digest
(Sciemetric Instruments: Ottawa, Canada) -- Sciemetric Instruments has announced the general availability of SigPOD Medical, a system to verify parts and processes in the manufacturing of medical devices.Regulatory initiatives such as the Food and Drug Administration’s Process Analytical…
Quality Digest
In October, Medtronic Inc., makers of a wide range of medical devices, issued a voluntary suspension of its Sprint Fidelis defibrillation leads due to an increasing rate of lead fractures.Rob Clark, Medtronic senior director of public relations, says the decision was based on both a statistical…
Quality Digest
(NIST: Washington) -- Five U.S. organizations were recently named winners of the 2007 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which promotes excellence in organizational performance, recognizes the achievements and results of U.S. organizations, and publicizes successful performance…
Quality Digest
(ANSI: New York) -- Safety symbols—like those for high voltage, biohazards, a wet floor, and radioactive materials—depend upon consistency and bold graphics to warn against specific hazards and personal injury. A revised American National Standard from the National Electrical Manufacturers…
Quality Digest
(ISO: Geneva) -- A new ISO standard will help to ensure that urbanization, a global trend, develops in an environmentally friendly manner. The building-construction industry is a major employer and responsible for generating a large amount of waste and pollution, approximately 40 percent of…
Mike Micklewright
Question: How is lean like making whoopee?
Answer: I don’t know. I just wanted you to open the article. However …
Send me your funny answer. I’ll choose the best answer, that’s not too dirty or offensive, and perhaps it’ll be published in my next article two months from now. You’ll be famous! The…
Quality Digest
(NCQA: Washington) -- A set of measures assessing the quality of care for HIV/AIDS patients was released recently for public comment. Developed by the National Committee for Quality Assurance in collaboration with the AMA-convened Physician Consortium for Performance Improvement (PCPI), the…
Quality Digest
(NOVACES: New Orleans) -- The Bureau of Medicine and Surgery recently presented a contract to NOVACES to implement lean Six Sigma throughout the Navy Medical Logistics Command.As a provider of business process improvement methodologies, NOVACES will guide the implementation of a change in…
Dyadem
(Dyadem: Toronto) -- Dyadem, a provider of quality life cycle management and risk life cycle management software, has helped Maidstone Bakeries bring the world a better donut. In the process, Maidstone has saved hundreds of thousands of dollars through the use of Six Sigma methodology and…
Quality Digest
(Enna Products Corp.: Bellingham, Washington) -- Enna Products Corp. and Norman Bodek have published a new hardcover book by Shigeo Shingo, Kaizen and the Art of Creative Thinking. Along with Taiichi Ohno, Dr. Shingo codeveloped the Toyota production system (TPS). Originally written in 1958-59,…
Steven Ouellette
Harvest time—vegetables fresh from the local farmer’s market going right into a homemade soup, eaten with fresh bread. Yum! This month, I’d like to talk about a recipe for a Greek alphabet soup, which you had better know about if you plan on doing an experiment. This may be the first recipe that…
Quality Digest
(Consumers Union: Yonkers, New York) -- Lead hazards in consumer products aren’t limited to the millions of toys recalled so far this year, according to Consumer Reports magazine.Consumer Reports lab tests detected lead at widely varying levels in samples of dishware, jewelry, glue stick caps,…
Quality Digest
(NIST: Gaithersburg, Maryland) -- Each year the Baldrige National Quality Program recruits experts from businesses, education organizations, health care providers, nonprofits, and other groups to serve as members of the Board of Examiners for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.…
Quality Digest
How are physicists helping to eradicate malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills more than a million people annually? Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology helped a young company create weakened, harmless versions of the malaria-causing parasite. These parasites…
Terry Kaytor
Quality’s commonly accepted definition along the lines of “meeting or exceeding customer expectations” falls short. A more complete definition of quality should also consider achieving our potential, which can exist at a personal level or at a business level. Our ability to achieve both potentials…
Quality Digest
(Cogiscan Inc.: Bromont, Quebec) In collaboration with strategic partners, Fuji, Juki, and Siemens, Cogiscan Inc., introduced its RFID Smart Reel Detection system at Productronica, in Munich, Germany. The development project, announced earlier this year, uses RFID technology on reels of…
Quality Digest
(Innov-X: Woburn, Massachusetts) -- Innov-X has installed two systems for online quality control testing of stainless steel tubes at Sandvik Materials Technology in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The FOX-IQ on-line X-ray fluorescence (XRF) analyzer is a totally automated elemental analysis system,…
William Tandler
Continuing with our analysis of the Greatest Design Tool ever, our objective in this article is to take a detailed look at the structure and contents of feature control frames to demonstrate that they represent “encoded” information which may only be “decoded,” not “interpreted.” With their…
Quality Digest
(Leica Geosystems Inc.: Atlanta, Georgia) -- The TPS1200+ Total Station introduces Leica’s most precise automatic positioning ever, along with several other accuracy improvements. Users can combine pointing accuracy with the convenience of robotic instruments. In combination with the new…