All Features
Esteve Garriga
There are many important issues to be considered in the food industry, such as consumer tastes, environmental impact, and economic aspects, but the most important is food safety.
Although current food safety management system (FSMS) certification schemes around the world are highly effective, I…
Annette Franz
In 2019, I wrote about a marketing phenomenon that I kept hearing about, that customers are in control, that they have all the power. I never felt like that was right.
In that post, I wrote: “So, when you see those headlines about customer control and customer power, what are they really talking…
Yoav Kutner
Like business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce, business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce allows customers to purchase parts and supplies via an online portal. The difference is that in B2B e-commerce, both the customers and suppliers are businesses, and the customers may or may not be the end users of the…
Gleb Tsipursky
Stakeholder engagement is one of the more critical aspects of leadership, whether you’re a team leader or a member of a cross-functional team trying to lead team members to focus on quality. Stakeholders can be anyone from your colleagues to suppliers to business partners, and your relationship…
Clare Naden
Never have we been more acutely aware of the importance of reliability when it comes to laboratory testing. As the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted, the development of accurate diagnostic tests plays an important role in outbreak management.
Whether a laboratory develops its own test…
Nate Burke
Businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations. And this will only become a more important focus as we continue to navigate the complex and volatile Covid-stricken commercial climate.
Fortunately, e-commerce is thriving. Unlike…
Maria Church
Sometimes work seems like, well, work. It’s not the fun, fulfilling, or rewarding kind of work that we look forward to tackling but the life-sucking, drudgery kind of work. What to do when work drains the soul and seems like a waste of a life? Find the meaning in the work you do, and you will find…
Sheronda Jeffries
Since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, UK officials have seized millions of substandard face masks at Heathrow Airport. These masks could have put millions at risk for contracting or spreading the Covid-19 virus.
Industry and governmental organizations including the Therapeutic Goods…
Stephen M. Hahn, Amy P. Abernethy
During a short period of time, our society has seen a rapid increase in the interest and availability of cannabidiol (CBD) products and other products derived from cannabis. However, we still have a limited understanding of the safety profile of CBD and many other cannabis-derived compounds,…
Chip Bell
All my life, I thought leaves departed trees in the fall because they got too old to hang onto the branch and gravity bested their grasp. It does not work that way. Trees literally release their leaves from the limb. Here is how a leaf becomes the prey of gravity.
As days get colder and shorter,…
Gleb Tsipursky
Should quality professionals be worried about the new Covid strains originating in the United Kingdom, South Africa, and elsewhere, and recently identified in the United States?
Authorities have focused on downplaying concerns about vaccine effectiveness against these new variants. While some…
Annette Franz
I’ll keep today’s article simple—and fun. Bob Farrell, founder of Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlors, shared the secret to a great customer experience in 1973 (yes, almost 50 years ago!), when he developed a motivational speech for new employees called “Give ’em the pickle!” It was based on a letter he…
Kate Zabriskie
Do any of these sound familiar?
“The lawn service had to go. I used them for more than 15 years, and by the last season, my lawn looked terrible. The spring seeding didn’t take, nutsedge and wiregrass consumed half the yard, and they just kept spraying chemicals. I wish somebody had just told me…
Richard Harpster
As someone who has helped companies in a wide variety of industries for the last 30 years solve many problems using risk-based thinking, I cannot think of an issue that I have worked on that is more important than preventing the spread of Covid-19. With three high-risk people in my home, I have…
Jane Bianchi
Let’s pretend, for a moment, that you’re a primary care physician and you refer one of your patients to another doctor for a colonoscopy. Will the patient follow through? If not, how will your team know to remind him or her? If the patient does receive a colonoscopy, will your team be alerted so…
Bahar Aliakbarian
The two major U.S. developers of the early Covid-19 vaccines are Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. They both developed mRNA vaccines, a relatively new type of vaccine. A major supply-chain issue is the temperature requirement for these vaccines.
The Pfizer vaccine needs to be stored at between –112° F…
Chip Bell
Ever notice how some people always get the best table, the upgraded room, or the best cut of meat at the market? Great customer service is not an accident. Those who are served well follow a recipe that turns even a cold initial encounter into a warm one. Here are five tips for almost always…
Ryan E. Day
If you are a quality engineer or maybe even the quality manager of a manufacturing company, investing in quality improvements may be a no-brainer. Defects are inherently undesirable, right? Well, yes, but at the level of plant manager, president, or CEO, decisions about where to allocate assets…
Natalie Weber
Unlike Covid-19, remote audits aren’t unprecedented. Remote audits didn’t start with the pandemic, although it has forced more companies to use them than previously. At MasterControl, we’ve been doing remote audits for years for our international customers. It saves time and expense, and it’s every…
Sanjay Mishra
As the weather cools, the number of infections of the Covid-19 pandemic are rising sharply. Hamstrung by pandemic fatigue, economic constraints, and political discord, public health officials have struggled to control the surging pandemic. But now, a rush of interim analyses from pharmaceutical…
Joerg Niessing, Fred Geyer
A new digital era of business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing is upon us. It’s driven by corporate customer demand for online access to their suppliers’ offerings and expertise. Taking advantage of this shift is challenging because it requires moving from deeply embedded B2B sales and…
Nader Moayeri
I am part of a grassroots effort at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that is developing an exposure notification system for pandemics in general, though we hope it could be used in at least a limited fashion during the current Covid-19 pandemic. We are fortunate at NIST to…
Klaus Wertenbroch
From a customer perspective, the only thing more frustrating than being denied a product or service is when that denial comes without a satisfactory explanation. As humans, our ability to deal with disappointment depends on understanding why it happened. Without an acceptable rationale, we’re apt…
Anju Dave Vaish
T his year’s unprecedented lockdown happened just as we started moving forward with our 2020 goals. There has been a lot of speculation about Covid-19 and its consequences, much of it dire, but there has also been something that has kept us all rolling: the human mindset. With constraints come new…
Jon Speer
The medical device industry is one that requires preparation. Unlike less regulated industries, there’s an expectation in the industry around the possibility that an inspector or auditor can show up without notice and stop a business in its tracks.
That’s why, when Greenlight Guru released its “…