All Features
John G. Miller
Outstanding means being superior, striking, exceptional, clearly noticeable—essentially, to stand out. People are attracted to outstanding organizations. They want to buy from them, sell to them, invest in them, volunteer at them, and work for them. And as we close out the first decade of the 21st…
Benny Shaviv
The rapid pace of technological advancement in the last decade has introduced both significant benefits as well as significant challenges to medical device makers. Companies these days are faced with demands of bringing products to market faster and faster, not only to meet sales and market…
David C. Crosby
Education seems to be a never ending problem for the United States. The drop-out rate in some major cities is 50 to 60 percent, or even more. With teacher strikes, tight money, and controversial curriculum, it’s a wonder any of us can read or write, or that we made it to the moon. I just watched…
FARO
Most car drivers enjoy road tunnels without giving a second thought to the years of patient effort that go into the construction. In the case of the new 3.6 km-long, newly opened Vintebro tunnel near Oslo, Norway, in three minutes one can drive through a tunnel that took three years to finish and…
(Sensor Products Inc.: Madison, NJ) -- During tough economic times it is tempting to reduce quality control to cut costs. However Dolph Beyer, an engineer with Mohawk Fine Papers, asserts that doing this is actually counterproductive. He has determined that using pressure indicating sensor film as…
WILLIAM SCHERKENBACH
I’ve spent most of the past two years living in China where I have learned much on how enterprise is managed over there. Many people have said that this century belongs to Asia. That may be, but they have a lot to learn and change before that happens. They cannot depend on cheap rote labor to…
Donald J. Wheeler
The four questions of data analysis are the questions of description, probability, inference, and homogeneity. Any data analyst needs to know how to organize and use these four questions to be able to obtain meaningful and correct results.
The description question
Given a collection of…
Knowledge at Wharton
“Lean” has come to mean an integrated, end-to-end process viewpoint that combines the concepts of waste elimination, just-in-time inventory management, built-in quality, and worker involvement supported by a cultural focus on problem solving. Can such practical principles be applied to innovation…
David Rideout
The field of surface metrology is one of the fastest growing areas of engineering and quality management. Because what happens at the interaction between two surfaces can affect the functionality and life span of a product, understanding the places where contact and interactions occur is vital for…
Steven Ouellette
You know how sometimes you think everyone knows a secret that they haven’t let you in on? Well, I had the opposite happen to me the other day. I assumed everyone knew the purpose for measurement system analysis (MSA), a.k.a. gauge repeatability and reproducibility; but I found out that a number of…
Minitab LLC
Kaj Ahlmann (right), owner of the Six Sigma Ranch, Vineyards, and Winery, and vineyard manager, David Weiss, create great wines by applying old-world techniques and the rigor of proven quality improvement.
Some people take it easy when they retire. But Kaj…
Malcolm Chisholm
I have just finished rereading Walter A. Shewhart's 1939 book Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (Dover Publications, 1986). Mine is the 1986 edition, which has a foreword by W. Edwards Deming. Shewhart, a Bell Labs man, pioneered quality control and was a major inspiration…
Michelle LaBrosse
As a part of my project close-out celebration of the “get the kids into college” project, I decided to celebrate by going back to school myself. So, here I am in Parma, Italy, at the Academia Barilla cooking school through Sur La Table—two organizations that really understand the community around…
Matrox Imaging
What about parking? It’s a question drivers must consider every time they turn the key in the ignition. Cities have struggled with parking issues since the preautomobile era, however, in those days the question was more likely to be: What about my horse?
Parking automobiles proved to be a…
GKS Global Services
GKS Inspection Services has been a leading provider of dimensional inspection, 3-D laser scanning, terrestrial scanning, and CT scanning services for more than 25 years. The company’s metrologists and engineers are experienced in the automotive, defense, electronics, and many other manufacturing…
Paul Scicchitano
I
f you’ve been sweating what to get your quality colleagues this holiday season, you might want to pass up that tin of gooey chocolate in favor of a new international self-help standard.
Published on Nov. 1 by the Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization (ISO)—the same…
Bill Kalmar
Several years ago, I penned a column entitled, “Nurse, I’m Ready for My Cappuccino!” The article was an interview with Gerard van Grinsven, the new CEO and president of the Henry Ford West Bloomfield Hospital, which was to be located in a Detroit suburb. At the time of my interview, Van Grinsven…
Scott Alamanach
Sometimes when studying something that has become too familiar to us, we can gain valuable new insights by looking at it from a radically different perspective. Much has been written, for example, about how important customer service is for business—so much, in fact, that it becomes easy to lose…
Figure 1: Measuring 3D CT METROTOM 1500 from Carl Zeiss
There are still no generally applicable standards for industrial computed tomography (CT). Manufacturers and users still must agree on de facto standards for the specification and certification of…
Stewart Anderson
Last week I had occasion to view once again, in the company of a client, the excellent little video, “Toast Kaizen,” produced by the Greater Boston Manufacturing Partnership (GBMP)1, and narrated by Bruce Hamilton. In that video, Hamilton takes a simple everyday process, that of making toast, and…
John David Kendrick
A common error of many Six Sigma and operations research professionals is not properly selecting the correct subgroup sampling technique when constructing a statistical process control (SPC) chart. Incorrect subgroup sampling technique selection has become worse in the modern computing age,…
David Roberts
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--Editors
Mike Richman
Here at Quality Digest, we get a lot of mail: Some of it’s critical, some of it’s praiseworthy, some of it’s cantankerous, and some of it’s challenging. All of it is insightful. And then, every once in awhile, something comes along that simply... well...
The following was sent to us from a…
“The consumer’s concept of quality will no longer be measured by only the physical attributes of the product—it will extend to the process of how the product is made, including product safety, environmental compliance, and social responsibility compliance.”
—Victor Fang, chairman of Li and Fang…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
My sons recently started talking about being cool, and I recalled my own teenage years and the need to be cool. That driving desire dictated the clothes I wore, the music I listened to, and what subjects I became conversant in. And, yet despite all my motivation and effort, it remained elusive…