All Features
British Assessment Bureau BAB
According to data from The British Assessment Bureau’s (BAB) independent 2011 Client Satisfaction Survey, 44 percent of respondents said that they had won business as a result of becoming certified to ISO 9001, the quality management system standard from the International…
NIST
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a suite of green tea reference materials to help manufacturers evaluate the composition of their products and assure researchers of the accuracy of analytical methods for studying the human health effects of this popular…
Mike Richman
Last month I wrote an article entitled “Being Comfortable in a World of Never-Ending Change.” Editor in Chief Dirk Dusharme and I also covered this story on the April 29th edition of Quality Digest Live (QDL). QDL, by the way, is our live video show wrap-up of the week’s top industry news and…
Denise Robitaille
The headline’s question seemed a bit far-fetched to me when it was originally posed. The answer provided another delightful illustration of the myriad analogies we find in our everyday lives that relate so effortlessly to our work as quality professionals. The comparison demonstrated the complexity…
Cor Groenveld
How safe is our food? It is a question asked all over the world on a daily basis as food-scare stories fill the media and governments act to calm consumer fears. There is a real and tangible concern among the public; an IBM consumer confidence survey in 2009 found that 80 percent of those…
Mike Richman
Welcome to Quality Digest Daily 2.0! This new format represents a significant re-imaging of our flagship brand (the industry’s only daily newsletter), which we first launched nearly two years ago. I hope you notice that we’ve added more video content to the newsletter as well as greater editorial…
Lisa Lupo
Companies aren’t perfect, and neither are the people who work for them. Since this is a fact rather than a judgment, it’s reasonable to expect errors in manufacturing and process management. When an audited company continues to show a flawless record for, say, a food-safety audit, chances are it…
Miriam Boudreaux
In my March 24th column, I discussed how you should handle audits that point out a minor or "Mickey Mouse" nonconformance. In this column, I am going to look at this from the auditor’s point of view, when it’s obvious that the auditee did not take a nonconformance seriously and didn’t bother to do…
Danita Johnson Hughes Ph.D.
Read this. It won’t be a waste of time.
Time gets lost. People kill time. Time flies. It gets wasted. Time weighs heavy on our hands. We spend time. Time passes. It drags on or it hurries by. Those behind bars are said to be doing time. Sometimes, we have no time left; we’re out of time.…
Miriam Boudreaux
Have you ever been audited and felt like the auditor’s findings were almost irrelevant in the context of your organization’s major challenges and goals? Did you sometimes feel like you've been handed a Mickey Mouse nonconformity given the issues your organization is confronting? But what is one…
Miriam Boudreaux
Have you ever been audited and felt like the auditor’s findings were almost irrelevant in the context of your organization’s major challenges and goals? Did you sometimes feel like you've been handed a Mickey Mouse nonconformity given the issues your organization is confronting? But what is one…
Denise Robitaille
Every once in a while when I’m conducting training, I have the good fortune to have someone ask a particularly atypical question that gets me thinking and helps me to develop more tools and techniques. This serves to not only augment my own bag of tricks but also increases my capacity to serve my…
Denise Robitaille
Every once in a while when I’m conducting training, I have the good fortune to have someone ask a particularly atypical question that gets me thinking and helps me to develop more tools and techniques. This serves to not only augment my own bag of tricks but also increases my capacity to serve my…
American National Standards Institute ANSI
(ANSI: Washington) -- The Internet as we know it is about to max out. Within the next 12 to 18 months, every one of the 4.3 billion internet protocol (IP) addresses will have been exhausted.
When the Internet was created more than 30 years ago, 4.3 billion unique addresses seemed…
Denise Robitaille
I’ve been working with a client on implementing an ISO 9001-compliant quality management system. As always it’s a unique and interesting project, since organizations have different cultures, processes, products, and customers. No two quality management systems are quite the same. Documentation…
Mike Richman
Protecting the health and well-being of consumers and the world at large is the quality industry’s highest calling. During the past several decades, as the manufacture of electronics and consumer goods has shifted away from North America and Europe, the need to confirm and ensure the safety of…
Pierre Huot
If a manufacturer were to ask its clients how they evaluated goods or services, the three most common metrics would be goods at a fair price, on-time delivery, and quality. Ask which could be most valuable and in all likelihood the most significant response would be quality. When included in the…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
For most of us, food safety is a topic that, at best, only lurks at the edges of our brains. It rarely becomes something we really think about until we open up our refrigerator and try to figure out what’s growing in the back corner of the bottom shelf, or until we hear stories about people being…
Mike Richman
Yes, it happened again. According to a recent Associated Press story, drinking glasses produced in China, featuring comic and superhero characters, have been discovered to contain extremely high levels of lead. Excessive amounts of cadmium were revealed in the glasses as well.
This has been a…
A new year always brings new hope, new plans, and new perspectives. While looking ahead is the most direct route to progress, looking back is essential to understanding the present. After all, the past creates the consequences that will shape the future.
With this in mind, the editors of…
Thomas R. Cutler
Food safety standards are becoming increasingly stringent. Although government legislation has long been implemented, your customers may be driving an even higher standard of food safety through the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) or Safe Quality Food (SQF) Institute, which require third-…
The QA Pharm
My definition of “specification” is rather simple: It’s a promise.
Just like any other promise, you’d better be sincere when you make it and be able to keep it. Failure to keep a promise brings disappointment. Frequent failure leads to distrust. And consciously breaking a promise is nothing less…
Denise Robitaille
Election time is once again upon us. And, like a bumper crop of kudzu run amok, campaign ads have besieged local broadcasts with the tenacity of an unrelenting pestilence. My mailbox is equally stuffed with innuendo-laden campaign fliers. A horrific waste of paper.
The malicious tone of the…
Mike Richman
Did you know that World Standards Day (being celebrated today) and Earth Day both began in the year 1970? How about the fact that Oct. 14 was chosen as the date because that was the day in 1946 when the delegates of what was to become the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) first…
Andrew Reich
Looking for a new factory to work with in China can be daunting. With pressures from poor rice production on the rise and labor throughout China unstable, more China-based manufacturers are closing shop every day.
For these reasons I think it’s an opportune time to review the key aspects and goals…
