All Features
Mike Richman
Our most recent episode of QDL from Friday, Sept. 29, 2017. featured news, technology, and two great interviews. Let’s have a closer look:
“Domestic Cars Fail to Keep Up With International Competition”
The most recent American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI) survey took a look at people’s…
Jack Phillips, Patti Phillips
According to W. Edwards Deming, “Every system is perfectly designed to achieve exactly the results it gets.” This applies to any quality initiative and any other activity, including learning and development. Yet, according to an ATD/ROI Institute study, only 8 percent of CEOs see the results most…
Anna Abram
We’re at a moment of extraordinary opportunity to improve public health. New innovations are giving us fundamentally better ways to address disease. Some of the same technology is providing consumers with a broader selection of foods that can improve peoples’ diets and products that can expand…
Arun Hariharan
In my October 2013 column, “Standardize to Improve,” I dealt with business process mapping in detail. Business process management systems (BPMS) comprise the entire gamut of documenting process steps, assigning ownership to process owners, and often, process-compliance audits to check whether you…
Mary McAtee
True to my profession as an engineer, I am a total geek at heart and proud of it. Spending time in automobile museums always fascinates me. It excites me to see a prescient innovator from the past come up with an idea like headlights. The first ones were Limelight carbide models that had a nasty…
Thomas Kochan, Lee Dyer
The technologies driving artificial intelligence (AI) are expanding exponentially, leading many technology experts and futurists to predict that machines will soon be doing many of the jobs that humans do today. Some even predict humans could lose control over their future.
While we agree about…
Jacqueline Calhoun
Which cybersecurity-related activities are most important to your business strategy and critical service delivery? How do you assess the effectiveness and efficiency of your use of cybersecurity standards, guidelines, and practices? To answer these questions and build excellence in your…
Joshua Fairfield
Internet-enabled devices are so common, and so vulnerable, that hackers recently broke into a casino through its fish tank. The tank had internet-connected sensors measuring its temperature and cleanliness. The hackers got into the fish tank’s sensors and then to the computer used to control them…
Peter Merrill
ISO 9001:2015 has significant structural changes that differentiate it from the previous standard. The new high-level structure is common to all ISO management system standards (i.e., quality, environmental, IT security) and enables us to start looking at integration of these systems. There is a…
Joe Bollard
As of Sept. 14, 2018, ISO/TS 16949 certificates are longer valid, which means automotive suppliers must certify to the new version, IATF 16949. Transition audits are underway and will continue into next year, but many companies still have a long way to go to prepare.
Let’s look at some of the…
Mary Drotar
A recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review, “Using Scenario Planning to Reshape Strategy,” indicated a resurgence of scenario planning that initially gained recognition during the 1960s and ’70s. Royal Dutch/Shell has been the “poster child” of success ever since it used scenario planning to…
Dirk Dusharme
Our Sept. 8, 2017, episode of QDL examined a different way to conduct clinical trials, discussed fixing problems before they occur, and in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey looked at resources for building a more resilient and sustainable infrastructure.
“A Better Way to Design Clinical Trials”
A…
Laurel Thoennes @ QD
There’s nothing like a splash of cold water to wake you up. Imagine what a 33-trillion-gallon splash would do. Maybe 24 hours of wind at 185 miles per hour would sweep you onto your feet. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma said, “Wakey wakey,” and we can’t afford to nod off.
How do you recover from…
Arun Hariharan
In the last week of August 2017, two extreme weather events occurred on opposite sides of the world. Hurricane Harvey brought record-breaking rain and catastrophic flooding to Houston, Texas, causing loss of life, mass evacuation of people, and damage estimated to be in billions of dollars. Around…
Greg Hutchins
I live in the Northwest of the United States. We are now the small business and startup mecca of the country. Why? San Francisco and Silicon Valley are too expensive. So, folks are moving in droves to Portland and Seattle; one-third of the license plates in my hood are out of state.
But there are…
DNV GL
Sponsored Content
A new report by Jupiter Research says $8 trillion will be the price tag—within the next five years—of cyber attacks against businesses around the world. Hacks and other forms of digital theft are accelerating despite what would seem to be nonstop efforts by corporations to harden…
Stephen Chick
Value has found a place at the heart of healthcare innovation. For money-conscious governments and other actors in the system, it’s not enough that a new treatment be beneficial and safe. It also needs to be cost effective.
This emphasis on value is even changing the profile of the pharmaceutical…
Mike Richman
On Friday, Sept. 1, 2017, QDL included news about the disaster in Texas and no apocalypse in retail, an interview covering a different approach to failure modes and effects analyses, a feature article on consumer views about for-profit social-benefit enterprises, and a great new Tech Corner demo.…
Mike Richman
Last week, my friend and colleague, QD editor in chief Dirk Dusharme, wrote an uplifting and important column in this space. Titled “The Day We All Looked for the Same Thing,” Dirk’s article used last week’s solar eclipse, seen in its totality in so many places around the United States, as a motif…
Saerom Lee, Karen Winterich, Lisa E. Bolton
Have you ever wondered who collects the clothes you stuff into that donation drop box in your neighborhood? Chances are, you assumed it was a nonprofit, but that box actually may instead belong to a for-profit social venture. If you don’t know what that means, you’re not alone.
Years ago, just…
Automated Precision Inc.
Sponsored Content
Scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) are working on research projects that aim to answer fundamental physics questions. How did the universe begin? What are dark matter and dark energy? What is the mass hierarchy of neutrinos? Are there other…
Amie Whittington
As discussed in my previous article, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is ramping up compliance audits of governmental hospitals that are exempt under section 501(c)3. However, the IRS isn’t the only one monitoring your tax-exempt hospital. Other organizations have started policing these…
Mike Richman
There was a lot of ground to cover on this week’s show… fortunately we had drones (I mean, unmanned aircraft systems) to help us cover it all. Here’s a quick flyby:
“Girl Scouts Offer New Badges for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math” The Girl Scouts of the USA are now offering their…
John Flaig
Independence is an important issue in statistics, so I found the article, “Ethics, Auditing and Enron,” by Denis Arter and J. P. Russell, in the October 2003 issue of Quality Progress quite interesting.
In the second section of the article the QP editor asks, “Must auditors be independent?” to…
Chad Kymal
Globally, there are more than 68,000 organizations certified to ISO/TS 16949:2009 that will need to undergo a transition audit to the International Automotive Task Force (IATF) international automotive quality standard, IATF 16949:2016. As of April 2017, 181 of these audits have been completed,…