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The Car of Tomorrow, a new racecar style for NASCAR’s NEXTEL Cup Series, made its debut in March 2007 with much fanfare. Seven years in the making, NASCAR’s research and development center rolled up its shirtsleeves and conceptualized their dream template. Their ideal racecar would implement the…
I thought this month we would get away from the stats of the last few columns. Hey, quiet down! How can anybody read over all that cheering?
There’s something missing from most Six Sigma implementations—a gap that, if left unattended, leads to wasted time and money, as well as the failure of the…
(GAO: Washington, D.C.) -- In 1995, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) designated Department of Defense (DOD) business systems modernization as a high-risk program, and the program remains on the high-risk list today. A key to successful systems modernization is having and using an…
(AME: San Diego) -- The attendees of the Western Regional Conference of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) in San Diego June 9-11, 2008 will have an opportunity to hear keynote speakers who are experts on lean principles share their success stories. The speaker roster includes a…
I recently gave a speech on products made in China to ASQ’s customer service division in Raleigh, North Carolina. The critical takeaways were that global uncertainties and risks were fundamentally changing the rules of outsourcing and offshoring. What’s going on? Let’s look at few of the changes…
(ISO: Geneva) -- The new International Standard ISO/IEC 10995:2008 specifies an accelerated aging test method for estimating the life expectancy for the retrievability of information stored on recordable or rewritable optical disks.This international standard provides a methodology that includes…
(NCQA: Washington) -- Expanding health insurance coverage is a critical step in health reform, but reforms won’t be successful if they fail to address the quality and cost of care. That’s the conclusion of The Quality Crossroads Group, a broad group of stakeholders drawn together to identify…
(ANSI: Washington) -- James H. Turner, Jr., chief counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives committee on science and technology, has been selected by the U.S. Celebration of World Standards Day planning committee as the 2008 recipient of the Ronald H. Brown Standards Leadership Award. Turner…
Unlike many other requirements in ISO 9001, the subclause dealing with the ISO management representative is rarely the subject of debate. In fact, it doesn’t get nearly as much consideration as it deserves.
Traditionally, it’s assumed that the quality manager gets the job by default. If the…
(NSAI: Nashua, New Hampshire) -- Companies looking to become suppliers to The Boeing Co. now have a simpler way to get on to the company’s preferred provider list. The aeronautics giant recently announced that it will now accept IEC/TS 62239 certification for electronic component management…
(House of Representatives: Washington, D.C.) -- On March 3, U.S. representatives George Miller (D-California) and John Barrow (D-Georgia) announced legislation to help prevent combustible dust explosions such as the one at the Imperial Sugar refinery in Port Wentworth, Georgia, which in early…
(FAA: Washington, D.C.) -- The Federal Aviation Administration has announced steps to strengthen the reporting system designed to classify airspace errors, in response to a report by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Inspector General (IG) that revealed the intentional misclassification…
(NSAI: Nashua, New Hampshire) -- Companies looking to become suppliers to The Boeing Co. now have a simpler way to get on to the company’s preferred provider list. The aeronautics giant recently announced that it will now accept IEC/TS 62239 certification for electronic component management…
What’s an extremely difficult part of lean? Sustained improvement. Kaizen is best known and most often described as continual, incremental improvement. Kaikaku is perhaps best described as revolutionary improvement. Thus we have two ways to pursue sustained improvement, evolution and revolution.…
What’s an extremely difficult part of lean? Sustained improvement. Kaizen is best known and most often described as continual, incremental improvement. Kaikaku is perhaps best described as revolutionary improvement. Thus we have two ways to pursue sustained improvement, evolution and revolution…
(ANSI: New York) -- The American National Standards Institute invites all members to submit a nomination for the 2009 ANSI board of directors. Nominations are for terms beginning on January 1, 2009.ANSI strives to ensure balance and diversity within its membership and is seeking board members who…
(ISO: Geneva) -- A new ISO standard will help to ensure consistent communication about one of the most ubiquitous and versatile materials in the global economy: plastics. ISO 19712-1:2008, “Plastics—Decorative solid surfacing materials—Part 1: Classification and specifications,” will ensure that…
(NCQA: Washington) -- The National Committee for Quality Assurance recently reached a milestone when it recognized its 10,000th physician for high-quality care. NCQA’s voluntary physician recognition programs evaluate physicians and physician practices based on evidence-based measures of quality…
Encoding the mating flange:
In Workshop No. 7, we used Smart GD&T processes to encode the operation, assembly, and other functions of a flange. In this workshop, we take a deeper look at the mating aspect of the game by encoding the mating flange. The additional steps, 7 through 9, are…
Colorized micrograph of a NIST chip combining four microrefrigerators (circled in red) with a superconducting sensor (large orange square in the middle). The self-cooling chip could be used for applications ranging from detailed X-ray analysis of semiconductors to detection of…
(Automated Imaging Association: Ann Arbor, Michigan) -- A new machine vision market study reports that machine vision and automated imaging continues to be a growth industry in North America. The 2008 study is based on 2007 actual results and is organized primarily around the major machine…
(Carl Zeiss MicroImaging: Thornwood, NY) --The David H. Murdock Research Institute (DHMRI) in Kannapolis, North Carolina, has chosen Carl Zeiss MicroImaging, to supply its light microscopy and biological imaging systems for the microscopy core facility, making it one of the most advanced…
Manufacturing firms intent on capturing and distilling rich streams of data will find them. Companies will often look at a capability maturity model (CMM) in rows and columns—a format common across many industries and many applications—in Excel. Most data dumped from a database end up in a grid,…
Manufacturing firms intent on capturing and distilling rich streams of data will find them. Companies will often look at a capability maturity model (CMM) in rows and columns—a format common across many industries and many applications—in Excel. Most data dumped from a database end up in a grid,…
(LAI International Inc.: Scottsdale, Arizona) -- A lean manufacturing initiative conducted by LAI International Inc., a supplier of precision components and subassemblies for original equipment manufacturers, has reduced the cycle time on a critical aerospace product by 25 percent, according to…
