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Six Sigma promoters and innovation advocates have emerged as opposing camps in the battle for tool supremacy in the organization improvement wars. As Business Week said in “Six Sigma: So Yesterday?” and “At 3M, A Struggle Between Efficiency and Creativity,” which described how GE, Home…
(SBTI: San Marcos, Texas) -- Sigma Breakthrough Technologies Inc., an international business process solutions consulting firm is now offering lean Six Sigma Green Belt certification testing online. For the certification test, a set of 90 randomly selected questions are divided into five main…
(ISO: Geneva) -- ISO/IEC 24762:2008—“Information technology—Security techniques—Guidelines for information and communications technology disaster recovery services” aims to offer guidance on the information and communications technologies and services necessary for disaster recovery (ICT DR) as…
(NCQA: Washington) -- The National Committee for Quality Assurance recently announced the certification of eight leading software vendors for their Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS)-related software. Such software collects HEDIS-related data from health plan databases and…
(IQPC: London) -- Top companies will be sharing their case studies at IQPC’s Business Process Management Spring Summit on April 14–17 at the Intercontinental West Miami Hotel in Miami, Florida. This event brings together first-hand business practitioners under one roof to exchange best practices on…
As is the case with any lean implementation in a traditional environment, culture change is the most difficult obstacle to success. A company can hire consultants, develop work teams, and begin lean initiatives, but if it only talks the talk, the initiative soon becomes just talk.
The…
As is the case with any lean implementation in a traditional environment, culture change is the most difficult obstacle to success. A company can hire consultants, develop work teams, and begin lean initiatives, but if it only talks the talk, the initiative soon becomes just talk.
The…
What’s a datum reference frame?
As discussed in workshop No. 5, datum reference frames (DRF) are coordinate systems, and preferably—at least to start with—Cartesian coordinate systems.
As we know, coordinate systems serve to orient and locate objects, and in the world of GD&T in particular…
It’s becoming common to refer to the devices used for dimensional and coordinate measurement—vision/optics, lasers, touch probes, and others—as sensors. Multisensor measuring systems use two or more of these devices. It can be confusing because none of these “sensors” is actually a sensor. The…
(Carl Zeiss SMT: Albany, New York; and SEMATECH: Austin, Texas) -- In a potential boost to advance lithography, engineers at SEMATECH and Carl Zeiss SMT have announced the completion of their final design for the next generation photomask registration and overlay metrology system—called PROVE.…
Hy Tran examines a kilogram sample in a mass comparator at Sandia’s Primary Standards Laboratory. Photo by Randy Montoya (Sandia Corp.: Albuquerque, New Mexico) -- The kilogram is losing weight and many international scientists, including some at Sandia…
(ARTEL: New Orleans, Louisiana) -- The ARTEL Extreme Pipetting Expedition has announced data showing that pipettes performed accurately and precisely in Washington state’s humid Olympic National Park, but underdelivered significantly in a drier facility mimicking typical laboratory conditions…
(ISO/IEC: Geneva, Switzerland) -- From fires to earthquakes to pandemics, businesses and other organizations may become the victims of disaster at any time. To deal with the unexpected and safeguard the interests of their stakeholders, as well as their reputation, brand and value-creating…
(QMI: Toronto, Ontario) -- Robert M. Griffin, president and CEO of CSA Group, has announced that the group has finalized an agreement for the sale of its Quality Management Institute division, a North American registrar, to SAI Global Limited of Sydney, Australia, for $40 million Canadian.
“The…
(MetricStream Inc.: Redwood Shores, California) -- MetricStream Inc. a provider of enterprisewide governance, risk, compliance, and quality management solutions, has released an updated compliance management application. The new release is designed to manage compliance with multiple…
(ANSI: Washington, D.C.) -- The rows of bulk food bins that line many grocery store aisles offer endless options for enhancing recipes. From grains and cereals to nuts, seeds, and spices, the various commodities that fill those bins are standardized through International Organization for…
Recently I became aware that the ISO 9001 requirements pertaining to preventive action are sometimes referred to as the “fortune-telling clause.” The deprecating implication is that attempting to implement preventive actions is as silly as relying on a two-bit sideshow palm reader to help you make…
Powerful brands can drive success in competitive markets and become the organization’s most valuable assets. Wikipedia suggests that, “Brands were originally developed as labels of ownership: name, term, design, and symbol.” Today, how brands reflect and engage people and how they define people’s…
Powerful brands can drive success in competitive markets and become the organization’s most valuable assets. Wikipedia suggests that, “Brands were originally developed as labels of ownership: name, term, design, and symbol.” Today, how brands reflect and engage people and how they define people’s…
As a manager, one might imagine being a rider atop a horse. You cannot expect to force the horse to win by constantly pulling the reins, neither can you expect to win the race consistently by pushing the horse beyond its capability. The rider needs to influence its performance to win the race;…
(Economist Intelligence Unit: London) -- Due to a limited understanding of the customer, one-half of consumer products, financial services, and manufacturing companies say that they find it difficult to decide which products to phase out and which to retain, and only one-third of these companies…
(STLE: Park Ridge, Illinois) -- Concerned with friction and wear, the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers will hold its annual meeting and exhibition May 18–22, at the Cleveland Convention Center in Cleveland. STLE’s purposes are education, improved equipment and processes, and…
(ISO: Geneva) -- The International Organization for Standardization recently approved the creation of a new project committee to develop an international standard for road traffic safety management systems.
The secretariat of the project committee, ISO/PC 241—“Road safety management,” has been…
(EBRI: Wasington, D.C.) -- A relatively new health plan model that advocates hope will control rising health spending could fail if key consumer education initiatives prove ineffective, according to a study recently published by the nonpartisan Employee Benefit Research Institute.The study,…
(NCQA: Washington, DC) -- The National Committee for Quality Assurance launched a new version of its Physician Practice Connections (PPC) program designed to assess how medical practices are functioning as patient-centered medical homes. The new Physician Practice Connections—Patient-Centered…