All News
Starbucks’ announcement that it would close for three hours on February 26 to retrain about 135,000 in-store employees sent shudders through the thousands of coffee fanatics in the nation. Would java aficionados have to forego their venti-decaf-no foam-double vanilla-light whip-extra caramel-…
(The Conference Board: New York) -- The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index, which had declined sharply in February, fell further in March. The Index now stands at 64.5, down from 76.4 in February. The Expectations index declined to 47.9 from 58.0. The Present Situation Index decreased to 89…
The advantages to pharmaceutical companies of using electronic solutions to modernize their paper-based or partially electronic processes are enormous. Automation speeds up and connects all interrelated processes (corrective and preventive actions, customer complaints, audits, deviation…
(UCSF: San Francisco) -- The approval process for medical devices doesn’t involve the same rigorous review used for pharmaceuticals, and to improve health outcomes this needs to change, say researchers from the University of California, San Francisco.In the January 2008 issue of the Journal of…
(FDA: Rockville, Maryland) -- In an effort to facilitate stronger cooperative relationships with its counterpart agencies around the world, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) plans to establish eight full-time, permanent positions at U.S. diplomatic posts in the People’s…
(Journal of Supply Chain Management: Clemson, North Carolina) -- A new study from the Journal of Supply Chain Management illustrates the real potential for contamination of globally sourced foods and proposes a conceptual framework of supply chain quality management.Led by Aleda V. Roth of…
(Modulo: New York) -- In an effort to streamline its risk assessment and compliance processes, New York University Medical Center has selected the Modulo Risk Manager, an automated information tool.As one of the nation’s largest research and academic medical centers, NYUMC is subject to…
(The Joint Commission: Oak Brook, Illinois) -- Representatives from the health care organizations involved in responding to recent disasters—the crash in Atlanta of the bus carrying the Bluffton University baseball team, the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the…
(ASQ: Milwaukee, Wisconsin) -- The American Society for Quality will present three distinguished service medals and 10 national awards on May 5 during its annual World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Houston, Texas. The recipients are recognized for their innovative contributions and…
Question:What do you call it when a quality manager is caught cheating on a quality exam?
Answer:Benchmarking
Several months ago, I taught a three-day internal-audit class to about 15 people. On the morning of the first day, Joe, the quality manager, gave me an Excel spreadsheet of the lunch orders…
(AIAG: Detroit, Michigan) -- The 2008 Automotive Executive of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to industry legend Carroll Shelby at an invitation-only luncheon at the Detroit Athletic Club on April 16. Approximately 225 automotive original equipment manufacturer executives and…
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…
For the last couple of columns, we have been analyzing a simple experiment where we look for the best choice for a new gear material. We have used analysis of variance (ANOVA) to detect a difference in the mean wear for the four different materials. In the last column, we performed a post-hoc…
(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…
(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…
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…
(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…