All Features
Don Sayre
There is a new international standard published June 9, 2011, that might just warrant your attention. This standard’s purpose is help organizations follow a systematic approach to improving energy performance, including energy efficiency, energy use, and consumption. It applies to variables that…
ACLASS
Keith Greenaway, vice president of ACLASS, a brand of ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation
Board that provides accreditation, gave a brief talk titled “Focus on Inspections and Compliance” at the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act public meeting held on June 6, 2011. His prepared remarks follow:
The…
Kimberly Egan
I don’t know how I missed this gem, but on March 24, 2011, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent a Warning Letter to Jonathan’s Sprouts Inc. informing the company that it was (among other things) marketing its organic mung bean, alfalfa, and broccoli sprouts as drugs. The FDA said it has…
Mayo Clinic
“We can do better” was the underlying takeaway message from the 15th annual Mayo Clinic Quality Conference. This year’s theme was “Creating and Paying for Value in Health Care.”
The conference, held May 3–4, 2011, in Rochester, Minnesota, drew about 1,000 people to hear national leaders in…
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…
Bruce Hamilton
About six years ago I was meeting with a clinical team to kick off an early improvement effort at their hospital. We began with a reflection on the problems with traditional business management practices. To break the ice, I played a short clip from an I Love Lucy episode that has now become a…
The QA Pharm
Can you imagine the stream of firms that venture into their respective FDA district offices to give presentations on their warning letter response and to offer their assurance that they truly “get it?” You can be sure these firms had several dry runs and dress rehearsals to hone their material…
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 Chamberlain
According to the National Center for Health Care (NCHC), emergency department (ED) crowding has been a concern in U.S. hospitals for more than a decade. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report the number of visits to EDs rose 19 percent from 1995 to 2005, even as the number of…
This is one of the first questions that executives always ask me. Because it is a broad question, the answer is often challenging. I usually respond with a few examples that have been gathered in Juran Institute’s 20-year benchmarking practice database, such as Company A is this, and Company B is…
American Sentinel University
Critical care units at St. Joseph’s Hospital Health Center in Syracuse, New York, were faced with a formidable task. They had applied to receive the Beacon Award for Critical Care Excellence, a distinction given only to the top intensive care units in the United States. One of the components on…
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…
David Schwinn
“Under-promise, over-deliver” is a phrase taught to me many years ago by my friend and colleague, PQ Systems’ owner Michael J. Cleary. It may have always been true. It may always be true. It is certainly true today.
I am in the middle of a sabbatical that requires me to buy and learn to use new…
Laurel Thoennes @ QD
“What makes a personal kanban any better than a to-do list?” asked Julie, crossing out a completed task on her “ta da!” list with exaggerated strokes.
“With personal kanban you visualize your work, it becomes tangible, you get kinesthetic feedback, it’s flexible, contextual, and it promotes…
The QA Pharm
A March 30, 2011, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Warning Letter to Ningbo Smart Pharmaceutical Co. revealed that it had reported conformance to specifications on certificates of analysis, when in fact no testing was done—among other issues.
The FDA rather understatedly informed Ningbo Smart, “…
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…
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.…
TraceGains
Under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), food manufacturers and processors who import food ingredients and raw materials will be required to implement a Foreign Supplier Verification Program, essentially mandating that foreign suppliers undergo the same rigor and scrutiny as domestic ones.…
TraceGains
Under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), food manufacturers and processors who import food ingredients and raw materials will be required to implement a Foreign Supplier Verification Program, essentially mandating that foreign suppliers undergo the same rigor and scrutiny as domestic ones.…
The QA Pharm
By the time a consent decree comes along—which happens when a firm repeatedly violates current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) requirements and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) forces it, through legal channels, to make specific changes—it’s no longer a discussion about responses to…
The QA Pharm
By the time a consent decree comes along—which happens when a firm repeatedly violates current good manufacturing practice (cGMP) requirements and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) forces it, through legal channels, to make specific changes—it’s no longer a discussion about responses to…
Bruce McDuffee
If you’re in the business of manufacturing drugs, medical devices, nutraceuticals, or manufacturing or importing any product in the United States that falls under current Good Manufacturing Processes (cGMP) regulations, your facility will be inspected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (…
Kimberly Egan
It turns out that I am not the only one who has noticed that food regulation is sometimes a little, well, silly. The federal government recently “identified a mother lode of government waste and duplication” and decided that getting rid of it “could potentially save billions of tax dollars annually…
Ryan E. Day
The recent brouhaha involving a class-action suit against Taco Bell alleging that their beef filling is more filling than beef really got me thinking, but not about what’s in the tacos. Instead, it got me thinking about quality control, quality assurance, and particularly about customer…
In business there’s a saying: Time is money. The more time it takes for something to get done, the more money is wasted. Companies that can figure out a way to compress the time it takes for something to happen can realize significant cost savings and also get their products into the market faster…