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Denise Robitaille
“Nonfulfillment of a requirement.” That’s the clear and concise definition of a nonconformity offered up by ISO 9000:2005–“Quality management systems—Fundamentals and vocabulary.” The definition leaves little room for ambiguity. A nonconformity is the identification of an incident involving either…
David Blanchard
Not long ago, the economic outlook for small- and medium-size manufacturers in the United States looked problematic. The latest China-U.S. trade talks had ended with little progress on the key issue of the undervalued Yuan, and slow economic growth had led to a decrease in optimism among…
Praveen Gupta
As I teach Six Sigma in my classes, I try to create projects for myself, and often it’s the same project over and over. This time, my project was to use Six Sigma to reduce my extra weight.In 1986 one of my clients distributed a “heart for life” goodie bag on Christmas. In the bag was a measuring…
Bill Kalmar
Being confined to a hospital bed can bring more discomfort than the malady that prompted the admission. Crowded rooms with other patients in various stages of illness, tasteless meals delivered with apathy, loud announcements for lost doctors, and a staff more concerned about planning their next…
Bill Kalmar
Being confined to a hospital bed can bring more discomfort than the malady that prompted the admission. Crowded rooms with other patients in various stages of illness, tasteless meals delivered with apathy, loud announcements for lost doctors, and a staff more concerned about planning their next…
Scott Deming
Today’s world is filled with savvy consumers. They know how to find the best deals. They’re up on all the latest trends. If there’s a hot new product on the market, they don’t want to miss it. (Remember those iPhone lines!). A remarkable blend of exuberance and skepticism leaves many business…
Douglas C. Fair
Just weeks after earning my industrial statistics degree, I hired on with a major aerospace company. My first “real” job entailed working with engineers and operators to deploy statistical process control (SPC) in a large machine shop. I quickly found out that the warm, coddling confines of a…
This figure shows the 3-dimensional dose distribution of the prostate upon completion of implanted seeds. Based on patient tests, Lee’s inverse planning system uses 15% fewer seeds. Photo by Eva Lee A California medical software company has launched…
Anthony V. Fasolo
As a regional director for loss prevention for the Marriott Corp. in the 1980s, I attended an “Insight To Time Management” seminar conducted by Charles Hobbs of Salt Lake City. The ideas in this article I got from that seminar and from more than 40 years of personal experience, with Marriott and…
Steven Ouellette
I spent my June and July articles beating up on the “sigma” index commonly associated with Six Sigma (and continue to do so over in my discussion board.) Let me sum up by saying that, while not wrong, “sigma” isn’t an efficient metric for accomplishing what we are trying to do in today’s business…
Dan Coughlin
If you have only $10,000 to improve your business, should you pour it into a marketing initiative or a performance initiative? I vote for improving performance every time. The long-term payback will be extraordinary.
The quality you provide to customers is the value that they receive from the…
Fred L. Eargle
Meet Chet, industrial engineer and manager of a small manufacturing department. He just came to this company a few months ago. This is his second job since graduation. He was a line supervisor for about a year at his previous company. He felt that job was too confining and prevented him from using…
Fred Mason
In last month’s column, I talked about the accuracy funnel, which shows that in a measurement system where the sensor or the part is moved in one or more axes, the greater the distance, the larger the potential inaccuracies in the measured distance. In the case of an imaging system as used in a…
In last month’s column, I postulated that the hazardous-substance-free movement represents a major paradigm shift and creates demanding requirements for industry, creating a much higher bar of performance for business. QC 080000 IECQ HSPM can be a help.While the increasing demand for business…
Denise Robitaille
Control of quality records: Can there possibly be a more boring requirement? You can feel the yawn coming on as you read through the requirements of ISO 9001 subclause 4.2.4.
Not only are you required to keep records, you’re required to have a documented procedure that describes how you maintain…
Girdhar J. Gyani
The ISO 9001 series of standards is the most widely used in the world and specifies requirements for an organization’s quality management system (QMS). The standard is designed to enable the organization to have a customer orientation, a people (staff) orientation, and a business orientation.…
Bill Kalmar
How many times have you viewed a compelling story on TV, or read a newspaper or magazine account of an investigation of wrongdoing and then never discovered the outcome? Mass media tantalize us with sensational reports, and after the hoopla the stories just fade away.As I lay here recently in my…
David Weldon
This article is reprinted with permission from the July 2007 issue of ExecDigital. At age 160, the New England Confectionery Co. is the oldest multiline candy company in the United States and one of the newest. Four years ago, the popular candy manufacturer embraced lean manufacturing practices,…
Praveen Gupta
Six Sigma was Bill Smith’s vision for excellence in everything. Prior to Six Sigma, companies were implementing total quality management, statistical process control, pre-control, cost of poor quality, and other techniques with minimal effect. Quality became a promise of “motherhood and apple pie…
Mike Micklewright
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror, I’m asking him to change his ways.”by Michael Jackson
Question: What did the registrar auditor do after informing his client that he wasn’t allowed to give advice?
Answer: He gave them advice.
I like to listen to Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.”…
Paul Midler
Numerous news stories this past month have focused on concerns about the quality and safety of certain Chinese exports. In this opinion piece, Paul Midler discusses “quality fade” in China, which he defines as “the deliberate and secretive habit of widening profit margins through a reduction in…
CardioMEMS engineer Michael Fonseca uses a laser to separate pressure sensors in the company’s clean room facility in the ATDC Biosciences Center located at Georgia Tech’s Environmental Science and Technology Building. Photo by Gary Meek After…
Bipin Roy
Story update 11/1/2010: We had the incorrect author shown for this story. The author is Bipin Roy.
Welcome to the information technology world of governance boards, compliance councils, Sarbanes Oxley, and audit committees that continually invent stringent rules and regulations to make the…
Steven Ouellette
Last month I talked about the “sigma” index and how it can be used. So what could be bad about the “sigma” index?Never forget that metrics drive behavior and that people are very, very good at finding a way to succeed when given a goal. It just may not be the thing you wanted them to do. If “sigma…
David Schwinn
We recently lost two great American authors, Kurt Vonnegut and David Halberstam. I liked them because they told the truth. At least their truth agreed with my truth, and it seems like the truth of a great many other people.I first became aware of Kurt Vonnegut in my late teens, a time when I…