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Welcome to Quality Digest’s 2008 Vision Systems Directory, featuring information for organizations that manufacture or distribute vision-/optical-based measurement equipment. This guide presents an alphabetical listing of 121 companies that responded to our requests for information, including the company’s contact information (address, phone number, fax number, and web address). Descriptions of their products can be found at www.qualitydigest.com/content/buyers-guides .

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Registering to the appropriate quality management stand­ard—and maintaining that registration—is probably the best way to ensure that your organization is serious about improvement. There are standards for practically every industry in the world, in manufacturing as well as service environments. The path to registration can be a long one; fortunately, there are professionals to make the journey a bit easier.

The following section contains two directories. The Registrar buyers guide will help you find the right company to register and audit your organization’s compliance to various standards. These organizations can ease your journey toward the successful implementation of standards for quality management, social accountability,
environmental management, FDA requirements, and others. This section also includes the ISO Standards Consultants buyers guide, which can help you find the right consultant to lead you through the often-complex registration process, particularly for ISO 9001, the world’s most recognized quality standard.

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By Anne Willimann

 

L

et’s travel back in time to September 10, 2008, at 10:28 a.m. At that moment, CERN became known to the general public when the first beam was successfully steered around the world’s most powerful particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This historic event marked the beginning of a new era of scientific discovery.

CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, with headquarters in Geneva. Recognized as the world’s leading laboratory for particle physics, CERN is located 50 to 150 meters below ground under the city’s surroundings, and crosses the Swiss border with France. The LHC is installed in a tunnel 27 kilometers in circumference and provides collisions at the highest energy levels ever achieved in laboratory conditions. CERN physicists can observe these collisions via four huge detectors, exploring new territory in matter, energy, space, and time.

Particle Physics

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By Joyce A. Thompsen, Ph.D.

Efficient participation in today's economy demands high reliance on effective leadership of technical and support teams whose members are scattered across many geographic boundaries. There are unique and distinctive requirements for leadership attention in the virtual project team or remote management situation, where individuals who share responsibilities for common goals reside in geographically dispersed locations.

Key findings from both research and best practices across many industries reveal that effective distance leadership includes the typical fundamentals for leading people and managing resources in a traditional office environment.

However, difficulties in the traditional environment can be significantly magnified in the virtual or remote situation. Difficulty with communicating; working together; and producing high-quality, on-time results is typically heightened by distance. Effective leaders need to quickly, confidently and competently diagnose such issues and take deliberate actions to keep project team relationships, productivity and outcomes on track. There is even more emphasis on the use of appropriate communications skills to fit the needs of the people and the situation.

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By S. Bala

The United States spends 16 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, more than any other nation. Although that investment has produced medical experts and breakthroughs envied the world over, a great majority of U.S. citizens are unhappy with the end results. When the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund conducted a poll of U.S. health care consumers last year, 69 percent expressed strong dissatisfaction with the current health care system. In a 2007 survey, the same group found U.S. respondents twice as likely to support a complete overhaul of their system than those from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Great Britain, and Australia--all nations that spend half as much GDP as the United States on health care.

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Welcome to Quality Digest’s 2008 Calibration Software and Services Directory

On the following pages you’ll find nearly 200 companies that can help you properly calibrate your measurement equipment. Included in each listing is the company name, address, telephone and fax numbers, web address, and a key showing whether the company in question provides calibration software (SW), services (SVC), or both. Further information, including detailed descriptions of these companies’ products and/or services, can be found online at www.qualitydigest.com/content/buyers-guides.

Quality Digest hasn’t evaluated, nor do we endorse, any of the following calibration software and/or service providers. This directory is intended to be used as a guide; please contact the companies themselves for further information.

Good luck in your search for the right calibration software and/or services provider.

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By R. Stephen Flynn

What Is Multisensor Metrology?

Multisensor metrology is dimensional measurement on a measuring machine that utilizes two or more different sensor technologies to acquire data points from features and surfaces of a part to perform more measurements than would be possible on a machine using a single sensor. Most multisensor machines are motorized and use software that repeats predetermined measurement sequences without the need for user interaction.

Most articles about measuring devices, instruments, or systems describe what they do and how they work. The manufacturers of these systems want readers to know about the innovation and technology that went into them. However, the missing part of such articles is how to use the measuring system to get the information that the user needs to make decisions. This article looks at multisensor metrology from a user’s perspective.

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Manufacturers of all kinds depend on the accurate measurement of products and parts to ensure that they conform to the needs of their customers. Whether for size, shape, weight, length, or depth, proper dimensional measurement can mean the difference between a happy customer and a lost contract.

The three guides in this section will help you ensure proper dimensional measurement. The 3-D Measurement buyers guide provides a listing of major companies offering high-tech coordinate measurement machines and other 3-D measurement equipment. Companies listed in the Optical Dimensional Measurement Systems buyers guide and/or the Vision Systems buyers guide amplify the power of sight for product inspection and approval.

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By Philip Hewitt

On-machine verification (OMV) is a recent innovation that combines existing technologies to solve more complex measurement problems on machine tools. Many machine tools are equipped with probing systems, and using the probe for simple part setting is an established process. Simple macro-based probing cycles allow the user to measure basic features such as faces, corners, and bosses, and these can be combined to create rudimentary inspection reports. These basic solutions are restricted to simple 2-D measurement because 3-D measurement is just not practical. Although skilled operators can sometimes adapt probing macros to measure along compound angles, this becomes too difficult and too time-consuming for complex, curved surfaces.

OMV solves these problems using graphical 3-D software methods to program the measuring sequences. The programming and reporting tools from inspection software are combined with machine tool post-processor expertise to create a measuring solution for machine tools.

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By Tom Pyzdek

One day, early in my quality career, I was approached by my friend Wayne, the manager of our galvanizing plant.

 "Tom," he began, "I've really been pushing quality in my area lately, and everyone's involved. We're currently working on a problem with plating thickness. Your reports always show a 3-percent to 7-percent reject rate, and we want to drive that number down to zero."

 I, of course, was pleased. The galvanizing area had been the company's perennial problem child. "How can I help?" I asked.

 "We've been trying to discover the cause of the low thicknesses, but we're stumped. I want to show copies of the quality reports to the team so they can see what was happening with the process when the low thicknesses were produced."

 "No problem," I said, "I'll have them for you this afternoon."