You like FREE content. We like getting a paycheck. Please support us by disabling your ad blocker on our website.
Our PROMISE: Our ads will never cover up content.
Our children thank you.
Essential in quality control, vision-based multisensor metrology allows supplied components and materials to be quality-checked before, during, and after incorporation into a final product. It can also provide an audit trail enabling a point of failure to be accurately pinpointed in time as well as providing a means of early detection and diagnosis of the problem. Early correction can save time, reduce waste, save money, and most important, safeguard a company’s reputation for reliability and quality.
Standards such as ISO 9001 mandate documentation requirements as part of a company’s compliance with the standard. Although the requirements are intentionally broad-based and open, many organizations tend to over-document their systems. ISO 9001:2008 requires a manual and six documented procedures. AS9100 requires seven, and ISO 14001 requires one. Yet companies continue to write additional procedures, often for the wrong reasons. Let’s end the confusion about implementing a management system vs. documenting one.
A common belief is that the standards’ requirements are satisfied if detailed procedures exist to define a system. Additionally, many managers and executives think that a documented procedure for every element in the company results in better control and accountability. Although no requirements are enumerated in these standards for procedure format, more emphasis is placed on this than on the information contained within the procedures.
Welcome to Quality Digest’s 2009 Gauges Buyers Guide, which features more than 140 manufacturers and distributors of gauges. Each listing contains the company’s address, telephone and fax numbers, and a web address (if provided). Many of these companies supplied a list of the types of gauges that they provide, selected from a predetermined list of 35 gauge types. Please refer to the abbreviations key for these types.
We encourage you to visit our online buyers guide database at www.qualitydigest.com/content/buyers-guides for detailed descriptions of the gauge manufacturers’ and distributors’ products, if this information has been provided to us.
The products listed in this guide have been neither evaluated nor endorsed by Quality Digest . Only those companies that responded to our requests for information are listed. We hope this resource will help you find the right gauge for your specific needs.
Three basic evaluation methods exist for any work activity: inspection, compliance auditing and management auditing. The first method, inspection, measures a process's output against certain characteristics. These characteristics, generally identified as form, fit and function, are specified, and the process output either possesses those characteristics or it doesn't. As a result, an inspection's outcome is always binary: pass or fail.
The term “global” is ubiquitous in our daily lives. Like the economy, human rights, and peace, the environment is often discussed in global terms because that’s the only way to bring about profound change. Now, global warming--even though its full extent is unknown--has brought a sense of urgency to improving the environment.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) brings together stakeholders from around the globe to develop international standards that provide structured means to systematically manage improvement. ISO 14001--”Environmental Management Systems--Requirements,” along with a separate guidance document for its use, is the basic environmental management system ( EMS) standard being implemented globally to help manage environmental aspects of an organization. An EMS can be an effective tool in maintaining compliance with regulatory and other requirements, preventing pollution, and driving continuous improvement.
Quality improvement has stalled in manufacturing due to an inability to capture, continuously improve, and leverage performance knowledge in design and manufacturing activities. Other enterprise systems, such as project life-cycle management (PLM), fail to improve quality because they treat it as a process management problem. The fundamental challenges to achieving quality are knowledge-management and continuous-improvement issues. Recently, quality life-cycle management has received a boost from enterprise software solutions designed to change how manufacturers go about designing quality into their manufacturing processes and products.
Some statistics reported by manufacturers highlight the current dilemma in quality performance:
• Eighty percent of all quality issues are repeat issues. These are errors that have happened before and were fixed, yet the lesson learned wasn’t recalled by or communicated to another group so that preventive action could be taken.
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.
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.
IECQ QC 080000: The Standard for Lean-Green Compliance
Although not all manufacturers around the world understand the value proposition of a lean-green, process-based manufacturing program, there are more than 1,250 that do--those that are registered to the IECQ QC 080000 standard.
IECQ hazardous substance process management (HSPM) has proven to be an efficient, effective, and financially prudent way for manufacturers to demonstrate international compliance with hazardous- substance-free components, products, and related material requirements and legislation.
Adding a lean-green, process-based manufacturing program enhances this concept and adds even greater value.
When properly implemented, QC 08000 certification provides its management and stakeholders:
Qing Rong Zhang (behind computer, center), a Shanghi-based quality engineer with more than 30 years of experience with automotive original equipment manufacturers and tier-one suppliers, handles an overall supplier assessment.
It’s hard not to pick up a newspaper or industry magazine or surf the internet without reading that manufacturing industries are relocating their operations to other countries. During the past couple of years, it’s been equally difficult to avoid articles concerning serious quality issues present in consumer and industrial products produced in emerging economies. Even as product lines move to China, India, and Russia, domestic companies are losing significant numbers of experienced employees throughout their organizations due to early retirement or reassignment. Diminished and often lost in this regard is the tribal knowledge of operators who know the pulse of the manufacturing process. This triple whammy of outsourcing, loss of tribal knowledge, and decrease in product quality has emphasized the need for third-party suppliers of supply chain solutions.