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Outside of their jobs, employees make important decisions every day. They
vote on community issues. They help teach their children new skills. They
purchase homes and cars and life insurance. But on the job, how many people are
allowed to make important decisions about their work? How many people have input
into how they do their own jobs, lead a team, find out what their customers need
or make decisions about what will work better for their customers?
What are self-directed work teams?
Minnesota-based 3M is among an increasing number of companies that involve
employees in the daily management of their business through work teams. These
teams are empowered to take corrective actions to resolve day-to-day problems.
They also have direct access to information that allows them to plan, control
and improve their operations. In short, employees that comprise work teams
manage themselves.
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.
We’re all aware of the importance of safety testing for medical products, both for implantable devices and external devices used to monitor or sustain us when we’re in the hospital. In the past, emphasis has been on the hardware-safety aspects of external medical equipment. Are they foolproof? Are there built-in safety mechanisms that prevent the device from causing harm through electrical shock or other forms of electrical or electronic malfunction?
Until a few years ago, little thought was given to the software that is an increasingly crucial part of these devices. Over time, however, the software that controls many electronic diagnostic and life-critical electronic equipment has grown in importance, to the point where a software failure could be just as catastrophic, and life threatening, as a hardware failure. A software crash on your laptop simply means a reboot. A software crash on a piece of equipment helping to keep a patient alive is another problem altogether.
Fortunately, the issue has not gone unnoticed. In 2006, the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) published IEC 62304--“Medical device software--Software life-cycle processes.”
“We are going to win, and the industrial West is going to lose: There’s nothing much you can do about it because the reasons for your failure are within yourselves.”
--Konosuke Matsushita
They work tirelessly to change our world irreversibly. If they succeed at what they’re doing and aren’t challenged, our way of life as we know it will end. While we whine about our bosses, our organizations, and our government; while we do the minimum that our jobs require; while we flip-flop through the mall and watch Oprah they’re planning, learning, and executing. When we’re tucked away in our beds, tossing and turning in restless sleep, they’re even busier. They don’t seem to tire; their passion is relentless. To them, weekends and holidays are inconsequential in their desire to have what we have.
We’re at war, but we seem oblivious to it. Our children’s future, our families, even our liberties are at risk, but for now, apathy is our primary defense. Secure in our ignorance of what’s happening far away, we think that we’re safe. But we’re not.
By Geraldine S. Cheok, Alan M. Lytle, and Kamel S. Saidi, Ph.D.
3-D Imaging Terminology
One of the documents to come out of committee E57 was E2544-08 -- "Standard terminology for three- dimensional (3-D) imaging systems." What follows is an excerpt from the document of some of the 3-D imaging terminology. To keep the excerpt short, we have included the definition of just a few of the terms listed.
3.2 Definitions of terms specific to this standard
3-D imaging system--a noncontact measurement instrument used to produce a 3-D representation (e.g., a point cloud) of an object or a site.
Angular increment--the angle between samples, Da, where Da = ai- ai-1, in either the azimuth or elevation directions (or a combination of both) with respect to the instrument’s internal frame of reference
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.
The changing nature of today's health care organizations, including pressure
to reduce costs, improve the quality of care and meet stringent guidelines, has
forced health care professionals to re-examine how they evaluate their
performance. While many health care organizations have long recognized the need
to look beyond financial measures when evaluating their performance, many still
struggle with what measures to select and how to use the results of those
measures. Because a growing number of health care professionals have readily
adopted quality concepts, health care organizations should be able to quickly
improve their performance measurement systems by following a few simple
rules.
History
A brief look at the evolution of quality in modern health care systems may
help understand the need to improve performance measurement.
Welcome to Quality Digest’s 2009 Registrar Buyers Guide. This handy resource includes more than 50 listings of companies that provide registration and auditing services on several standards, from the ubiquitous ISO 9001 for the overall management of quality management systems to any number of sector-specifics.
Included in each description, you’ll find the company name, location, phone and fax number, web site, and abbreviations representing the standards for which each company provides registration services. A key defining these abbreviations is included below.
Welcome to Quality Digest’s 2008 ISO Standards Software Directory. The software that these companies create or distribute will help you to achieve or maintain registration to various quality standards of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The software products are designed to support the diverse needs of companies large and small, not only in compliance to standards, but in continuous improvement in areas of interest and industries such as: aerospace, analytical tools, benchmarking, consumer protection, corrective actions, customer satisfaction, data gathering, documentation management, energy, environmental issues, federal government agencies, going green, hazardous waste, health and safety, measurement process, process performance, return on investment, supply chains, value-adding methods, and more. If your needs concern any of these, take the time to contact these companies, and you may not need to look any further.
As with all of our directories, this guide is intended as a starting point to help readers choose the right solution for their needs. Quality Digest hasn’t evaluated, nor do we endorse, any of the products listed in this directory. Good luck finding the software solution to fit your needs.
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.
