(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Vice President Joe Biden and U.S. Commerce Department Secretary Gary Locke presented five U.S. organizations with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest honor for organizational innovation and performance excellence.

We are almost there… the close of another year. There are two ways to end the year. One way is to write off the rest of December because the year is just about shot, and then just start fresh in January.

Beginning Dec. 8 with “This Year in Quality, Part One,” and continuing Dec.

(Pallas Athena: The Netherlands) -- Pallas Athena, a global business process management and software solutions vendor, has released its process-mining software solution, ReflectOne 1.3.

(IMAGINiT Technologies: Framingham, MA) -- Rand Worldwide, a provider of technology solutions to organizations with engineering design and information technology requirements, announced that its IMAGINiT Technologies division launched its Scan to BIM software for the Autodesk Revit platform.

(ATS: Amsterdam) -- Applied Tech Systems (ATS) announces the release of its visual quality operations management software, ATS Inspect version 5.3.

(ASIS International and BSI Group: Alexandria, VA) -- ASIS International and BSI have released a joint American national standard, “Business Continuity Management Systems—Requirements with Guidance for Use”

(NVision: Coppell, TX) -- Invensys Operations Management (IOM) saved 60 hours, or about 5 percent in man-hours, in a mechanical upgrade to a steam turbine by using NVision’s Engineering Service Division to capture precise measurements of valves and other hardware.

(Minitab: State College, PA) -- Kraft Foods is quickly and effectively working toward Six Sigma goals with new software that makes it easy to analyze Zarpac Performance Index (ZPI) data with Minitab Statistical Software.

(SGS: Rutherford, NJ) -- SGS was recently awarded the contract for nondestructive testing (NDT) services of the liquefaction and purification facilities during the construction of the new liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in Damietta, Egypt.