Content By Quality Digest

Dave Coffaro’s picture

Leading by Cause
By: Dave Coffaro 07/29/2020

Lessons throughout history inform us that cause precedes effect, and actions create results. Plato explained the principle of causality, saying “Every­thing that becomes or changes must do so owing to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause.” In Codex Atlanticus Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “No effect is in Nature without cause; you understand the cause and you do not need any experience.”

And as every schoolchild learns, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” per Sir Isaac Newton’s third law of motion.

With such depth of affirmation around cause preceding effect, why do business leaders focus so heavily on analyzing their numbers—or focus on the effect instead of the cause? A recent conversation with a community bank CEO focused on his vision for the company. He opened the dialogue, saying he and his leadership team had put a lot of thought into where they want to take their bank, and the vision they committed to was to deliver top-decile return on equity and return on assets, as well as topline revenue growth: a quintessential example of focusing on effect, not cause.

Cost Savings Strategies for Certification

Quality Digest   |  Tue, 07/28/2020

Recording: Cost Savings Strategies for Certification

Fill out the form and click “submit” for instant access to this recording.

Greg Hutchins’s picture

The Future of Everything Is Risk-Based
By: Greg Hutchins 07/28/2020

My recent epiphany was that the lens for all work and even for everyday living during the next few years will be risk-based. Why do I make this case?

In January 2020, my company was selected to participate in the largest pitch fest in the Northwest, TechfestNW, which was originally scheduled for April. Think “shark tank” but in front of a live audience of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs—1,000 or so folks. The idea is to take your start-up idea, distill it, and pitch it to investors. Kind of fun. Kind of scary. 

Our pitch that we worked on in February 2020 was: “The future of engineering is going to be risk-based.” We had risk training, consulting, and other products that we wanted to launch to a broader audience. So, we decided to see if we could get traction and feedback.

Well, February and March passed. Covid-19 became a pandemic. We were all in quarantine mode. As you can imagine, TechfestNW was moved from April to August 2020. We prepped for August.

Uncertainty and risk

Two popular words in most news programs last spring were uncertainty and risk. So, we changed our pitch for the August pitch fest to: “The future of all work is going to risk-based.”

  • video thumb
Buyer's Guide for Quality Management Software

Moving to cloud-based quality management software has never been more valuable (or urgent). Learn best practices from hundreds of successful quality management modernizations at companies like yours in this easy-to-follow cloud QMS buyer's guide. Reserve your free copy of the Buyer's Guide for Quality Management Software today.

Veeva 7-27-20 F Vid Banner

Links to https://www.industries.veeva.com/qualitydigest.

Buyer's Guide for Quality Management Software

Moving to cloud-based quality management software has never been more valuable (or urgent). Learn best practices from hundreds of successful quality management modernizations at companies like yours in this easy-to-follow cloud QMS buyer's guide. Reserve your free copy of the Buyer's Guide for Quality Management Software today.

Buyer's Guide for Quality Management Software
 

Tom Taormina’s picture

The Future of Quality Management Is Business Success, Part 7
By: Tom Taormina 07/27/2020

Each article in this series presents new tools for increasing return on investment (ROI), enhancing customer satisfaction, creating process excellence, and driving risk from an ISO 9001:2015-based quality management system (QMS). They will help implementers evolve quality management to overall business management. In this article we look at the clauses and subclauses of Section 9 of the standard.

Clause 9—Performance evaluation

Clause 9 is the part of the standard that we can use to truly quantify business excellence and risk avoidance. I will propose paradigm shifts that will make the outputs of this clause more informative for senior management and will include actionable recommendations that can contribute to the success factors that are immediately palatable and implementable for the leadership.

9.1.1 Monitoring, measurement, analysis, and evaluation—General

9.1.1 and excellence
This subclause requires that the organization must establish what needs to be monitored, measured, analyzed, and evaluated.

Douglas S. Thomas’s picture

Manufacturing Cybercrime: It’s Worse Than We Thought
By: Douglas S. Thomas 07/23/2020

The cyber world is relatively new, and unlike other types of assets, cyber-assets are potentially accessible to criminals in far-off locations. This distance provides the criminal with significant protections from getting caught; thus, the risks are low, and with cyber-assets and activities being in the trillions of dollars, the payoff is high.

When we talk about cybercrime, we often focus on the loss of privacy and security. But cybercrime also results in significant economic losses. Yet the data and research on this aspect of cybercrime are unfortunately limited. Data collection often relies on small sample sizes or has other challenges that bring accuracy into question.

Marposs’s picture

Marposs Announces New GEMGP Stand-Alone Tool Monitoring Solution
By: Marposs 07/22/2020

(Marposs: Auburn Hills, MI) -- Marposs, a world leader in measurement, inspection, and test technologies, has announced its new Artis GEMGP stand-alone solution for detecting process anomalies during metal cutting in machine tools. By measuring force and strain, GEMGP is able to detect and report on tool breakage, missing tools, overload, tool wear, and fluid flow in real time. This helps to prevent damage to the machine, reduce scrap, and improve productivity.

The GEMGP can accommodate two sensors for measuring force and strain values obtained from the spindle during the machining process. A highly flexible solution, the GEMGP offers three different monitoring strategies and can handle up to 127 different cutting cycles with varying types of limits for each cycle. Any events that exceed the pre-fixed limits are recorded in a log file.

The compact GEMGP is designed for easy installation and operation and can be housed within machine electrical cabinets, robots, handling systems, or other devices. All necessary functions and interfaces are integrated in the module. Featuring a digital I/O interface, the GEMGP is independent of the NC type and can be run from any PLC, enabling a discrete connection to the module.

Ben Brumfield’s picture

People Think Robots Are Pretty Incompetent and Not Funny, New Study Says
By: Ben Brumfield 07/21/2020

Dang robots are crummy at so many jobs, and they tell lousy jokes to boot. In two new studies, these were common biases human participants held toward robots.

The studies were originally intended to test for gender bias, that is, if people thought a robot believed to be female may be less competent at some jobs than a robot believed to be male and vice versa. The studies’ titles even included the words “gender,” “stereotypes,” and “preference,” but researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered no significant sexism against the machines.

“This did surprise us,” says Ayanna Howard, the principal investigator in both studies. “There was only a very slight difference in a couple of jobs but not significant. There was, for example, a small preference for a male robot over a female robot as a package deliverer.” Howard is a professor in and the chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing.

Although robots are not sentient, as people increasingly interface with them, we begin to humanize the machines. Howard studies what goes right as we integrate robots into society and what goes wrong, and much of both has to do with how the humans feel about robots.