(Toyota Motor Corp.: Tokyo) -- At a press conference on Feb. 17 in Tokyo, regarding quality related issues, the Toyota Motor Corp. (TMC) announced the following:

In today’s ultracompetitive manufacturing world, knowledge is power, especially when it comes to the industry’s most advanced measurement and inspection systems.

Some experts could barely hide their disappointment when the total number of ISO 9001 certificates recently failed to break the long-awaited million-certificate mark—as if it isn’t enough to have the world’s most widely used voluntary quality standard of all time.

(TÜV Rheinland PTL: Tempe, AZ) -- Figures from 13 years of solar technology testing—including the top three quality failures and strongest influences of new manufacturers on module design—show some photovoltaic (PV) modules required a tune-up to pass international qualification standards.

One of my clients, a wireless business-to-business (B2B) telecom company, was experiencing a significant problem in their call center. They were absolutely inundated with calls—most of them problems.

(ACSI: Ann Arbor, MI) -- Customer satisfaction with the goods and services that people buy in the United States remained strong in the fourth quarter of 2009, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

(Jesse Garant & Associates: Windsor, ON, Canada) -- Using computer tomography (CT) technology similar to what has been used in the medical industry for years, Ontario-based Jesse Garant & Associates has adopted and expanded this technology for automotive, mining applications, and medical

(EtQ Inc.: Farmingdale, NY) -- EtQ Inc. has announced the addition of new and enhanced features in its latest release, Reliance 7.0.

When I was in Sweden recently, we had a lot of good discussion about the lean concept of “standardized work.”

(Cognex Corp.: Natick, MA ) -- Cognex Corp. has announced 3D-Locate, a library of 3-D vision software tools that expands application possibilities in vision-guided robotics, assembly, and inspection.