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Quality Digest
Hitachi Medical Corp. (HMC) recently received the 2006 Innovation Award in recognition of its development of new products and processes. Almost 60 North American imaging and 140 Japanese hospitals helped define the critical product capabilities that Hitachi Medical and International…
Research engineer Phil Santangelo works in professor Gang Bao’s cell culture facility in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University in Atlanta. Photo courtesy of: Phil Santangelo…
Quality Digest
Three medical device manufacturers—two in Mexico and one in the United States— recently received Shingo Prizes. Baxter Healthcare Corp.’s North Cove Plant in Marion, North Carolina; Baxter’s Cuernavaca Plant in Morelos, Mexico; and Cordis Corp. of Juarez, Mexico, received the awards,…
Quality Digest
Blue Mountain Quality Resources Inc. and eCalibration.com have collaborated on a spring training schedule. The courses are designed to provide unique and leading-edge training for professionals working in regulated life sciences industries. The courses include: • Facilities and Equipment…
Kevin Meyer
Established in 1903, the Harley-Davidson Motor Company grew rapidly during the two world wars. Foreign competition hit the industry early, and by 1953 Harley-Davidson was the last remaining major motorcycle manufacturer in the United States. Harley was bought by AMF in 1969 and by the late…
Quality Digest
Pitney Bowes’ Group 1 Software recently announced the availability of Address Quality Hub, an address-cleansing software platform. In August 2007, the U.S. Postal Service will begin enforcing stricter regulations regarding postage discounts created to minimize mail that is undeliverable as…
Quality Digest
QUMAS recently made its QUMAS R&D software suite available to biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. QUMAS provides regulatory affairs and quality management solutions, and the new research and development suite is the first of a series for the life sciences that will focus on…
Quality Digest
SiberLogic recently introduced SiberSafe Definer (QE Edition), a next-generation quality engineering and requirements management solution for retailers.Quality engineering is an especially critical process for retailers that make products under a private label. Such companies often use…
Quality Digest
FlipChip International LLC recently appointed Marcus Crayon vice president of quality for its semiconductor-wafer scale packaging and bumping business in Phoenix.“We are excited to have Marcus Crayon join FlipChip International as our vice president of quality. His experience in product…
Quality Digest
Frost & Sullivan’s 2006 Best Practices Awards honored 38 companies that demonstrated outstanding achievement in customer service, technological innovation, strategic product development and leadership. Industry analysts determined best practices by comparing market participants and…
A certain company has a complaint department that answers calls for three unique products. Because of failure rates inherent to each product type, some products have a higher expected complaint rate than others. Calls are tallied each hour and categorized by product type…
Quality Digest
Metaldyne recently announced the appointment of Steve Dickerson as its vice president for quality, Six Sigma and process. Dickerson will lead the company’s Six Sigma and other quality improvement techniques. He will also work with his counterparts at Metaldyne’s parent company, Asahi…
Quality Digest
Six Sigma helped improve patient satisfaction through better room service at Heritage Valley Health Systems’ hospitals. The hospital group first measured patient satisfaction in 2001, and it found that patients were particularly dissatisfied with the quality of food offered them. A…
Quality Digest
California Manufacturing Technology Consulting, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing the competitiveness of the state’s manufacturing base, will offer a Green Belt certification course next month in Southern California. The course will take place over 12 weeks in weekly four-hour…
Quality Digest
WCBF will host its Lean Six Sigma Summit April 24–27 at The Westin Chicago North Shore. At the meeting Edward Hanway, Cigna Corp. CEO, will receive the Lean Six Sigma CEO of the Year award for his leadership with the methodology. Cigna’s lean Six Sigma efforts made a $110 million…
Quality Digest
Hertzler Systems Inc., Minitab Inc., Hyperion Corp., Raptor International and the International Society of Six Sigma Professionals have partnered to offer the Six Sigma Software Showcase Tour. The one-day workshop will kick off in Philadelphia on March 1 and will stop in Chicago; Boston…
Steven Ouellette
We are more than halfway through the countdown of our exploration of the kooky, and expensive, mistakes people make in implementing Six Sigma, and I want to talk about something that’s so fundamental people rarely see it—Stupid Six Sigma Trick #4: Overusing DMAIC.
DMAIC stands for define the…
Quality Digest
HelpIT, which sells data-cleansing software, recently joined with QAS, a supplier of address verification solutions, to provide organizations with tools that standardize and verify addresses, and identify and process duplicate records.Because customers in a multichannel environment can…
Quality Digest
For their technical performance and quality, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration recently bestowed the George M. Low Award on Teledyne Brown Engineering and Barrios Technologies.Barrios, nominated by the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, won the small-business service…
Quality Digest
This year’s winners of the Shingo Prize for Excellence in Manufacturing are: Autoliv Querétaro CMX Facility, Querétaro, Mexico Baxter Healthcare Corp., North Cove Plant; Marion, North Carolina Baxter S.A. de C.V., Cuernavaca Plant; Morelos, Mexico Cordis de Mexico; Juarez, Mexico…
Quality Digest
The National Biodiesel Accreditation Commission recently announced the registration of six more companies to BQ-9000, a voluntary program for quality control of this alternative to petroleum-based diesel fuel. Biodiesel producers Stepan Co. of Northfield, Illinois; Western Iowa Energy…
Thomas R. Cutler
Dairy plants are among the heaviest users of municipal water in the United States, using two gallons of water for every gallon of consumer product produced. The clean-in-place (CIP) systems that daily wash and sanitize every truck, tank, pipe and surface in the plant use the greatest amount of that…
Thomas R. Cutler
Dairy plants are among the heaviest users of municipal water in the United States, using two gallons of water for every gallon of consumer product produced. The clean-in-place (CIP) systems that daily wash and sanitize every truck, tank, pipe and surface in the plant use the greatest amount of that…
Quality Digest
Capella Hotels & Resorts has chosen PAR Springer-Miller Systems’ SMS|Host Hospitality Management System for installation at Capella’s luxury hotels. Schloss Velden in Velden, Austria, and Capella Castlemartyr Hotel and Golf Club in County Cork, Ireland, will be the first to implement…
Quality Digest
Exterro Fusion is the first fully integrated discovery management platform available to law firms and corporations. The new software is said to help the legal industry improve responsiveness, control costs and mitigate risk in the discovery process. “During complex litigation,…
