All Features
Steven Ouellette
The end is near! Well, at least the end of the Top Ten Stupid Six Sigma Tricks (SSST) countdown. The Heretic soldiers on until his appointment with the stake. This month, we arrive at Stupid Six Sigma Trick #2: Neglecting Daily Management. In this SSST, companies get so starry-eyed over the fancy…
Some folks like to use control charts to analyze gauge study results. When using a control chart in this manner, one can assume that the chart should represent a series of gauge studies conducted over a period of time. In this example, let’s say that each morning a gauge is verified by…
Quality Digest
(IQPC: Iselin, New Jersey) -- International Quality & Productivity Centre will present its fourth annual Canadian Six Sigma Summit May 30–June 1 in Toronto. The event will feature 16 real-world presentations of lean and Six Sigma applications, five interactive workshops, roundtable…
Quality Digest
(Minitab Inc.: State College, Pennsylvania) -- Minitab Inc., the leading global provider of software and services for quality improvement and statistics education, recently announced the opening of Minitab Pty Ltd, its new subsidiary in Australia. The full-service office is located in…
Quality Digest
(Oriel Inc.: Madison, Wisconsin) -- SigmaFlow, a provider of enterprise performance improvement software, and Oriel Inc., a productivity consulting and training organization, have announced an joint offering that integrates Oriel’s lean training content with SigmaFlow’s Project…
Quality Digest
(Instantis: Santa Clara, California) — Instantis, a provider of software for managing top-down performance improvement initiatives like Six Sigma, announced today that it has completed and made available the results of a ground-breaking study on Six Sigma adoption patterns and maturity…
Quality Digest
(American National Standards Institute: New York) -- James Hill, a recognized leader in the building and fire industries, has been selected by the U.S. Celebration of World Standards Day Planning Committee as the 2007 recipient of the prestigious Ronald H. Brown Standards Leadership…
Quality Digest
(American National Standards Institute: New York) -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently released federal regulations aimed at strengthening the security of chemical facilities nationwide. The final rule, issued April 2, establishes comprehensive risk-based performance…
Quality Digest
(National Institute of Standards and Technology: Gaithersburg, Maryland) -- The Commerce Department’s Advanced Technology Program recently opened a new competition for cost-sharing awards to support high-risk industrial research and development projects. The program offers funding for specific…
Craig Cochran
A few years go I had the good fortune of doing some consulting with B&C Specialty Products in Hopeulikit, Georgia. B&C does light manufacturing, primarily plastic molding and assembly, and they also distribute imported products produced by companies in the Far East. They have about 150…
Quality Digest
(Department of Commerce: Washington, D.C.) -- Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez is seeking nominations for the 2007 National Medal of Technology, the nation’s highest honor awarded by the President to America’s leading inventors and technological innovators.“The face of competition…
Richard Curtis Ph.D.
The speed, convenience and cost benefits of microliter volume, air displacement pipettes drive the frequent use of these precision instruments. However, pipettes, like all mechanical instruments, are subject to failure, and this—along with the technique of operators—can have a significant effect…
Quality Digest
(Delcam Inc.: Salt Lake City) -- Delcam has expanded its reseller network for its FeatureCAM family of CADCAM software in the United States by extending its agreements with two of its most experienced resellers—Cad Cam Systems from Rockford, Illinois, and Programming Plus of New Berlin, Wisconsin—…
Quality Digest
(Hexagon AB: Sweden) -- Hexagon subsidiary ROMER Inc. and FARO Technologies Inc. have reached agreement to settle all outstanding disputes between them. Under the terms of the settlement, patent suits pending in California and Florida, and a lawsuit involving claims of false advertising, will be…
Quality Digest
(National Institute of Standards and Technology: Gaithersburg, Maryland) -- The National Institute of Standards and Technology is hosting a meeting in Gaithersburg, Maryland on April 23 from 1 to 5 p.m.. The meeting will debate the organization of a semiformal consortium of the various consortia…
Fred Mason
A metrologist wants to know that any variations in measurements are the result of variations of the parts being measured, not variations in the measuring devices or their users. Subjective interpretation of inspection or measurement devices is a complex variable that can influence the quality of…
Quality Digest
(RABQSA: Sydney) -- Worldwide standards in asset and personnel security management systems are about to improve dramatically with the launch this week of an internationally recognized Security Management System (SecMS) Auditor Certification Scheme. The scheme provides international recognition for…
Quality Digest
Dozens of standards developers from around the world met in San Francisco recently for the annual meeting of the International Accreditation Forum’s technical and executive committees. The meeting, held March 24–30, included day-long breakout sessions for several of the technical committee’s work…
Quality Digest
(LRQA: Coventry, England) -- Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance has been awarded Designated Operational Entity status by the Clean Development Mechanism executive board related to validation for an additional seven scopes. The Kyoto Protocol requires that to be eligible for emissions credits, a CDM…
Denise Robitaille
Many of you have probably had the occasional insane day when you thought: “This job would be so much easier if we didn’t have customers to deal with.” Apart from the demands for price concessions and the requests for unreasonable deliveries, there are a whole group of customer traits that can drive…
Dennis Bradley
Europe’s Reduction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive identifies six hazardous substances and their maximum permissible levels within electrical and electronic equipment. RoHS imposes upon producers of such goods responsibility for knowing whether their finished products contain…
Quality Digest
(CyberShift: Parsippany, New Jersey) -- CyberShift, a provider of global workforce management and expense management software and services, was recently selected to the 2007 START-IT 125, an annual list of the most influential manufacturing technology providers as determined by the editors and…
Michel Podevyn
In the old days at Soliant LLC in Lancaster, South Carolina, employees pushed 275-lb drums filled with acrylic resin powder to a scale for weighing and adding to a mix. Once the powder was weighed out, two employees manually scooped 1.5 lb at a time from the drums to the mixing vessel, the…
Quality Digest
(University of Maryland: College Park, Maryland) -- The University of Maryland, along with U.S. Senators Barbara Mikulski and Benjamin Cardin, today recognized nine high-performing organizations with the Maryland Performance Excellence Awards.The awards, Maryland’s highest distinction given for…
Bruce Rayner
(Technology Forecasters: Alameda, California) -- It seems everyone is trimming down these days. A soon-to-be-published study conducted by Technology Forecasters Inc. and Electronics Supply & Manufacturing, revealed a wealth of insight on the state of lean in electronics. Among the…
