All Features
Donald J. Wheeler
Setting the process aim is a key element in the short production runs that characterize the lean production of multiple products. Last month in part one we looked at how to use a target-centered XmR chart to reliably set the aim. This column will describe aim-setting plans that use the average of…
Steve McKee
The Philippine Department of Transportation got into a bit of a fix recently for publicly thanking the coronavirus. In an attempt to “provide an enlightening and awakening narrative” that might cause people to see a silver lining in the viral cloud over their heads, the DOT instead found itself…
Disaster Avoidance Experts
(Disaster Avoidance Experts: Columbus, OH) --The quality of our response to COVID-19 is fundamentally broken – and that doesn’t apply only to governments, but also to businesses, nonprofits, and individuals and their households. Where and why did we go wrong and how can we improve, especially as…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Around the world, local agencies and institutions have scrambled to find personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect their essential employees from Covid-19. Not just healthcare workers, but also the men and women who to work to keep our cities and counties up and running, from emergency…
Stanley Chao
‘Can you help me source PPEs from China?” asks a caller on the phone. I have received dozens of these inquiries since March from local governments, medical clinics, and mom-and-pop shops after hospitals and first responders began reporting massive shortages of N95 masks, latex gloves, and surgical…
Quality Digest
It’s easy to assume that something as simple as a mask wouldn’t pose much of a risk. Essentially, it’s just a covering that goes over your nose and mouth.
But masks are more than just stitched-together cloth. Medical-grade masks use multiple layers of nonwoven material, usually polypropylene,…
Grant Ramaley
The International Accreditation Forum (IAF), the association of conformity assessment accreditation bodies worldwide, held an emergency meeting after confirming what appears to be an outbreak in the use of fake ISO 13485 certificates. ISO 13485 is a quality management system standard particular to…
Hari Abburi
If there’s one thing the global business community is learning from the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s the outright imperative for companies to be agile “from top to bottom.” This lesson continues to ebb, flow, and unfold daily, wreaking having on bottom lines in every corner of the world.
In fact,…
Brian Lagas
When most people think of lean processes, they believe the goal is to optimize things in a step-by-step approach. The result that companies using lean methods can look forward to is incremental improvements brought about by the elimination of waste.
Individuals who stick with this definition often…
NIST
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have devised a novel, accurate, easy-to-operate, time- and labor-saving way to provide calibrated scale-bar standards for testing the performance of terrestrial laser scanner (TLS) systems.
TLS technology is widely employed to…
Argolytics
(Argolytics LLC: State College, PA) -- Following the recent release of TRENDABLE for Data Analysis, Argolytics LLC, has announced the latest addition to its suite of online quality control software: TRENDABLE for Data Collection.
TRENDABLE for Data Collection builds on Argolytics’ commitment to…
Carrie Van Daele
Crossing the street or stepping backward when you encounter another person has already become a habit, as has a routine elbow bump, instead of a handshake.
And that is definitely what is needed during a health crisis. But when the time is right, as a society we must bounce back to social…
Corey Brown
Many industrial businesses have heard of the dangers of relying on tribal knowledge. But what exactly does tribal knowledge mean? How does tribal knowledge impact an organization? How do you capture tribal knowledge?
Organizations spend substantial time and resources developing the knowledge and…
NVision Inc.
(NVision: Southlake, TX) -- Two recent projects related to personal protective equipment (PPE) completed by NVision Inc. demonstrate the growing role that noncontact scanning/measurement technologies are taking in the race to create new products and designs to minimize exposure to Covid-19.…
Gleb Tsipursky
So many companies are shifting their employees to working from home to address the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. Yet they’re not considering the potential quality disasters that can occur as a result of this transition.
An example of this is what one of my coaching clients experienced more than a…
Sangeet Paul Choudary
The digitization of patient data and the adoption of cloud-based healthcare management systems have created efficiencies and new business models across the value chain. Advancements in AI provide superior decision support systems to doctors, while connected devices enable the remote delivery of…
Buehler
(Buehler: Lake Bluff, IL) -- Buehler, an ITW Company and a global manufacturer of metallographic equipment and consumables presents “Fastener Metallography – Guidelines to Quality Metallurgical Analysis,” a complimentary webinar for novices to experts.
Fasteners (rivets, screws, nuts, and bolts)…
Belinda Jones
Back in 2016, the PrecisionPath Consortium (PPC), in cooperation with the Coordinate Metrology Society (CMS) and UNC Charlotte, conducted the very first industry survey in support of their lead project—the Technology Roadmap for Large-Scale Manufacturing. 3D measurement professionals answered…
David H. Parker
It is well known that the speed of light depends on the index of refraction of the medium in which the light is propagating. It is also well known that in a dispersive medium, the speed of an amplitude modulated wavefront depends on the group refractive index, i.e., slightly slower than the carrier…
Belinda Jones
When it comes to metrology education, the CMS is all about its newest training asset 3D Measurement U or simply 3DMU. Developed in partnership with Quality Digest, 3DMU is an online video training program for organizations, educators, and metrology practitioners. The new resource offers a first…
Mike Richman
One hundred and forty-five years ago today, on May 20, 1875, delegates from 17 nations to the Metre Convention in Paris signed the Treaty of the Metre, which established the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM). This organization standardized many of the measurements that we now take…
Jason Chester
During the last several decades, many forward-thinking manufacturers have adopted factory automation for all that it promises—greater efficiency, consistency, productivity, and cost savings. In fact, if you walk through most modern manufacturing plants, you’ll see lines of machines performing a…
Charles Tarrio, Thomas Lucatorto
In 2019, after decades of effort, manufacturers used a new technology to create smartphones with individual circuit features as small as 7 nanometers (nm), or billionths of a meter, enabling them to cram 8.5 billion electronic devices, known as transistors, on a single small chip. Fitting more…
Tom Taormina
Each article in this series presents new tools for increasing return on investment, enhancing customer satisfaction, creating process excellence, and driving risk from an ISO 9001:2015-based quality management system. They will help implementers evolve quality management to overall business…
Annette Franz
There’s a little bit of irony in the title of this article. Why do we have to make sure the customer—and employee—experience is crisis-ready? Well, as John Kennedy said, “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”
Back in November 2012, I wrote an article titled, “Are You Ready for…
