All Features
William A. Levinson
The Pareto principle calls for focus on the vital few rather than the trivial many. While none of ISO 9001’s clauses are trivial—a nonconformance for any of them requires corrective action—ISO 9001 users can avoid most nonconformances by focusing on the clauses that are the most frequent trouble…
Annette Franz
In the past, I’ve written about some of the myths of journey mapping. One of those myths is: Without a digital mapping platform, I can’t even begin to map. Let me explain my position.
You probably know by now that I’m an advocate of digitizing your maps, for a variety of reasons, not the least of…
Jim Benson
A few years ago, I received a call from a very frustrated vice president of development in the Midwest. He sent his staff to get trained in Scrum. He thought he was sending his team off to learn how to develop software. Instead, they came back scrumbroken.
The team spun in circles arguing about…
Buehler
(Buehler: Lake Bluff, IL) -- Buehler has announced their latest addition to the world-renowned Wilson hardness testing range, the new UH4000 Series Universal Hardness Tester. This tester comes in two key configurations: UH4250 Hardness Scale 0.5-250 kgf and UH4750 Hardness Scale 3-750 kgf.
The…
Davis Balestracci
During recent visits to Twitter and LinkedIn, I’ve become increasingly shocked by the devolution of the posts to vacuous nonsense. I felt a Network moment of, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Is your organization getting to the point where executive reaction to what’s…
Guangnan Meng
Electrodes are essential components of modern lithium-ion batteries, which are used to power mobile electronic devices, electric vehicles, and many other products. The battery’s surface structure and engineering are directly related to its performance, life expectancy, and safety.
The batteries…
Banner Engineering
(Banner Engineering: Minneapolis) -- Banner Engineering, provider of technology for industrial automation, announces its Q5X Sensor for solving difficult distance-based applications, even at acute angles, from a range of 9.5 centimeters to 2 meters.
The high-power laser sensor reliably detects…
Marposs
(Marposs: Auburn Hills, MI) -- Marposs, a world leader in measurement and process monitoring technologies, has announced the availability of its Brankamp X7 “smart” in-process monitoring systems for cold- and hot-forming, thread rolling and stamping operations.
The X7 system’s artificial…
Ryan E. Day
In the manufacturing universe, metal tube fabrication is a world of its own. That being said, the requirements for developing a new world-standard solution for tube bending are common to all manufacturing—be faster, more accurate, and more economical.
With customers like Delta Air Lines, British…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
I had the pleasure of interviewing Whitney Johnson, author of the book, Build an A Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve (Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). Whitney has done ground-breaking work in the arena of personal disruption—applying these concepts to…
Gwendolyn Galsworth
Most people have a notion about the visual workplace that is much too small for themselves and their companies. They think of it as a series of point solutions that are helpful, even clever. Yet they should expect more—because they need more.
In fact, visuality is a language—an imbedded system of…
Cority
(Cority: Toronto, Canada) -- Cority, provider of environmental, health, safety, and quality (EHSQ) software, announces the availability of its enhanced quality management solution.
Designed to provide quality professionals with a closed-loop, continuous improvement process to ensure product safety…
Teledyne DALSA
(Teledyne DALSA: Billerica, MA) -- Teledyne DALSA, a Teledyne Technologies company and global leader in machine vision technology, announces a compact, low-cost vision system for multicamera applications.
The GEVA 400 system offers excellent cost savings for multicamera vision applications, such…
Stephen McCarthy
I am thrilled to introduce Quality Digest’s special report, “Unlocking the Future of Life Sciences.” This series explores the last several decades of quality management within the life sciences industry. It begins with the genesis of early regulations, shows us how that led to the current state of…
Mike Richman
Great quality is pretty much the same everywhere, but the cost of poor quality is not equivalent from industry to industry. For example, it’s conceivable (but I hope not probable) that this article may turn out to be a real bomb, or worse, a complete snoozer. What’s the cost of that poor quality?…
Quality Digest
Within the life science industry, federal and industry regulations have prompted the need for compliance, and that trend has only increased in magnitude and complexity. Along with that has come technological solutions to enable both compliance and efficiency, without which life science…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
As the United States struggles with rising healthcare costs, reducing the amount of money pharmaceutical companies spend dealing with regulation, while at the same time meeting drug safety requirements, would seem to be competing interests.
The goal of any honest pharmaceutical company is to make…
Laurel Thoennes @ Quality Digest
Compliance to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations has come a long way in the past 30 years. Here are the main changes. Have they affected your business?
1988: Food and Drug Administration ActOfficially establishes the FDA as an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
It’s been a year and a month since Stephen McCarthy switched C suites, moving from Johnson & Johnson, where he served as vice president of quality system shared services, to Sparta Systems, where he’s now vice president of digital innovation. His focus has switched as well.
At J&J, he…
Graham Freeman
Many industries have no clear boundary between safety and quality culture. In fact, they are often closely integrated. Quality failures and nonconformances that require rework have been correlated with increased accidents and recordable injury rates in manufacturing organizations. These injuries…
Scott A. Hindle
‘Process Capability: What It Is and How It Helps,” parts one, two, three, and four, discussed Alan’s development in the field of process capability1 He’d learned about the mistakes that can be made and how to avoid them in practice to become better at his job. Alan had since passed on his learning…
Steve McKee
Your business does not have a brand; your brand has a business. That may sound odd, backward, even heretical, but it’s true.
Consider the smartphone on which you may be reading this. When it was fresh out of the box and had gigabytes of memory to spare, it weighed roughly 6 ounces, depending on…
Jack Dunigan
Graham was a salesman of specialty products with a proven record of success. His many years of experience had yielded a high degree of confidence in himself and the products he sold, and an advanced level of competence in his craft as a personable, trust-inspiring, responsible salesman.
The retail…
Rob Matheson
Democratizing data science is the notion that anyone, with little to no expertise, can do data science if provided ample data and user-friendly analytics tools. MIT researchers are hoping to support that idea with a new tool for nonstatisticians that automatically generates models for analyzing raw…
Wendy White
Starting a new facility in the food-processing industry is an enormous undertaking. There are thousands of things that must be accomplished, from hiring and training new staff to ordering and installing equipment. This scenario is a perfect example of “too much to do and not enough time to do it…