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Whitney Blackburn began her career as an art director for a visual communications company, where she built a reputation for intuitive design and creative leadership. Equipped with a passion for intelligent marketing and a deep curiosity for all things outside her comfort zone, Blackburn has spent…
We learned in science class that we should use the scientific method to evaluate hypotheses. Yet somehow, once we enter industry we throw that early learning out the window and fall prey to several pitfalls in experimentation and data interpretation.
In the first two pitfalls that we discussed…
(PQ Systems: Dayton, OH) -- PQ Systems announces the release of SQCpack 7, a comprehensive update to their best-selling statistical process control (SPC) solution that helps organizations utilize the power of data analysis to improve quality.
SQCpack 7 is an easy and scalable application that…
Strengthening communication between caregivers and patients should be a top priority for reducing healthcare costs and improving patient experience, according to a new poll of U.S. healthcare quality improvement professionals conducted by ASQ, the world’s largest network of quality resources and…
Strategic planning requires you to understand the competitive landscape in which you’re operating. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to get your arms around the complex market dynamics you face. A great tool you can use to assess the environment is SWOT analysis. SWOT stands for strengths,…
Physician alignment is vital to driving the changes necessary in our shifting healthcare environment. On the hospital side, physicians are the frontline experts needed to increase quality and decrease cost. It’s impossible for a hospital system to take on important projects like fall prevention,…
(ANSI: Washington D.C.) -- The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) calls on the standardization community to participate in newly released survey intended to gauge interest in a mentoring program for emerging standards professionals. The short survey was created by the ANSI Joint Task…
The ability to make predictions has always been rewarded. Statistician Donald J. Wheeler says that “prediction is the essence of business.” With growing bodies of data and good analytical models, our predictions are getting better.
The statistical models and algorithms behind prediction can be…
(TÜV SÜD AG: Munich) — The revised ISO 9001 standard, scheduled for publication in late 2015, will bring a host of changes for organizations. The new standard, for example, no longer includes the clause requiring top management to appoint a quality management representative (QMR). However, this…
Parts per million (ppm) is part of the language of Six Sigma. It pervades the sales pitch and is used in all sorts of computations as a measure of quality. Yet what are the rules of arithmetic and statistics that govern the computation and usage of parts per million? To discover the answers read…
Corrective action is an essential tool for any business. It helps to identify adverse events and pinpoint any systemic issues that must be resolved. However, a corrective action system can’t work effectively by itself.
Leading quality and compliance management systems include a corrective action…
Once upon a time, in a land called “Industrial Age,” the leaders of organizations resided at the top of a hierarchy, managers were in the middle, and workers were supervised.
It was the job of leaders to do the important thinking and come up with bright ideas to move the company forward, and the…
Among the fallout from the final draft of the ISO 9001:2015 revision is a contextual change in the concept of “continual improvement.” The standard’s intent that organizations preemptively address likely issues before they become problems hasn’t changed; if anything, there’s an explicit toughening…
(NIH: Bethesda, MD) -- Poor quality medicines are a real and urgent threat that could undermine decades of successful efforts to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, according to the editors of a collection of journal articles published April 20, 2015.
Scientists report up to 41 percent…
If there’s anything we can count on in putting together Quality Digest Daily each and every day, it’s that good, in-depth case studies will be well read. When those case studies also offer real context in terms of the historical underpinnings of movements or methodologies, all the better.
The…
With the recent release of the movie The Avengers: Age of Ultron, now is the perfect time to contemplate whether Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, needs a quality management system (QMS) to help him identify and prevent the disasters that seem to plague him.
Tony Stark is a billionaire genius who…
“It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” —Ursula K. LeGuin
This is the story of how and why the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) was created. It’s the first in a series of tributes celebrating the upcoming 25th anniversary of a program…
We learned in science class that we should use the scientific method to evaluate hypotheses. We should study the problem, formulate a hypothesis, run a controlled experiment, analyze the resulting data, and then make an objective decision. We have also heard innumerable times that we should make “…
(LNS: Cambridge, MA) -- As a manufacturing leader, you’re familiar with ever-present challenges like ensuring quality, demolishing informational silos, and responding more effectively to customer demands.
What you might be less familiar with are the revolutionary strategies emerging to solve them…
(Werth: Old Saybrook, CT) -- The newly developed ScopeCheck MB from Werth Messtechnik GmbH is a multisensor CMM for the precise measurement of large-volume components in the shop-floor environment.
The measuring range of this series is up to 800 mm in the X axis and 2,000 mm in the Y axis. 3D…
The fifth edition of ISO 9001, which is slated for publication in late 2015, has some good ideas regarding improvement and harmonization with other management system standards such as ISO 14001. However, ISO/Draft International Standard (DIS) 9001:2015 has taken away prescriptive language for a…
You’ve no doubt heard (or can recall) Hans Christian Andersen’s story, “The Ugly Duckling.” If not, here’s a quick refresher: It’s about a baby swan who suffers abuse from his barnyard companions because of how he looks—he’s assumed to be a baby duckling, and an “ugly” one at that—until one day,…
Once a project is completed, a common question is, “How do we deploy this improvement to other areas in the company?” A fair number of formal improvement structures include the final step of “standardize,” implying that the improvement is laterally copied or deployed into other, similar situations…
(AssurX: Morgan Hill, CA) -- A new FDA guidance issued by the Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) and Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) offers some helpful detail for device firms uncertain if post-approval studies can replace premarket studies at the time of…
Companies purchase scales because the value of goods entering or exiting a facility is based on their weight. Without assured scale accuracy, a company can lose thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars annually.
Depending on the requirements and type of weighing device, annual…
