All Features
Laura Studwell
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1 in 6 U.S. citizens are affected by foodborne illness each year; the Public Health Agency of Canada estimates the figure at 1 in 8 Canadians. Both agencies state that illness can stem from either contaminated products or allergies relating to…
Eston Martz
Last week I attended the American Society for Quality’s World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Nashville, TN. The ASQ conference is a great opportunity to see how quality professionals are tackling problems in every industry, from beverage distribution to banking services.
Given my…
Richard DeRisio
Editor’s note: Quality Digest will present Richard DeRisio’s webinar, “Effective Strategies for Complaint Handling” on May 19, 2015, at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific. DeRisio will be a guest on Quality Digest Live on Friday, May 15, also at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific, to preview the webinar…
Thomas R. Cutler
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…
Matt Treglia
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…
ASQ
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…
Mike Figliuolo
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,…
Alexandra Brown
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,…
Steve Daum
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…
Donald J. Wheeler
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…
Emily Ysaguirre
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…
Jesse Lyn Stoner
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…
Mary McAtee
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…
Tim Lozier
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…
Dave Cranmer
“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…
Matt Treglia
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 “…
Bud Weightman
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…
Annette Franz
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,…
Mark Rosenthal
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…
Russell Desilets
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…
Kelly Graves
In my last article, I presented the psychological steps of change and how to overcome the natural human resistance to it. In this installment, I’ll present an example of how to transfer those concepts into plans, the plans into actions, and the actions into continuous behaviors.
This process…
John Keyser
Strong leadership and kindness are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they fit together effectively. The most successful leaders treat their team members with kindness. They realize that kindness is motivating. As Bob Kerrey has said, “Unexpected kindness is the most powerful, least costly, and most…
Patrick Stone
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a “Plain Jane” version of its Pharmaceuticals FY 2015 Action Plan. In this article, however, let’s look at some interesting wrinkles not necessarily contained in the document.
This “Plain Jane” action plan, taken straight from the document, reads as…
Matthew E. May
I am nothing if not a consumerist. Meaning, I am constantly impressing upon the companies with which I work the importance of a deep and empathic understanding of customers past, present, and future. This is especially true if a company is contemplating a strategic shift that entails repositioning…
Nicola Wilson
With quality the driving force behind innovation and operational improvements in the vast majority of organizations, it’s no surprise that every industry sector has embraced it, from manufacturing to the service. For some sectors, however, quality improvements can be the difference between life…
