All Features
Michelle LaBrosse
You are in the kitchen, surrounded by ingredients, and are asked to prepare a meal. As you look around, you notice that you have the usual: flour, sugar, eggs, milk, butter, meat, veggies, and fruit. You think, “No problem. I can whip something up in no time.” Then you take a second look around…
MIT News
Power turbines may be a mature business, but they are also a booming one. This year General Electric received record orders for jet engines, and because natural gas is currently cheap, worldwide demand is increasing for gas turbines used in power plants, says Jeffrey Immelt, GE’s chairman and…
NIST
The electromagnetic force has gotten a little stronger, gravity a little weaker, and the size of the smallest “quantum” of energy is now known a little better. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has posted the latest internationally recommended values of the fundamental…
The QA Pharm
Responses to the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Warning Letters and the FD483—a written notice of deficiencies found during inspections—are usually full of commitments. They involve what will be done to correct compliance problems, and when it will be done. The FDA has even started to ask…
NIST
Terahertz radiation can penetrate numerous materials—plastic, clothing, paper, and some biological tissues—making it an attractive candidate for applications such as concealed weapons detection, package inspection, and imaging skin tumors. However, to date there is no standard method for…
Tracker Handbook by Art Kietlinski
Despite a laser tracker’s many capabilities, its main function presents some limitations that can make it difficult to measure certain features of a part. Line-of-sight or scanning surfaces with a small radius or contour may be a challenge when using only a laser tracker.
Before other…
FARO
Variation Reduction Solutions Inc. (VRSI) is an independent integrator of machine vision and applied metrology technologies for automated manufacturing. The company focuses on achieving disruptive gains in assembly-process accuracy and efficiency through the innovative application of…
American College of Surgeons
The American College of Surgeons (ACS) has set a goal to enlist at least 1,000 hospitals into its respected National Surgical Quality Improvement Program (ACS NSQIP). The commitment is part of the ACS Inspiring Quality initiative, an effort to raise awareness of proven models of quality…
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
All types of snazzy technologies are available these days to make buildings greener: automated shades, electrochromic windows that know when to tint, intelligent lighting controls and smart cooling and heating systems, to name just a few. But how do these components work with each other and…
Knowledge at Wharton
In a recent article in The New York Times, Bryan Burrough, an author, former Wall Street Journal reporter, and now a correspondent for Vanity Fair, takes business writers to task for producing books that are of generally low quality. He gives many reasons for this: Some of the books are too…
William A. Levinson
Dr. Gary Brandeland’s article, “The Day Joy Died,” which appeared in the Oct. 20, 2006, edition of Modern Medicine, underscores the primitive nature of quality thinking—and more specifically, safety thinking—in hospitals. Although I’m not going to give formal engineering advice about medical…
Bill Kalmar
Sseems the Diet Police are once again running rampant in our nation. It has been said that close to 30 percent of Michigan residents are overweight, and thus there is a movement afoot to curtail our eating habits, not only in that state but also nationally. Believe it or not, there is some…
Minitab LLC
C
otton. Given that it’s the most widely used fiber in clothing, you’re probably wearing some right now. We love cotton’s comfortable properties and soft feel. But as everyone who’s ironed a cotton shirt or pants knows, these same properties can make cotton-based fabric particularly prone to…
Davis Balestracci
After reading Joe De Feo’s July 8, 2011, Quality Digest Daily article, “A Positive Prognosis: Transforming Health Care in America,” I took another look at the wonderful book, Escape Fire (Jossey-Bass, 2003), a compendium of Dr. Donald Berwick’s inspiring plenary speeches at the Institute for…
Mark R. Hamel
Lean is largely about satisfying customer requirements. That’s nearly impossible if the lean practitioner doesn’t understand demand. In fact, misunderstand average daily demand, and the impact can be significant, including inaccurate takt times, improper demand segmentation, poorly sized kanban,…
Paul Naysmith
If W. Edwards Deming could see what you are doing, he’d punch you in the face. OK, not really. He may have been brutally honest in his lectures but I don’t think he ever punched anyone. However, he would have plenty to say about how often one business copies (I believe the term today is “benchmarks…
Cognex Corp.
Since 1975, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has required that all prescription tablets or capsules have a unique identification in terms of size, shape, color, and imprint. Drug makers use the imprints both to identify the chemical substance and dosage and for promotional purposes.…
MIT News
Conventional wisdom among managers holds that employees helping each other can only be good for a company. Accordingly, firms spend money, time, and effort to promote what’s known as “knowledge transfer.” Policies range from the popular (e.g., lavish company retreats) to the maligned (switching…
Paul Naysmith
If W. Edwards Deming could see what you’re doing, he’d punch you in the face. OK, not really. He may have been brutally honest in his lectures, but I don’t think he ever punched anyone. However, he would have plenty to say about how often one business copies (I believe the term today is “benchmarks…
MIT News
Recommendation algorithms are a vital part of doing business on the Internet. They provide the basis of the targeted advertisements that account for most commercial sites’ revenues, and of services such as Pandora, the radio site that tailors song selections to listeners’ declared preferences. The…
The Conference Board
According to a new report released by The Conference Board, companies need to incorporate risks from workforce and people-management issues more fully into their overall risk-management structures. Based on a global survey of executives at 161 leading companies, “Managing Human Capital Risk: A Call…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
I saw six people huddled on the sidewalk in front of me; through their legs I saw what looked like a body on the ground. I rushed over to see what was going on. I saw a man with a bloody gash on his head; he appeared to be unconscious. I pushed through and started checking him out using my Boy…
FDA
As headlines from Europe implicate tainted vegetable sprouts in more than 4,000 illnesses and dozens of deaths, American consumers may wonder, “Could that happen here?”
The United States has had its own headline-grabbing outbreaks from contaminated vegetables—such as lettuce in 2010, peppers in…
Steven Ouellette
Last month I showed you a process to use to save money, time, and sanity when doing any type of research, including applied problem solving and quality improvement (“Don’t Design the Experiment Until You Research the Process”), However, I didn’t have room to go through the steps to show you how…
Bruce Hamilton
Significant digits, the number of digits to the right of a decimal point that are warranted by the accuracy of the means of measurement, are a critical part of scientific investigation. In developing products and services, the concept is essential. For example, how many products have failed to “…
