All Features
Matthew R. Philip and Lori Cross
A whole-team approach is an agile practice in which an entire team works as a unit of generalists to share the responsibility for producing high-quality deliverables. It’s a kind of “glue” that holds a lot of other agile practices together. Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, co-authors of Agile…
James Robertson
Delivering high-value decision support information is the reason why decision makers implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. In fact, precision configuration to support the delivery of decision support information is critical to a successful ERP. There are numerous reasons why.…
Edward D. Hess
For many, achieving the American Dream means taking control of their destiny, quitting their 9 to 5, and opening the doors to their very own business. These brave entrepreneurial souls have shaped American enterprise, and today, they're playing the critical role of helping to drive…
Tracker Handbook by Art Kietlinski
Back in the early 1990s, before the laser tracker—the portable measurement system that relies on a laser beam to measure and inspect—had the reputation it has now, it was viewed simply as an inspection tool. As part of a quality control group, I would check dimensional and geometrical accuracies…
Stewart Anderson
Not all customers are equally profitable. Different customers have different needs, and hence different costs to serve. The overall profitability of a business is a function of the profitability of individual customers and customer groups.
Many businesses measure customer satisfaction but they…
British Assessment Bureau BAB
According to data from The British Assessment Bureau’s (BAB) independent 2011 Client Satisfaction Survey, 44 percent of respondents said that they had won business as a result of becoming certified to ISO 9001, the quality management system standard from the International…
The QA Pharm
Once upon a time I asked, “What does it mean to operate in a state of control?” at an off-site “strategy” meeting of a senior management group. You know the kind of meeting that I'm talking about—one in which a working breakfast was followed by a day of golf, and I was the one doing the working.…
Kimberly Egan
I don’t know how I missed this gem, but on March 24, 2011, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) sent a Warning Letter to Jonathan’s Sprouts Inc. informing the company that it was (among other things) marketing its organic mung bean, alfalfa, and broccoli sprouts as drugs. The FDA said it has…
Paul Naysmith
I greatly believe in training. I have been fortunate to work in businesses that also believed in having trained and qualified professionals in their organization. I have personally and professionally benefited from that philosophy, and I have gained new knowledge as a result.
Since graduating from…
William A. Levinson
Many appliance, big box, and other stores recommend the purchase of extended warranties to go with consumer electronics. They are available for automobiles as well, but they are rarely if ever cost effective. The bathtub curve (figure 1), a model for failure or hazard rates in reliability…
Stewart Anderson
Often a firm is confronted with the key question of whether the quality of its products and services should be improved. For many readers, the question may even seem illogical: How could it not be beneficial for a firm to improve the quality of its products and services?
On closer analysis, however…
Bill Kalmar
Have you ever had one of those days where confusion reigns and as each hour ensues, you find something new to dwell on that absolutely drives you nuts? Well, I just had one of those days. It started this morning as I was out for my daily five-mile run. As is my custom, I have my cell phone strapped…
Donald J. Wheeler
Whenever we present capability indexes the almost inevitable follow-up question is, “What is the fraction nonconforming?” What this question usually means is, “Tell me what these capability indexes mean in terms that I can understand.” These questions have resulted in multiple approaches to…
NIST
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a suite of green tea reference materials to help manufacturers evaluate the composition of their products and assure researchers of the accuracy of analytical methods for studying the human health effects of this popular…
Mayo Clinic
“We can do better” was the underlying takeaway message from the 15th annual Mayo Clinic Quality Conference. This year’s theme was “Creating and Paying for Value in Health Care.”
The conference, held May 3–4, 2011, in Rochester, Minnesota, drew about 1,000 people to hear national leaders in…
Mike Richman
Last month I wrote an article entitled “Being Comfortable in a World of Never-Ending Change.” Editor in Chief Dirk Dusharme and I also covered this story on the April 29th edition of Quality Digest Live (QDL). QDL, by the way, is our live video show wrap-up of the week’s top industry news and…
David L. Chandler
Photo: Greg Hren/RLE
Researchers at MIT have succeeded in making a fine thread that functions as a diode, a device at the heart of modern electronics. This feat—made possible by a new approach to a type of fiber manufacturing known as fiber drawing—could open up possibilities…
Douglas C. Fair
How do organizations confirm that supplier products comply with critical quality standards? For the most part, companies rely on inspectors to check incoming materials. Their results are compared with the company’s own quality standards and supplier-generated documents, such as certificates of…
Robert Napoletano
The customer is always right. Everything we are taught about customer satisfaction is intended to keep us focused on this one principle, and we need to keep this in mind whenever we deal with the customer. Everybody’s business revolves around a customer base, whether we are a service company or…
Daniel Brown
Reverse engineering and 3-D scanning are often considered synonyms. But 3-D scanning is also an efficient way to compare as-built physical objects to theoretical digital 3-D models (i.e., CAD models), and thus an essential asset to every quality control (QC) department’s tool box. Today’s 3-D…
Tom Pyzdek
Lean, Six Sigma, and quality provide a set of tools and a framework for achieving excellence in any process. Quality professionals are able to help organizations determine if customer requirements are properly defined and if the organization is meeting those requirements. Lean practitioners have a…
Mark R. Hamel
Among other things, an effective lean management system drives process adherence and process performance. The daily accountability portion of the system includes brief tiered meetings with the stakeholders.
At the tier I level, the core meeting participants are pretty much the natural work team…
University of Michigan
Want to convince someone to do something? A new University of Michigan (U-M) study has some intriguing insights drawn from how we speak.
The study, presented May 14, 2011 at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, examines how various speech characteristics…
Tripp Babbitt
Caveat emptor or “let the buyer beware” is a long-used phrase familiar to consumers. Your ability to get good service is proportional to your knowledge. Certain industries have poor reputations that make customers wary, but they remain reliant on the vendor to be honest with them. The predictable…
Knowledge at Wharton
Barry Salzberg, CEO of Deloitte, has spent his entire 34-year career in one place, climbing the corporate ladder. From his first unsupportive manager at the New York-based professional services firm to the mentors who helped pull him up through the ranks, Salzberg learned to lead and be led,…
