All Features
James Wells
The ISO 9001 standard talks about the relationship between the company and the customer in a couple of places. First is management’s responsibility to make sure that customers’ needs are a top consideration, and that their requirements are met. Then that customer satisfaction is improving, and…
Bruce Hamilton
You may recognize the following quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, or more recently from Kelly Clarkson: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I’ve thought about this often during the last 22 months in context of the horrible pandemic and, more parochially, in relation to the efforts of many…
Gleb Tsipursky
Are you worried that having hybrid and, especially, full-time remote employees will undermine employee on-the-job learning, integration into company culture, and intra- and inter-team collaboration? This issue recurrently came up with organizations that I guided in developing strategies for…
Artem Kroupenev
The manufacturing industry was thrown into the spotlight early in the pandemic as consumers rushed to stores, panic-buying everything from canned goods to water bottles. Since then, the industry has had more than its fair share of challenges, including the critical ramp-up of vaccine and…
jeffdewar
With membership in ASQ down, ISO 9000 series certifications down, and an unnerving reduction in quality management staff in many companies during the pandemic, today’s quality professionals are justifiably concerned about their future and career choice.
Here’s my take on the future of quality: It…
Mike Richman
It’s hard to fathom that Quality Digest, a little Northern California media company respected by all and beloved by many, turned 40 in November 2021. For a human being, 40 may be the new 30, but it’s still just creeping up on middle age. For a small business, on the other hand, 40 years is…
Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
No matter which quality management methodology, technique, or fad du jour you chose during the past 40 years, from quality circles to TQM to Six Sigma, all had one thing in common: data. In manufacturing this eventually meant measurement data. Whether it was dimensional, time, temperature,…
Ryan E. Day
Quality Digest (QD) was born 40 years ago. Birthed as Quality Circle Institute (QCI), the organization was conceived as a consultancy focused on bringing the success of quality control circles at Lockheed to organizations that were beginning to awaken to the importance of employee involvement in…
Anthony D. Burns
I’m a chemical engineer. The fundamentals of the chemical engineering profession were laid down 150 years ago by Osborne Reynolds. Although chemical engineering has seen many advances, such as digital process control and evolutionary process optimization, every engineer understands and uses Reynold…
Dennis Bailen, Bob Sherlock
Manufacturing businesses small and large have had their hands full with the fallout of the pandemic, and although it seems the worst of the crisis is now behind us, companies will continue to grapple with how to keep both customers and employees on board despite supply chain issues, intense…
Steven Severt
Although ISO 19011—“Guidelines for auditing management systems” has included language about remote quality management system (QMS) auditing since the 2018 revision, this became a reality for many of us in March 2020 with the onset of Covid-19 and the mass lockdowns that ensued. Many of us have been…
Georgia Tech News Center
The Georgia Institute of Technology was awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA) as part of its $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge. Georgia Tech is one of 60 entities to be awarded funding to assist communities nationwide in their…
NIST
Sneezes, rain clouds, and ink-jet printers: They all produce or contain liquid droplets so tiny it would take several billion of them to fill a liter bottle.
Measuring the volume, motion, and contents of microscopic droplets is important for studying how airborne viruses spread (including those…
Paul Laughlin
The latest book I'm reviewing is about data and critical thinking, and it often makes you laugh. Alongside Moonwalking With Einstein (Penguin, 2011), it’s in the traditional Penguin paperback size and ideal to take with you anywhere. It’s so enjoyable you'll want to complete it ASAP. The writing…
Winnie Jiang
In what has become the most watched commencement speech ever, Steve Jobs had this advice for the class of 2005 at Stanford University: “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
Inspiring words from the…
Jason Tham
It’s common to hear about how the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted supply chain operations. Supply chain leaders are navigating one of the most difficult periods in recent history, and it’s impossible to foretell an end to global disruptions. What many don’t realize, however, is that the pandemic…
Sybil Derrible, Juyeong Choi, Nazli Yesiller
Communities across the U.S. Southeast and Midwest are assessing damage from the deadly and widespread tornado outbreak on Dec. 10–11, 2021. It’s clear that the cleanups will take months and possibly years.
Dealing with enormous quantities of debris and waste materials is one of the most…
Henrik Hulgaard
As customer demands for more customization and choice increase, the complexity of products and associated product design, manufacturing, and sales processes also increase. Product life cycles are also getting shorter, requiring a constant flow of new products with high-value features and…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
During the past decade, I’ve seen several dozen variations of the following urban legend posted online:
A large oceangoing ship stalled at sea when its engine broke down. None of the shipboard maintenance crew could repair it, so the shipping company helicoptered a consultant out to the stranded…
Kari Miller
In the medtech space, all roads lead to quality. Unlike pharma, which looks at safety and quality separately, all of the information around risk and vigilance to inform product improvement will be housed within a medtech company’s quality management system (QMS).
The primary goal of post-market…
Siemens PLM Software
Siemens Digital Industries Software introduces System NVH Prediction, a new Simcenter software application. It can bring the benefits of a comprehensive digital-twin approach to accurately and easily predict the interior and exterior noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) performance of a vehicle…
Dylan Walsh
Justin Berg has watched Back to the Future at least 25 times. Same with the DVD special features—the voiceovers and backstory and interviews. It’s his favorite movie, and he’s long believed that part of the film’s greatness is attributable to the fact that writer-director Robert Zemeckis oversaw…
Gleb Tsipursky
Any association would love a member-retention rate of 75 percent. Unfortunately, according to a 2017 report cited in the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) publication, Associations Now, retention rates for all associations are falling. While in 2016, 73 percent of associations…
Quality Digest
Getting your product into customers’ hands is often an undervalued—and under-engineered—part of your organization’s value chain. If the pandemic’s effect on our supply chains has taught us anything, it’s this: Diligent reevaluation of our modus operandi is a must for success.
When the Covid…
Donald J. Wheeler
On the face of it, it seems to be impossible for skewed variables to add up to a normally distributed result. Yet both common experience and mathematical theory combine to show us that this does indeed happen. In fact it is a fundamental property of probability theory which, in turn, explains the…
