All Features
NIST
Microscopes don’t exactly lie, but their limitations affect the truths they can tell. For example, scanning electron microscopes simply can’t see materials that don’t conduct electricity very well, and their high energies can actually damage some types of samples.
In an effort to extract a little…
Kelly Kuchinski
Editor’s note: A webinar on this topic will held on May 29, 2014, at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific. Register here.
Food and beverage manufacturers have seen a considerable number of changes over the last decade. Mergers and acquisitions have expanded the footprint of many food and beverage…
In 1927, my grandfather, A. N. Brunson, was 22 years old and repairing surveying instruments. That was the year he established Brunson Instrument Company in the back room of a map business in downtown Kansas City. When the Great Depression came along, he was fortunate to keep very busy. Because no…
Belinda Jones
M
etrologists employ numerous portable 3D metrology devices and techniques to acquire coordinate data to measure a manufactured article or assembly. There are many variables induced by an operator that can dramatically influence data collection. Although measurement equipment is calibrated to…
U.S. Air Force
The 2nd Maintenance Squadron’s Precision Measurement Equipment Laboratory (PMEL) at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier, Louisiana, calibrates and maintains an inventory of more than 6,700 pieces of equipment for Team Barksdale. With countless tools and test equipment used by ground crews every…
Taran March @ Quality Digest
“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.”—Galileo Galilei
It’s all well and good to say that metrology “includes all theoretical and practical aspects of measurement,” but that doesn’t adequately express its gestalt, which I think even metrologists would agree is hard to…
Brian Maskell
Many companies calculate product profitability by subtracting a standard cost from the price and calling it a margin. But this calculated margin does not tell you how much money you are making. It tells you almost nothing about profit because the standard cost is made up from a lot of tenuous…
Donald J. Wheeler
Who could ever be against having good measurements? Good measurements are like apple pie and motherhood. Since we all want good measurements, it sounds reasonable when people are told to check out the quality of their measurement system before doing an experiment or putting their data on a process…
Cathy Hayat
Air travel has long been considered the safest form of transportation. Statistically speaking, the average American is safer in an airplane than an automobile. Though this is reassuring, the industry is relentlessly pursuing ways to improve air travel safety. One such improvement is the continued…
Mike Richman
World Metrology Week is a good time to think about how the science of test and measurement affects our lives. From reducing the time and cost of large-volume manufacturing and assembly to helping ensure the safety and reliability of aircraft, automobiles, and sea vessels, portable coordinate…
Mark Schmit
ISO 9001 has been the quality management standard, with almost a million businesses certified around the world. It has been through many revisions, in 1994, 2000, and 2008, but the 2015 revision has an added element to consider—risk.
ISO international standards help to ensure that products and…
Brenda Percy
D
ocument control is one of the most commonly used QMS applications in companies of any industry today. It ensures that your documents are kept up to date and controlled, and it lets you automatically route your documents from review to approval to distribution.
The QMS’s document control…
Annette Franz
Someone asked me recently about the percentage of revenue that customer-focused companies spend on their voice of the customer (VOC) initiatives. Although they wanted some guidance on what to spend on a VOC solution, I thought it was a fair question but one for which I don’t have the answer. That…
ISO
Governments—local or otherwise—are under increasing pressure around the world to provide results that matter to the public, often within severe resource constraints. Now they are taking pointers from the private sector by using ISO 9001 for quality management to provide efficient and reliable…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
In today’s highly competitive business climate, creativity can no longer be limited to artists and inventors. The marketplace is changing rapidly, and in the words of Intel Chairman, Andrew Grove, companies must “adapt or die!” Every organization needs people—at every level—who can bring new…
Stanley Przybylinski
A widely cited prediction holds that by 2020 “upwards of 50 billion devices” will be connected to the Internet. And that number of connected devices, massive as it may be, will be dwarfed by a far larger number of connected sensors. At a modest 20 sensors per device, the connections tally…
Sandia National Laboratories
As hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles roll out in increasing numbers, so must the infrastructure that fuels them. To this end, a new project launched by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and led by Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will work in support of…
MIT Management Executive Education
The art of the business-plan pitch could fill volumes of business-school literature. But what if the real secret sauce had less to do with content and everything to do with delivery?
Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland, director of MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program…
Dawn Bailey
What does snoring have to do with the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence?
The connection has to do with the popular graphic in the Baldrige Criteria (shown in figure 1) depicting steps toward mature processes. The first step is simply reacting to problems. Operations are characterized…
Jim Benson
What happens when we start a project and it is honestly overtaken by events?
We start a project in good faith, and then, because context changes, we have to set it aside. It’s work-in-progress, so what do we do? The project isn’t done; we will likely come back to it, but it could be weeks or even…
UC Berkeley NewsCenter
Think working in an environmentally green building leads to greater satisfaction in the workplace? Think again.
People working in buildings certified under LEED’s green building standard appear no more satisfied with the quality of their indoor workplace environments than those toiling in…
Jack Dunigan
The biography Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (Simon & Schuster, 1997) is one of the great stories in American history. When Merriwether Lewis and William Clark departed St. Louis in May 1804, on what was called the Corps of Discovery…
Paula Oddy
The 2015 version of ISO 9001 is still more than a year away from publication, but ISO/TC 176, the technical committee responsible for the standard, has been hard at work on the revision since 2012. Registrants to the current version, ISO 9001:2008, are wondering about changes to the language and…
Alan Nicol
Last week a friend shared with me a snippet from an employee meeting. All “lean transformation” activities were to stop in order to put every effort into catching up on late shipments.
My friend’s comment, between many expressions of frustration and disappointment, was that the company’s…
Mark Murphy
Have you ever had people completely misinterpret your company’s growth strategy or vision statement? They start negative rumors about your plans, and then you struggle to correct their misinformation.
For example, say you’re launching some new technology strategy and word gets around that this…
