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Efficient participation in today's economy demands high reliance on effective
leadership of technical and support teams whose members are scattered across
many geographic boundaries. There are unique and distinctive requirements for
leadership attention in the virtual project team or remote management situation,
where individuals who share responsibilities for common goals reside in
geographically dispersed locations.
Key findings from both research and best practices across many industries
reveal that effective distance leadership includes the typical fundamentals for
leading people and managing resources in a traditional office environment.
However, difficulties in the traditional environment can be significantly
magnified in the virtual or remote situation. Difficulty with communicating;
working together; and producing high-quality, on-time results is typically
heightened by distance. Effective leaders need to quickly, confidently and
competently diagnose such issues and take deliberate actions to keep project
team relationships, productivity and outcomes on track. There is even more
emphasis on the use of appropriate communications skills to fit the needs of the
people and the situation.
The changing nature of today's health care organizations, including pressure
to reduce costs, improve the quality of care and meet stringent guidelines, has
forced health care professionals to re-examine how they evaluate their
performance. While many health care organizations have long recognized the need
to look beyond financial measures when evaluating their performance, many still
struggle with what measures to select and how to use the results of those
measures. Because a growing number of health care professionals have readily
adopted quality concepts, health care organizations should be able to quickly
improve their performance measurement systems by following a few simple
rules.
History
A brief look at the evolution of quality in modern health care systems may
help understand the need to improve performance measurement.
Welcome to Quality Digest’s 2009 Registrar Buyers Guide. This handy resource includes more than 50 listings of companies that provide registration and auditing services on several standards, from the ubiquitous ISO 9001 for the overall management of quality management systems to any number of sector-specifics.
Included in each description, you’ll find the company name, location, phone and fax number, web site, and abbreviations representing the standards for which each company provides registration services. A key defining these abbreviations is included below.
Welcome to Quality Digest’s 2008 ISO Standards Software Directory. The software that these companies create or distribute will help you to achieve or maintain registration to various quality standards of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The software products are designed to support the diverse needs of companies large and small, not only in compliance to standards, but in continuous improvement in areas of interest and industries such as: aerospace, analytical tools, benchmarking, consumer protection, corrective actions, customer satisfaction, data gathering, documentation management, energy, environmental issues, federal government agencies, going green, hazardous waste, health and safety, measurement process, process performance, return on investment, supply chains, value-adding methods, and more. If your needs concern any of these, take the time to contact these companies, and you may not need to look any further.
As with all of our directories, this guide is intended as a starting point to help readers choose the right solution for their needs. Quality Digest hasn’t evaluated, nor do we endorse, any of the products listed in this directory. Good luck finding the software solution to fit your needs.
On-machine verification (OMV) is a recent innovation that combines existing technologies to solve more complex measurement problems on machine tools. Many machine tools are equipped with probing systems, and using the probe for simple part setting is an established process. Simple macro-based probing cycles allow the user to measure basic features such as faces, corners, and bosses, and these can be combined to create rudimentary inspection reports. These basic solutions are restricted to simple 2-D measurement because 3-D measurement is just not practical. Although skilled operators can sometimes adapt probing macros to measure along compound angles, this becomes too difficult and too time-consuming for complex, curved surfaces.
OMV solves these problems using graphical 3-D software methods to program the measuring sequences. The programming and reporting tools from inspection software are combined with machine tool post-processor expertise to create a measuring solution for machine tools.
Our process improvement consulting company was contacted by a new design client requesting assistance in improving its quality management system (QMS). The company had used an existing system for several years, but it was still experiencing difficulties in making on-time delivery of designs; it had a higher-than-industry average, and missed customer requested dates in some cases. The designs themselves were sometimes nonconforming, having a higher-than-industry average for errors or missing a promised function. We agreed to work with the designers to identify areas of their QMS that could be strengthened, and to develop and implement a comprehensive quality plan to address these concerns.
Closing the Loop on CAPAs with Quality Management Software
The idea of mixing optics and measurement has its origins hundreds of years ago in the realm of pure science, i.e., astronomy (telescopy) and microscopy. Manufacturing first adopted optics for routine inspection and measurement of machined and molded parts in the 1920s with James Hartness’ development of instruments capable of projecting the magnified silhouette of a workpiece onto a ground glass screen. Hartness, as longtime chairman of the United States’ National Screw-Thread Commission, applied his pet interest in optics to the problem of screw-thread inspection. For many years, the Hartness Screw-Thread Comparator was a profitable product for the Jones and Lamson Machine Company, of which Hartness was president.
One of the most important objectives of an internal quality audit is
measuring the effectiveness of an organization's quality management system. For
this to happen, executive management must first meet its overriding
responsibility of establishing and maintaining a system regarding quality
policy, goals, resources, processes and effective performance--including
monitoring and measuring the system's effectiveness and efficiency.
ISO 9001:2000 delineates this responsibility into three distinct areas: 4.1
General requirements, 4.2 Documentation requirements and 4.3 Quality management
principles. If an organization's executive management isn't active in these
three areas, then they won't be addressed and the quality system will be
ineffective. Let's look at them one at a time, first in terms of their meaning
and then as auditable characteristics.
The United States spends 16 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) on health care, more than any other nation. Although that investment has produced medical experts and breakthroughs envied the world over, a great majority of U.S. citizens are unhappy with the end results. When the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund conducted a poll of U.S. health care consumers last year, 69 percent expressed strong dissatisfaction with the current health care system. In a 2007 survey, the same group found U.S. respondents twice as likely to support a complete overhaul of their system than those from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Great Britain, and Australia--all nations that spend half as much GDP as the United States on health care.
Product integrity occurs when performance, schedule, and affordability converge throughout the product life cycle. The first critical stage in realizing product integrity happens early in the product life cycle during design and development; a second and no less critical stage occurs later, during the transition from development to production. Early in the process, the relationship between design intent and process capability must be established and understood. As the design matures and transitions to production, it must be manufactured in a repeatable and affordable way by an extended supply chain. Achieving these seemingly intuitive objectives continues to be elusive for much of the aerospace and defense industry.
