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In 1988, Motorola Corp. became one of the first companies to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The award strives to identify those excellent firms that are worthy role models for other businesses. One of Motorola's innovations that attracted a great deal of attention was its Six Sigma program. Six Sigma is, basically, a process quality goal. As such, it falls into the category of a process capability (Cp) technique.
The traditional quality paradigm defined a process as capable if the process's natural spread, plus and minus three sigma, was less than the engineering tolerance. Under the assumption of normality, this translates to a process yield of 99.73 percent. A later refinement considered the process location as well as its spread (Cpk) and tightened the minimum acceptable so that the process was at least four sigma from the nearest engineering requirement. Motorola's Six Sigma asks that processes operate such that the nearest engineering requirement is at least plus or minus six sigma from the process mean.
Motorola's Six Sigma program also applies to attribute data. This is accomplished by converting the Six Sigma requirement to equivalent conformance levels (see Figure 1).
Quality improvement has stalled in manufacturing due to an inability to capture, continuously improve, and leverage performance knowledge in design and manufacturing activities. Other enterprise systems, such as project life-cycle management (PLM), fail to improve quality because they treat it as a process management problem. The fundamental challenges to achieving quality are knowledge-management and continuous-improvement issues. Recently, quality life-cycle management has received a boost from enterprise software solutions designed to change how manufacturers go about designing quality into their manufacturing processes and products.
Some statistics reported by manufacturers highlight the current dilemma in quality performance:
• Eighty percent of all quality issues are repeat issues. These are errors that have happened before and were fixed, yet the lesson learned wasn’t recalled by or communicated to another group so that preventive action could be taken.
Qing Rong Zhang (behind computer, center), a Shanghi-based quality engineer with more than 30 years of experience with automotive original equipment manufacturers and tier-one suppliers, handles an overall supplier assessment.
It’s hard not to pick up a newspaper or industry magazine or surf the internet without reading that manufacturing industries are relocating their operations to other countries. During the past couple of years, it’s been equally difficult to avoid articles concerning serious quality issues present in consumer and industrial products produced in emerging economies. Even as product lines move to China, India, and Russia, domestic companies are losing significant numbers of experienced employees throughout their organizations due to early retirement or reassignment. Diminished and often lost in this regard is the tribal knowledge of operators who know the pulse of the manufacturing process. This triple whammy of outsourcing, loss of tribal knowledge, and decrease in product quality has emphasized the need for third-party suppliers of supply chain solutions.
Welcome to Quality Digest’s 2008 State Quality Awards directory. On the following pages you’ll find a state-by-state summary of available awards, contact information and award summaries, including who may apply and deadline dates. We’ve done our best to include only the information that we’ve personally confirmed, but we nevertheless recommend that you contact award administrators directly to verify important dates, requirements and other critical data.
We wish you the best of luck on your journey to quality award recognition.
Standards such as ISO 9001 mandate documentation requirements as part of a company’s compliance with the standard. Although the requirements are intentionally broad-based and open, many organizations tend to over-document their systems. ISO 9001:2008 requires a manual and six documented procedures. AS9100 requires seven, and ISO 14001 requires one. Yet companies continue to write additional procedures, often for the wrong reasons. Let’s end the confusion about implementing a management system vs. documenting one.
A common belief is that the standards’ requirements are satisfied if detailed procedures exist to define a system. Additionally, many managers and executives think that a documented procedure for every element in the company results in better control and accountability. Although no requirements are enumerated in these standards for procedure format, more emphasis is placed on this than on the information contained within the procedures.
Real-time X-ray inspection systems have been used in quality assurance applications for more than 25 years. In electronics manufacturing, for example, X-ray inspection ensures the registration of drilled holes to internal pads of multilayer printed circuit boards. In electronic assembly applications, X-ray inspection ensures the quality of hidden solder bonds of surface-mounted components such as ball-grid arrays, as seen in figure 1 below.
Now real-time X-ray inspection is becoming an important tool for ensuring the quality of many medical devices. These devices incorporate a diversity of materials, including polymers, rubbers, steel, titanium, ceramics, and glass. Real-time systems employ fluoroscopic imaging devices to display the device’s X-ray image in a video format.
Welcome to Quality Digest's 2009 Six Sigma Services and Software buyers guide. This handy reference tool includes more than 200 companies that help you implement Six Sigma within your organization. Included in each description are the company name, location, phone and fax numbers, web site, and an acronym representing whether the organization offers Six Sigma services (SVC), software (SW), or both. Be sure to check this buyers guide online at www.qualitydigest.com/content/buyers-guides for additional information on these companies.
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 in your search for the right Six Sigma service or software provider to suit your needs.
By Thomas Hill, Ph.D.; Robert Eames; and Sachin Lahoti
Data mining methods have many origins, including drawing on insights into learning as it naturally occurs in humans (cognitive science), and advances in computer science and algorithm design on how to best detect patterns in unstructured data. Although traditional statistical methods for analyzing data, based on statistical theories and models, are now widely accepted throughout various industries, data mining methods have only been widely embraced in business for a decade or two. However, their effectiveness for root cause analysis, and for modeling, optimizing and improving complex processes, are making data mining increasingly popular--and even necessary--in many real-world discrete manufacturing, batch manufacturing, and continuous-process applications.
There is no single, generally agreed-upon definition of data mining. As a practical matter, whenever data describing a process are available, in manufacturing for example, then any systematic review of those data to identify useful patterns, correlations, trends, and so forth, could be called “data mining.” Put simply, data mining uncovers nuggets of information from a sometimes vast repository of data describing the process of interest.
Welcome to Quality Digest’s 2008 Consultants Directory, listing companies that provide quality consulting services.
Check the abbreviation key on page 48 for a preview of the services offered by each company. If additional information was provided to us, you’ll find it online at http://www.qualitydigest.com/content/buyers-guides. As always, we encourage you to contact these companies or visit their web sites.
Quality Digest hasn’t evaluated nor do we endorse any of the following companies listed in this directory.
We wish you well in finding a consultant for your specific needs.
Enron. Worldcom. Tyco. Cendant. Bernie Madoff, once chairman of the NASDAQ, is now cooling his heels in jail. The ex-CEO of Comverse is arrested in Namibia, the CEO at United Healthcare is forced to step down, and Patricia Dunn of Hewlett Packard is charged in an ethics scandal. And, of course, AIG has no problem doling out millions in bonuses to the very people who drove the company and the country into a financial crisis. It seems that no matter where we look today, the erosion of ethics and basic moral principles of right and wrong have taken us to the point where trust in our institutions and the very systems that make our society work are in imminent danger of oblivion. Perhaps at no time during the last two or three decades has business ethics, or the lack thereof, been of such paramount importance to the well-being of our business entities and country.
