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Dirk Dusharme @ Quality Digest
Quality professionals no longer focus solely on product or service quality. Today, the quality function is involved in almost every aspect of a company, from customer interactions and compliance management to environmental health and safety, supply chain management, risk management, and more.
A…
Joseph Near, David Darais
It’s not so simple to deploy a practical system that satisfies differential privacy. Our example in the last post was a simple Python program that adds Laplace noise to a function computed over the sensitive data. For this to work in practice, we’d need to collect all the sensitive data on one…
Michael Mallen
The concept of cost of quality (COQ) has been around for decades, but applying it to business is difficult. The adage “quality is free” (coined by Philip B. Cosby in his book by the same title) does not simply mean that you don’t have to pay for it. It means that you are likely already paying to…
Sharona Hoffman
Artificial intelligence holds great promise for improving human health by helping doctors make accurate diagnoses and treatment decisions. It can also lead to discrimination that can harm minorities, women, and economically disadvantaged people.
The question is, when healthcare algorithms…
Michael P. Powell
The promise of advanced manufacturing technologies—also known as smart factories or Industry 4.0—is that by networking our machines, computers, sensors, and systems, we will (among other things) enable automation, improve safety, and ultimately become more productive and efficient. And there is no…
Scott Heide
During the last several decades, the ability to manufacture customized products for customers has become increasingly attractive to a growing number of companies. However, customization has led to manufacturers drowning in a sea of increasingly complex bills of material (BOM).
Standard products…
Manfred Kets de Vries
Serge faced a conundrum. One of his business partners was in a legal dispute with Serge’s father, Charlie, and asked for his help. Serge knew that his father was prone to suing everyone who crossed his path—including family members. The business partner had repeatedly tried to end this legal fight…
Mark Esser
Alot has changed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) during the past 120 years. For one thing, we were known as the National Bureau of Standards for the first 87 years of our existence. Then, in 1988, we became the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), to…
Tinglong Dai, Christopher Tang, Ho-Yin Mak
More than 50 million Americans have received at least one dose of either the Pfizer or Moderna Covid-19 vaccine. So far, Americans have been largely brand-agnostic, but that’s about to change as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine rolls out.
The vaccine has been hailed as a game changer. It requires…
Joseph Near, David Darais, Kaitlin Boeckl
Does your organization want to aggregate and analyze data to learn trends, but in a way that protects privacy? Or perhaps you are already using differential privacy tools, but want to expand (or share) your knowledge? In either case, NIST’s blog series on differential privacy is for you.
Why are…
Quality Digest
Digital transformation is the integration of technology into all areas of a business, which fundamentally changes how organizations operate and deliver value to their customers. But what does success look like in a digital transformation? Project is on time and budget? Stakeholders are engaged…
Theodore Kinni
There is no shortage of advice regarding the art and craft of business strategy. Yet, in 2019, when the consulting firm Strategy& surveyed 6,000 executives, only 37 percent said their companies had well-defined strategies, and only 35 percent believed that their strategies would lead to success…
Clare Naden
It’s been about a year since the Covid-19 pandemic turned our world upside down, and that includes the world in which we work. Certainty has hung up its hat, normality looks unlikely to return, and unpredictability is here to stay for the long term. How can organizations manage in this context, and…
Sébastien Breteau
It’s been about one year since the Covid-19 impact intensified from a seemingly isolated health scare to a worldwide, ubiquitous tragedy that has upended daily life as we know it. Ever since consumers first faced widespread product shortages of essential items during the early days of the pandemic…
Jim Benson
Respect is an abused word. Weak minds use it as a placeholder for fear. Weak egos will demand it up front. Weak hearts will use it to attach themselves to people of bluster, wishing they could be so outspoken.
We could do with a few more conversations about respect.
We can see here, sadly, that…
Adam Conner-Simons
Laser cutting is an essential part of many industries, from car manufacturing to construction. However, the process isn’t always easy or efficient. Cutting huge sheets of metal requires time and expertise, and even the most careful users can still produce huge amounts of leftover material that go…
Elizabeth Benham
Each year during national Weights and Measures Week (March 1 to 7), we celebrate the contributions made by the weights and measures community to ensure accuracy and fair competition in commercial transactions based on weight or measure. This year’s theme, “Measuring Up to the New Normal,” was…
Nate Burke
Undeniably, the power of data is unmatched. With an abundance of data collection opportunities available online, and with an increasing number of businesses taking them, the potential and value of such information is richer than ever before. And businesses are benefiting.
Particularly where data…
Jim Benson
When we work together, which we all do, everything involves relationships. People request work from other people... that is a relationship. People take jobs that involve bosses and structure... those are relationships. People form teams to get specific types of work done... again, relationships.…
Ayman Jawhar
Product management as we’ve known it up until now—as a limited function or role—is effectively dead. However, viewed as a culture, product management is thriving. I predict “product culture” will be central to the future of work in digital economies. Yet knowledge workers, executives, and business…
Esteve Garriga
There are many important issues to be considered in the food industry, such as consumer tastes, environmental impact, and economic aspects, but the most important is food safety.
Although current food safety management system (FSMS) certification schemes around the world are highly effective, I…
Mark Schmit
During the Sept. 18, 2020, session of the “National Conversation with Manufacturers,” our three West Coast manufacturing leaders on the panel kept coming back to their critical need for skilled workers.
The conversation was one in a series of 11 virtual listening sessions hosted by the National…
Lucca Henrion, Duo Zhang, Victor Li, Volker Sick
One of the big contributors to climate change is right beneath your feet, and transforming it could be a powerful solution for keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
The production of cement, the binding element in concrete, accounted for 7 percent of total global carbon dioxide emissions…
Gregg Profozich
Welcome to the third installment of our series on lean and Six Sigma. As we saw in the first article, lean and Six Sigma are complementary continuous improvement methodologies that reduce the overall waste and variability, respectively, in production processes. The second article went into some…
James Wells
When is a product “good enough” to accept? This is the classic challenge of quality. High customer expectations demand that suspect products be thoroughly scrutinized and a high standard set for their release. Customers expect this, and quality staff strive to achieve it.
The other side of the tug…