The Quality Show, billed as the only trade show and conference focused exclusively on quality education, technology, equipment, and products, will take place October 24-26, 2017, at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, IL, and will include two keynote presentations, a host of educational sessions, an awards presentation ceremony, networking opportunities, and a bevy of exhibitions of the latest services and equipment the quality industry has to offer. 

Organizations have used management systems for a long time to help them create value and reach their objectives by actively managing risks and continually improving their performance.

In 1984, I joined the wafer quality group at Motorola Semiconductors Sector in Austin, TX. My first quality act was to join the American Society for Quality. 

The ISO certification auditing process can be daunting, especially if the auditor is going to be evaluating your company’s gage management processes based on data housed in your Excel spreadsheets or hand-written documents and note cards stuffed in three-ring binders.

In the quality world, air gaging ranks with micrometers, calipers, comparators, scales, CMMs and many other instruments in that they are all considered measurement and test equipment (M&TE).

Lean and agile can work alone but they can be very powerful together. Reducing waste keeps your company sustainable. Being agile keeps your company ahead of the competition.

Too often users of precision measuring instruments and gages end up with the wrong equipment and don’t find out until it’s too late. ‘Too late’ means after rejects are detected by in-house measurements or in worst case scenarios, by their customer.

In my previous column I discussed the role of specification limits in manufacturing, which led to thoughts about process control limits.

To be Lean, in process improvement speak, is to maximize customer value by eliminating waste. This means that an organization can create more value for customers with fewer resources if they can understand customer value and focus key processes to continually improve.

We’ve all heard the term “practice makes perfect.” It’s something instilled in us from a young age, from the repetition of the alphabet to the memorization of the multiplication table.