Monitoring temperature and/or humidity conditions is an essential ingredient of a wide range of quality assurance applications. There are many common methodological errors, however, in ways that this task is approached that either compromise quality standards or add unnecessary time and expense to the monitoring task.

It’s been more than 10 years since GE’s aggressive adoption of Six Sigma launched a renaissance of quality methods, and some 20 years since Motorola first began minting Black Belts and concentrating on defects. And yet, despite hundreds of documented successes and thousands of committed Six Sigma practitioners, criticism of and skepticism about Six Sigma remains as strong, and probably stronger, than ever.

When Jay and Carol Jones of Granville, MA-based Noble & Cooley Drum Co. learned that one of the firm’s Civil War-era military drums had surfaced, they wanted a closer look. So they called Instrument Technology Inc. (ITI) of Westfield, MA.

Richardson Manufacturing (Springfield, IL) is in the heart of earth-moving country, and their primary customers are the makers of enormous machines that push, haul and scrape dirt. During their 50-year history, Richardson has become a fully integrated engineering and production metalworking company. They accept CAD drawings from customers, then manage the parts from prototyping through production, and along the way make whatever fixtures are required to build them.

The task of inspecting how automotive parts fit together has also gotten increasingly more complex. The Body-In-White (BIW) Rollout and Process Optimization Department is entrusted with the job of verifying how well the various body parts fit to one another.

As a rule, counting, measurement and experimental data of various origins are initially protocolled or stored in the order of their occurrence. For descriptive and/or analytical processing of such data, it is often advantageous, at times even mandatory, to sort the data in ascending or descending order according to their size, i.e., to bring them into a so-called rank order.

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Freightliner Customizes Quality The Quality Magazine 2007 Plant of the Year, Freightliner’s Mt. Holly, NC, Truck Manufacturing Plant, is loud-bring earplugs-and busy, producing about 80 trucks per day, with plans to produce twice that in the coming years. The plant is constantly in motion, with 1,200 employees weaving throughout the shop floor, along with robots, automated carts and, of course, various parts on their way to becoming a truck.

View a slideshow of Freightliner’s Mt. Holly, NC, Truck Manufacturing Plant

Positive Material Identification (PMI) refers to the identification and analysis of various metal alloys based on their chemical composition in nondestructive testing (NDT). Because specifications for materials used in industry are increasingly more specific, the need for PMI testing has been steadily increasing for the past several years.

The concept of signal (S) to noise (N) ratios has high visibility in design of experiment circles due to the work of Taguchi and his disciples.