QMS & EMS London

The interest in quality management in healthcare has increased in the last decades as the financial crises in most health systems generated the need for solutions to reduce costs while maintaining quality of care. The development of quality management procedures has been closely linked with healthcare reforms. Starting in the early nineties quality management issues took impulse in reform legislation only 15 years later.

What should be a great time for global manufacturers has proven to be anything but. Production problems have caused trouble for many of the world’s largest and most successful companies, including Apple and Google. Both suffered “supply constraints” during the all-important holiday quarter.  The trouble has at least Apple joining a growing list to return a portion of their production work to North America. According to the Institute of Supply Management’s monthly index, U.S. production rose to 53.1 in January from 50.2 the month prior. Not since April has American manufacturing activity achieved such a fever pitch. 

Samsung -Korean electronics giant- is nipping at Apple's heels. But it is still missing one crucial element. The technology press loves a good narrative. And among the most beloved narratives is a good horserace. Two rivals struggling to better each other with new products or new features. The archetypal tech rivalry, between Microsoft and Apple not only lasted for decades, it helped make Silicon Valley what it is today. During the rise of the smartphone, the great race between mobile operating-system makers has been chronicled in detail. Early leaders like Nokia and Blackberry gave up the lead to Apple's iPhone and Google's Android. Microsoft, meanwhile, fought just to stay in this race.

Given the current economic scenario, we expect customers to be spending more on outsourcing to reduce costs and improve productivity. However, we can expect outsourcing to gain some momentum only in the second half of 2013. Generally, political decisions in their true sense are based on their financial viability and it is unlikely that any government will establish an agenda that jeopardizes economic interests. Also, Global business will continue to drive the growth of outsourcing industry in order to achieve core competencies, reduce and eliminate costs and achieve economies of scale.

In 1920, Sir Ronald A. Fisher invented a statistical way to compare data sets. Fisher called his method the analysis of variance, which was later dubbed an ANOVA. This method eventually evolved into Six Sigma data set comparisons. 

Benchmarking is the concept of discovering what is the best performance being achieved, whether in your company, by a competitor, or by an entirely different industry.  It is an improvement tool whereby a company measures its performance or process against other companies’ best practices, determines how those companies achieved their performance levels, and uses the information to improve its own performance. 

DG Environment has worked together with the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and other European Commission services towards the development of a harmonised methodology for the calculation of the environmental footprint of products (including carbon).

The lightning war between Samsung and Apple is already here. Samsung's newest, feature-packed Galaxy S4 may put pressure on Apple Inc to accelerate its pace of smartphone design and venture into cheaper devices - both departures from usual practice. The latest Galaxy, unwrapped with much fanfare in New York on Thursday, defeats the iPhone in most technical aspects. But the challenges it encapsulates run deeper than just a simple specifications comparison.

Kaizen is a japanese term that means continuous improvement, taken from words ‘Kai’ means continuous and ‘zen’ means improvement. Some translate ‘Kai’ to mean change and ‘zen’ to mean good, or for the better.

What is Lean?  The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means creating more value for customers with fewer resources.  A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value creation process that has zero waste. 

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an internationally standardised methodology (ISO 14040). LCA helps to quantify the environmental pressures related to goods and services (products), the environmental benefits, the trade-offs and areas for achieving improvements taking into account the full life-cycle of the product.

Every life cycle of a product or service starts with the extraction and processing of raw materials, followed by manufacturing, transportation and use, and ends with waste management including recycling and final disposal. Each of these life cycle stages consumes non-renewable energy and resources and generates emissions, which result in a number of environmental and health impacts at different levels. 

The product life cycle is defined as the period that starts with the initial product design (research and development) and ends with the withdrawal of the product from the marketplace. It is characterized by specific stages, including research, development, introduction, maturity, decline, and finally obsolescence as the product is removed from the market (discontinued). Each stage is often linked with changes in the flows of raw materials, parts and distribution to markets as production (input costs) is adjusted to face increasing competition. 

"Almost everybody does brainstorming wrong and turns it into an enormous waste of time. When most people do brainstorming, they run all over the place and think outside the box. I think they should think inside the box, the right-sided box". — Ralph Keeney An emeritus professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and a consultant to such diverse organizations as the Department of Energy and, just last month, a German power company with $40 billion in revenues, Keeney has devoted his career to a discipline called “decision science,” helping companies and government agencies bring focus and rigor to their decision-making process so that they can waste less time spinning their wheels and instead get clear on their objectives before they try to meet their goals.

Even as the demand for electricity grows, new guidelines could help improve power grid reliability and reduce electricity cost, researchers say.

"Data-driven method for achieving near perfect quality. Six Sigma analysis can focus on any element of production or service, and has a strong emphasis on statistical analysis in design, manufacturing and customer-oriented activities."  — UK Department for Trade and Industry  Six Sigma is now according to many business development and quality improvement experts, the most popular management methodology in history. 

This article introduces the eight quality management principles on which the quality management system standards of the ISO 9000 series are based. These principles can be used by management as a framework to guide their organizations towards excellence.  The principles are derived from the collective experience and knowledge of the international experts who participate in ISO Technical Committee ISO/TC 176, Quality management and quality assurance, which is responsible for developing and maintaining the ISO 9000 standards. 

“An Audience is always interested in experiences of someone with whom they can relate. There is something very private that occurs within the reader (or listener/viewer) while he ‘shares’ the actor’s experience. The operative word is ‘share,’ because the inner feelings of the protagonist are understandable to the reader who would have similar emotions under the same circumstances.”  — Will Eisner in Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative Regardless of the size of your company, the ability to identify and solve problems is something that businesses are always going to require. This fact represents the base of the quality management.  Many organisations fail to properly structure and support continuous improvement initiatives. Besides, it’s hard to please everyone all of the time. And if you work in process improvement there’s a good chance that there will be those who feel worried about the changes that might be coming their way.  All thes...