The importance of quality in manufacturing cannot be overemphasized. The cost of quality is not confined to costs related to process assurance, product inspection, rework and rejects; rather it encompasses the impact on performance and market perception for the product and the corporate. In the new global economy, multiple entities collaborate to deliver a product to the end-customer. In such a...

The FDA’s Quality by Design initiative and associated design space construct (ICH, 2009), have stimulated the use of quantitative methods, mathematical and statistical models, and designed experiments in the process of drug development and manufacture. For a given drug product, the design space may be interpreted as the constrained region of the manufacturing operating variable space within whi...

From the outset on, the development of Open Source Software (OSS) was characterized by the difficulty of evaluating the quality of the product. Due to the massive parallel development and the absence of the approved control structures of conventional software development, new strategies for ensuring quality had to be conceived. This paper gives a review of the established processes of the Open ...

The paper explores international comparisons of the extent of commonality or diversity in the main national external quality assurance frameworks for higher education. It has been suggested, from an European survey, that there are common features in national quality assurance frameworks (van Vught and Westerheijden (Quality Management and Quality Assurance in European Higher Education: Methods ...

We designed a survey on software engineering excellence (SEE) and administered it in 2005, 2006 and 2007 with the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to better understand the mechanism of how software engineering capabilities relate to IT vendors’ business performance and business environment. We measured the SEE survey results with regard to seven factors: deliverables, project ma...

In the context of quality assurance for the emergency medical services in Bavaria a segmentation of the municipal areas is necessary. Such municipal subareas are not officially defined; however, official submunicipalities do exist as point information. On the basis of these points an algorithm, generating reasonable borders within the municipal areas, was developed and implemented using ArcPy. ...

Abstiuct-Organizational databases are pervaded with data of poor quality. However, there has not been an analysis of the data quality literature that provides an overall understanding of the state-of-art research in this area. Using an analogy between product manufacturing and data manufacturing, this paper develops a framework for analyzing data quality research, and uses it as the basis for o...

Despite the proliferation of online education, concerns remain about the quality of online programmes. Quality assurance (QA) has become a prominent issue, not only for educational institutions and accreditors, but also for students and employers alike. This paper describes some of the rather unique QA processes used at Universitas 21 Global (U21G), one of the new breed of online academic insti...