I always look for the big picture in things.  Whether in personal life or professional, having the foresight to see things from a larger perspective lends itself to greater thought and better decision-making.  When hiking out in the wilderness, sometimes it's better to climb to the highest point and look down at your path, and you can see the whole trail laid out in front of you.  Then you know how far you've come, and how far you need to go;  with that kind of visibility you can plan your route, save your resources, and get through your journey easier.

Information is everywhere.  In fact, recent studies by the Global Information Industry Center state that Americans consume a whopping 1.8 zettabytes of information each year (that's a million million gigabytes), spend 1.3 trillion hours consuming information, and 10,845 trillion words read.  This all works out to about 34 GB per person per day.  Needless to say, we are consuming more information everyday.

Quality Management, if we've learned anything, is a central factor in any manufacturing organization.  What's most compelling is the evolution over the past decade on our perception of Quality Management.  Once thought to be another siloed system in an organization's infrastructure, Quality Management Systems have evolved into a central point of prominence in defining how products and processes are executed.

Next week (April 24, 2012 at 8:30am ET to be more specific) we will be hosting our 3rd Annual Life Science Seminar in lovely Waltham Woods in Waltham, MA (wicked lovely).  This will be our third year doing this great event, and with each year, we hope to provide a venue to learn and share about the various topics in the Life Science community.  This year we have speakers from EtQ, Kimberly-Clark Corporation, and Celgene Corporation.

It's tax season, which means those brave few procrastinators are waiting till April 15th to get their tax returns in.  While many of you are probably good loyal taxpayers, 1% of all people are audited each year.  The average person dreads that word, "Audit" (unless they misread and think I'm talking about 'Audis').  But for Quality and Safety professionals, audits are an important part of the Quality Management and EHS Management System.

While we like to joke around here on the blog, there is no doubt that using Quality Management and Environmental Health and Safety Management systems provide a great deal of value for an organization. In many cases, it revolves around fostering a more efficient and compliant organization. In other cases, it can mean taking a stand on social responsibility.

As technology evolves, more companies are looking for easier ways to manage their IT infrastructure and, in turn, their Quality Management System (QMS).  First came the client-server (thick client); then came the Web client(thin client); and now Software as a Service (SaaS) (supermodel thin client).  With the first two, the key component was the hardware.  It was always known that if you wanted software, you had to put it on a box, and someone had to maintain that box.  In this new technological era, IT is tired of maintaining your hardware;  they are looking for ways to deploy the QMS in the "cloud" - the hosted realm where server farms enable virtual operating environments to "float" and draw what bandwidth is needed to make the software work. 

A few months back, I posted an article on the benefits of integrating Quality and Environmental Health and Safety Management Systems with SAP.  Essentially, the focus was on how you can go about finding ways to compliment your current SAP implementation with QMS and EHS systems and how leveraging these workflow-based solutions can enhance your visibility into Quality and Safety with SAP.

Everyone seeks out value.  Whether you're a coupon clipper, a sale shopper, or a garage sale stalker, people look to get some sort of value out of their buying experience.  And if the product is purchased at retail, you look for ways to get the most out of the product you purchased.  I love a good deal - I will put money into something, as long as I know I will gain some form of return on my investment.

I'm ironically writing this, since I will most likely be on vacation when this is released.  I hope my delegation rules worked, so the blog post is not missed.