Quality Performance Measurement

One measure of the quality of distillate and bottoms from a distillation column is the concentration of impurities present. The rectification section of a distillation column above the feed point is primarily for removing heavy impurities from the distillate. So, the quality of the distillate stream can be measured by the concentration of heavy key impurity. The distillate quality specification can be an upper specification limit (USL) of heavy key impurity in the stream. If there are lighter components present, they will essentially all appear in the distillate. 

The concentration of key impurities in samples of distillate or bottoms can be studied with conventional statistical calculations, for example, average concentration and standard deviation. There can be common cause variability from everyday disturbances that occur to a distillation column and assignable cause variability from known disturbances such as startup, loss of steam, etc. The main emphasis of statistical measurement of product quality is on common cause variability. 

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Early pharmacotherapy for NSTE ACS is similar to that for STE ACS except that (1) fibrinolytic therapy is not administered (2) GP Ilb/IIIa receptor blockers are administered to high-risk patients and (3) there are no standard quality performance measures for patients with NSTE ACS with UA. 

Kieffer, R.G. Stoker, J.R. Quality performance measurement and reporting. Pharm. Technol. 1986, June, 54—58. 

In practice, it is nontrivial to manually select the parameter values to obtain successful results. Moreover, it is not obvious how to measure the quality of the results. Therefore, a well defined performance measure and an efficient parameter optimization method are desired. 

One approach to a mathematically well defined performance measure is to interpret the amplitude values of a processed signal as realizations of a stochastic variable x which can take a discrete number of values with probabilities P , n = 1,2,..., N. Briefly motivated in the introduction, then an interesting quality measure is the entropy H x) of the amplitude distribu-... 

Measurement of performance. Quality Management requires that measures of performance be established for every activity. These measures include end-of-pipe measurement, such as amounts of material released into the environment or injury rates, and in-process measures of how efficiently you are managing, such as time to review safety improvement proposals or total resources expended on PSM. Each team should be required to identify potential performance measures for the processes they are developing and the activities these processes manage. Many of the end-of-pipe measures will already exist these should be critically examined to ensure that they truly measure performance and are not unduly influenced by other factors. For example, the number of accidents in a fleet of road vehicles is almost directly dependent on the number of miles driven with no improvement in performance, a reduction in miles driven would reduce the number of accidents. 

CCPS has developed guidelines for the measurement of PSM performance that provide useful ideas on measurement. Their approach for developing performance measures integrates Quality Management with a well-tested methodology for developing measures based on mathematical algorithms derived from expert assessment of system performance. The purpose was to identify well-defined, measurable, and practical indicators of performance that are updated on a schedule which makes the performance measure continuously useful. To date, measures have been developed for... 

At this point the VP, ESH and his set of integration teams worked to develop the performance measures that would be used to assess both the success of the overall integration effort and Quality Chemical Company s performance in the areas of ESH and PSM. Some of the measures specific to documentation systems were ... 

SOURCE Excerpted from U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1995) and Indoor Environmental Quality Appendix to International Performance Measurement Verification Protocol (U.S. Department of Energy, 1998)... 

If, besides the quality-related measure, z, one also wishes to include operating costs, in the analysis, because quality loss functions express quality costs on a monetary basis, commensurate with operating costs, the final global performance metric, y, which reflects total manufacturing cost, is simply the sum of both quality and operating costs (Clausing, 1993),... 

Consequently, the goal of our learning methodology is the identification of hyperrectangles in the decision space, X, that minimize expected total manufacturing cost, (y X), a performance measure that combines in a consistent form and a quantitative basis both operating and quality costs. 

Both operating costs and quality losses were combined together, leading to the following overall performance measure, yg, for the supremal decision unit ... 

ISO Guide 33 (1998) deals with other uses of RMs. It elaborates on various uses of RMs, excluding calibration, which is the subject of ISO Guide 32. In most cases, RMs are used as a quality control measure, i.e. to assess the performance of a measurement method. Most matrix RMs are produced with this purpose in mind. Other purposes of RMs are the maintenance of conventional scales, such as the octane number and the pH scale. ISO Guide 33 provides guidance on the proper use of RMs, and therefore it is together with ISO Guide 32 the most important document for users of CRMs. 

Internal quality control is undertaken by the inclusion of particular reference materials, called control materials , into the analytical sequence and by duplicate analysis. The control materials should, wherever possible, be representative of the test materials under consideration in respect of matrix composition, the state of physical preparation and the concentration range of the analyte. As the control materials are treated in exactly the same way as the test materials, they are regarded as surrogates that can be used to characterise the performance of the analytical system, both at a specific time and over longer intervals. Internal quality control is a final check of the correct execution of all of the procedures (including calibration) that are prescribed in the analytical protocol and all of the other quality assurance measures that underlie good analytical practice. IQC is therefore necessarily retrospective. It is also required to be as far as possible independent of the analytical protocol, especially the calibration, that it is designed to test. 

The FSA undertakes surveillance exercises, the data for which are acquired from analytical determinations. The Agency will take measures to ensure that the analytical data produced by contractors are sufficient with respect to analytical quality, i.e. that the results obtained meet predetermined analytical quality requirements such as fitness-for-purpose, accuracy and reliability. Thus when inviting tenders FSA will ask potential contractors to provide information regarding the performance requirements of the methods to be used in the exercise, e.g. limit of detection, accuracy, precision etc., and the quality assurance measures used in their laboratories. When presenting tenders, laboratories should confirm how they comply with these specifications and give the principles of the methods to be used. These requirements extend both to the laboratory as a whole and to the specific analytical determinations being required in the surveillance exercise. The requirements are described in three parts, namely ... 

Surface and volume resistivity measurements have been performed on films of polymer alone and polymer with Al(acac) added. Special care was taken to insure that only films of uniformly high quality were measured. Regardless of the film pretreatment, volume resistivities on two independently cast films of polymer alone fall in the 10- - ohm-cm range. No previously published resistivity is available on this particular polymer although upon surveying several ether polyimides from independent sources we measured similar volume resistivities. 

FDA record Quality systems Performance measures Change control... 

The regulatory process through which industry measures actual quality performance, compresses it with standards, and acts on the difference. 

Check the cell for the performance measurement The quality of the measurement depends strongly on the quality of the cell used. Always use the highest-quality cell available. Make sure that the cell is clean and free of contamination. Contamination can change the absorbance of standard solutions, resulting in failure of the photometric accuracy test. The optical quality of the cell is affected by factors such as closeness to the specified path length, parallelism of the inner and outer faces of the windows, and flatness of the window. Upon... 

Performance test samples (also called quality control samples or blind samples) are a quality control measure to help eliminate bias introduced by the analyst knowing the concentration of the calibration check sample. These samples of known composition are provided to the analyst as unknowns. Results are then compared with the known values, usually by a quality assurance manager. 

Hair dyes must meet a number of conditions related to their end use. Color can be assessed by colorimetry [49], The limits of precision are set by the substrate on which the measurement is performed. Studies on test subjects are difficult because of the uneven natural hair color and the background color of the scalp. Tresses are hard to prepare at a constant quality level. Measurements on wool cloth give reproducible results, but for oxidation dyes the shades are not identical to those produced on hair. Colorimetric methods are therefore useful only for comparative measurements on the same object, for example, in lightfastness tests. Because hair must be redyed after four to six weeks due to growth, the fastness required of hair dyes is generally less than that needed for textiles. However, stability is still a problem with many indo dyes (see Section 5.4.3). Some of them... 

Computer Systems Validation (CSV) The formal assessment and reporting of quality and performance measures for all the life-cycle stages of software and system development, its implementation, qualification and acceptance, operation, modification, requalification, maintenance, and retirement, such that the user has a high level of confidence in the integrity of both the processes executed within the controlling computer system(s), and in those processes controlled by and/or linked to the computer system(s), within the prescribed operating environments) (MCA). 

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