INBOX

Remembering Juran

I remember well the day Dr. W. Edwards Deming died. I remember how sad I was that there was so little said in this country about the passing of this great man who had done so much for so many. The way I found out Dr. Joseph Juran had died left me a great deal sadder. It was not until I received the April issue of Quality Progress, a month after Dr. Juran died, that I came to know he was gone.

I read a variety of online and print publications for my news, including the websites of USA Today and CNN, as well as Time magazine. I also read the local newspaper and watch the local TV news here in Boston, as well as the national TV news.

Not one of those media outlets brought the story to my attention. Maybe I was having a bad month. Maybe I was asleep at the switch. So I decided to ask some of my friends in the quality profession whether they had heard or seen anything. To a person, they had not.

I have spent almost 30 years of my life working on the front lines of quality, forever reminding people how important quality is. I have listened to and lived through every flavor of quality that has come along in that time. The importance of quality has been inescapable, right? So tell me how I am to understand that, for an entire month, it was as if Dr. Joseph Juran and all he did for quality in the world didn't matter at all.

ASQ, have we been fooling ourselves? There are reasons to believe we have.

With sadness and sympathy for the Juran family,

Paul Aganski
Field quality engineer
West Newbury, MA

Shell game

Regarding the article "The Great Debate" (April 2008, p. 26), is using the turtle diagram the only way to show objective proof to a third-party auditor that you are using the process approach? If it is, I believe the conclusions about the process approach for the environmental management system (EMS) are true.

Although ISO/TS 16949 might say that you have to use a turtle diagram (I don't know because I do not work for a company that is certified to ISO/TS 16949), ISO 9001 does not prescribe the use of turtle diagrams. Currently, my company is integrating ISO 9000, ISO 14001 and OHSAS 18001, and we believe the three management standards can be audited using the process approach. I think Tables 1 and 2 in the article will help us improve our internal auditing process.

>As for not using checklists or the copy of the standard, what do we use as proof that all requirements of the standard are being met? The checklist is a basic tool used in auditing and, like all tools, can be misused. If the auditor spends all of their time in a conference room looking only at the documentation, the auditee should ask their registrar to send a different auditor next time.

There is no value to the auditee or the auditee's customers to an audit that is conducted without spending time studying the processes of the company and talking to the people who are doing the work. The checklist and the standard are not the problem—poor training or the competence of the auditor is the problem.

Beth Clelland
Quality manager,
Amesbury Group Foam-Tite
Amesbury, MA

Author's response

Clelland makes some great comments and asks some very good questions. I probably don't have enough space to address them adequately, but here goes.

The turtle diagram is not the only way to show objective proof to a third-party auditor that you are using the process approach, and neither ISO/TS 16949 nor ISO 9001 requires its use. But the diagram is one method being employed regularly to demonstrate having used the process approach. An auditor could simply map out the process using a process flow diagram, ask questions following the process path and then record notes that support the technique that was used.

It's not my insistence against using a checklist, but rather the International Automotive Oversight Bureau regarding ISO/TS 16949 third-party auditors. I agree that auditors can use checklists to ensure complete coverage of a process or standard. But I have seen many instances where checklists limit the effectiveness of the audit.

Auditors might conduct the audit without preparation and then ask only the questions on the checklist, or they might "pencil whip" the checklist and not conduct an effective audit. Internal audit programs should not rely too much on checklists and should allow time for auditors to prepare before each audit, using the checklist as a tool.

Regarding the objective evidence of comprehensive coverage in the absence of a checklist, there are several ways to provide evidence the requirements are evaluated without using a checklist. One way is to maintain thorough auditor notes that describe what was observed and what was evaluated. Comprehensive notes combined with a coverage matrix can show that the elements have been evaluated.

As far as conference room audits, they provide little to no value to the organization and should be avoided.

Terry A. Mors