February 2003


The Loyalty Elephant
There is an old parable about a group of blind men describing an elephant. Lacking vision, they must use their sense of touch to understand what an elephant looks like. Recent articles about the differences between customer satisfaction, customer value...

Six Steps to Integrating Complaint Data into QA Decisions
Understanding consumer behavior factors helps determine the market implications of not solving the problem and allows quality assurance people to allocate resources accordingly. Integrating complaint data into the QA decision-making process requires six...
Boost Stock Performance, Nation's Economy
The concept of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) was first presented ten years ago by the author before the National Quality Roundtable. Data gathered from the experiences of actual customers had a strong economic imperative: Firms that...
Hungary's Journey To Business Excellence
Hungary has emerged as a major European success story, its economy thriving despite the recent worldwide recession. Four Hungarian companies illustrate how quality has led to business success. Using total quality management techniques tailored to fit...
Column: Emerging Sectors: ISO 9000 for Small Service Companies
Should a small service company pursue ISO 9000 certification? If your customers aren't well informed about the benefits of hiring a certified company, why invest the time and money to achieve the goal?...

ASQ News
First job in quality: Started as an electronic warfare technical writer for Westinghouse Canada Inc.; left 11 years later as quality manager. ASQ activities: Treasurer for the 2004 ASQ Annual Quality Congress, which will be held in Toronto; certified qual...
Quality Web Watch
CAREERS
www.sae.org The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) calls itself "the engineering society for advancing mobility in land, sea, air and space." Members and nonmembers can view the bookstore, job board, papers and related links, plus information on magazi...
Roadblocks to Quality
The automotive industry has developed state-of-the-art quality processes and procedures, yet many managers and engineers still do not understand or apply the concepts of variation reduction or trend analysis. This results in the poor quality that...
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