- Cost of Quality
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Global Quality
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- ISO 14000
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrics
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Capability
- Process Management
- Project Management
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Six Sigma
- Social Responsibility
- Standards
- Statistical Process Control (SPC)
- Statistics
- Teams
- Best Practices
- TL 9000
- ISO 22000
- Career Development
- Certification/Registration (management system Standards)
- Risk Management
- Customer Experience Management
- Customer Requirements
- Economic Case for Quality
- Awards
- Change Management
Perspectives: The Unending Search
Recently, Stephen K. Hacker wrote that “many of our organizations remain mired in their current states, frozen in old mindsets.”...
Career Corner: In Shape for Quality
I first met A.H. when my personal growth shifted to a more horizontal direction. He has since gone solo, working as a self-employed personal trainer. When I learned he had gone solo, I wondered if his perspective on managing for quality had changed....
Quality Around the Clock
It’s in your DNA. It’s how your mind works. It’s what you do. It’s who you are. When you work in quality, you see things differently. You approach problems and scenarios in certain ways. It happens after you’ve signed off....
Measure for Measure: Measuring Your Worth
I’ve run across this type of situation in which a calibration technician might feel he or she is not as important as others in the organization. Nothing could be further from the truth....
Follow the Signs
Many change models have been proposed, but one stands out: the transtheoretical model, also known as the health behavior change model. The model originates from directly observing how people really did or didn’t change in response to urgent medical needs....
Innovation Imperative: Time for a Change
A quality manager’s career is far from predictable. It depends on the attitude of an organization’s leadership toward quality and, perhaps more importantly, leadership’s understanding of what quality is....
Perspectives: Theory of Evolution
Thumbing through W. Edward Deming’s timeless classic Out of the Crisis, it’s striking to see how the current economic crisis can be attributed to the factors he pointed out so many years ago as roadblocks to quality and productivity....
Expert Answers: February 2012
The best way to eliminate errors ... Adjusting to a new auditor....
Heavy Mettle Victory
After 23 years of service, I retired from Heavymet. Heavymet is a colossus: 65,000 employees in 55 plants in six business units in six countries. I lived in interesting times there. Many asked how I felt about our progress in process management....
Online Conklin: Baker’s Loaf
When recounting Plant Able’s successful struggle to implement process management, we compared it to raising children. That sums up the story when implementation is in your home plant....
Career Corner: Dust Yourself Off, Dive Back In
Don’t just sit there waiting for the phone to ring. You’re a professional. If you envision losing your job, or it’s already happened, refocus your approach. You are capable of reinventing yourself....
Standards Outlook: Know Your Role
When an organization has stale quality management system processes in the face of dynamic—at times chaotic— uncertainty, the entire system may become irrelevant....
Measure for Measure: True Meaning
The term “calibration” can mean different things to different people, depending on their education and experience, and whether they are suppliers or consumers of calibration services....
A Decade of Distinction
In the first six months of 2010, Telefónica Group launched 60 simultaneous quality improvement projects. These 60 projects represent nearly 30% of the total number of improvement projects conducted in the company during the last decade....
Career Corner: Polish Up on Quality Lessons
Quality is a rewarding career. Yet, occasionally, after a particularly intense day battling a crisis, a momentary break from quality seems attractive. Sometimes I leave quality behind for a little while only to run into it someplace else....
Career Corner: Will You Be Ready?
In October 2002, I wrote a Career Corner column titled “Fired? Tired? Mired?” Even today, that’s the sense I get from the restlessness that I believe permeates today’s workforce. People are unemployed, and some have given up looking for jobs. People are...
Back to Basics: Stakeholder Management 101
Stakeholder buy-in is an essential factor of any successful project, including Lean and Six Sigma process improvement efforts. A leading cause of project failure, however, is inattention to those stakeholders who have the greatest influence over...
Lessons in Loyalty
Business growth depends on improving customer loyalty behavior. Companies with higher customer loyalty usually experience faster business growth than companies with lower customer loyalty, research has shown....
A Lean Transformation
Sacred Heart Hospital CEO Steve Ronstrom first learned about lean while working on boats in Alaska. There, they didn’t waste a thing—they wouldn’t even throw away a piece of rope. When he later returned home and worked in a hospital, he observed...
Career Corner: Paint Yourself a Purple Squirrel
In recent years, economic conditions have caused organizations and job seekers alike to re-evaluate fulfilling needs. Companies have been re-evaluating their need for talent, and job seekers have been re-evaluating their talents for filling companies'...
Career Corner: Seeing Through the Smoke
This question risks giving away my age, but it’s for a higher cause: When you hear the phrase “smoke gets in your eyes,” what is the first thing that comes to mind? If it’s not the Platters, the doo-wop group, and if you aspire to the management ranks...
Doomed to Fail
Ben looked around his new office, happy to still have a job but apprehensive about his new position. He had just been reassigned after his boss’s boss, the CEO, decided the continuous improvement initiative he had been leading was just not working out....
3.4 per Million: Integrating Inputs
Obtaining voice of the customer information is always important because a business’s survival depends on a person choosing its products over a competitor’s products....
Get Your Ducks in a Row
The ISO 9001 quality management system has been around since 1987, and it is generally acknowledged that the system produces some fairly significant benefits, including improved profitability, higher sales and better employee morale....
Dealing With Disconnect
"Tips" was retiring. He was smiling, and with good reason. I was not, and with equally good reason. As the company’s senior auditor, his leaving meant things would never quite be the same....
On the Plus Side
Without a doubt, quality at Honeywell Federal Manufacturing & Technologies (FM&T) is built in, not bolted on. Given the sensitive and serious nature of FM&T’s business, there can be no other way....
Career Corner: School of Hard Knocks
The first thing that came to mind as I was thinking about this column was that I’d share my experiences in launching a new product and some of the hard lessons I’ve learned on pitching, almost daily, projects and solutions to customers....
Career Climb
You don’t need to be jobless in today’s economy to feel stressed and apprehensive about your current situation. You don’t need to be reminded there aren’t any guarantees in today’s world....
Measure for Measure: What Really Counts
People are not stupid, and we are tired of companies trying to fool us. By sifting through the misdirection of the advertisers, we can get to the truth and measure what really counts at work, at home and in our communities....
Career Corner: Leave a Legacy
In many management development programs, an instructor assigns a task: write a brief eulogy summarizing what you feel a business associate could or would say about you. Questions you could consider include: What impact have you strived to make in the...
Managing Expectations
One condition is vital for initiating, implementing and sustaining a viable quality initiative: management support. Surprisingly, very few articles and books on quality even mention this need, let alone what to do if support isn’t there....
Attitude Shift
In a used-car dealership group based in Richmond, VA, a lean culture change took place that started with a redesign of its process for reconditioning used cars and ended with numerous benefits, some of which it didn't expect....
Ask, and Ye Shall Receive
Journalists are experts in managing conversational flow and encouraging people to open up and provide vital information. Their techniques can serve auditors well as they navigate the frustrating quagmire of audit and assessment interviews....
Prepared for Battle
Organizations need to remember that while the impact of a recession may be significant from a psychological perspective, the application of sound quality management principles has a much more significant effect on an organization’s success....
ISO-lating the Problem
When two healthcare organizations were searching for a way to better manage their activities, both turned to ISO 9001:2000 in the hope that the standard could organize their practices and help them improve service to patients....
Total Quality, Total Commitment
An innovative approach to quality helped A.V. Feigenbaum create the concept of total quality management. Indeed, Feigenbaum’s quality contributions have been praised by U.S. business leaders and quality professionals around the globe. Armand V. Feigenbaum...
The True Test of Loyalty
The customer loyalty field has experienced much technological innovation, such as automated reporting portals and integration of attitudinal and behavioral data in customer relationship management applications, over the past decade....
Helping Ease the Transition
Six Sigma and process improvement projects include implementation steps that typically alter workflow and deployment of labor to create a more effective and efficient process. New connections and relationships are established that reinforce new methods....
It All Ties Together
At a time when gas costs have skyrocketed and companies across the board are doing their bit to be greener, a team of individuals from CSX Corp. came together to develop a solution to combat the large amount of fuel wasted while locomotives sat idling....
Strong Foundation, Solid Future
In the wake of the scandals five years ago that shook consumer confidence in business leaders and the economy, I co-wrote an article about the resurgence of social responsibility on the corporate landscape and increased public awareness on the topic....
Back to Basics: An Appreciation for Documentation
Isn’t completing the task more important than completing the paperwork? Why do organizations spend valuable time and resources generating and maintaining paperwork systems?...
Career Corner: Company of One
The authors offer practical tips for career and life management success. Then, I learned job success was based on project success—mastering the cost and quality sides of work. Harry Beckwith and Christine Beckwith, You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself, ...
Standards Outlook: Too Much Talk, Not Enough Auditing
I was attending a local community volunteers meeting when I was approached by a member. He knew I was involved in the standards community, so he told me his company just received its ISO 9001 management system certification....
Career Corner: Use Business Cards Effectively
I'm shocked at the number of people who don't carry a business card. Even more amazing are those who don't even have cards....
Living Inside China's Quality Revolution
Quality processes in China today continue to be influenced by remnants of ancient policies and practices. When Huawei Technologies, one of China’s largest telecommunications manufacturers, recently declared its intention to become the Toyota of the...
Quality Glossary
Five years after it published its first glossary of quality terms, ASQ has revised that glossary with updated definitions and new entries, many from the lean glossary published in 2005. This reference of terms, acronyms, and prominent figures in the...
Career Corner: Behavioral Interviewing--Find Your Star
One of the newer trends in interviewing job candidates is to use behavioral interviewing techniques. When I was first exposed to behavioral interviewing, I was unsure and skeptical....
Statistics Roundtable: Turning Shewhart?s Challenge Into Opportunity
Statisticians must step forward and lead management to become more statistically minded.
Nearly 70 years ago, quality pioneer Walter Shewhart threw down the gauntlet: "The long-range contribution of statistics depends not so much on getting a lot of highly trained statisticians into industry as it does...
Completed Staff Work Revisited
The principle of completed staff work gives your bosses what they need to do their jobs....
Lean Lessons: The Benefits of Kaizen and Kaizen Events
Kaizen is a Japanese word typically translated to "continuous improvement." Originally this word referred to subtle, gradual improvements that are made over time. A baseball analogy is hitting singles all game long to score runs....
Quality in the First Person: From IT to QA
Would you like to change career paths? Many articles entice us with thoughts of finding new jobs that will fulfill all our dreams, but how many experienced professionals actually make the jump?...
The Science in Six Sigma
The structure Six Sigma provides for managing an organization's improvement initiatives is more important than its conformance quality target. It also guides project leaders and offers an array of analysis tools. In addition to Six Sigma's DMAIC...
Apply Six Sigma To Sales and Marketing
A common misconception regarding Six Sigma is that it applies only to manufacturing processes and that its fact-based problem solving methodology doesn't transfer to business processes such as marketing and sales. These people believe that a...
Consultants' Style: Sometimes Less Is More
When medium to small organizations decide to become ISO 9001 or ISO 14001 registered, they often rely heavily on consultants for training, gap analysis, documentation, and management system development. However, because consultants are expensive, these...
Quality in the First Person: Living by the Values
My first exposure to quality was when I was 27. I was working in R&D at Polaroid Corp. While I liked working at Polaroid, I was unhappy with my job, so I started looking for other openings in the company and found a quality control engineer position....
12 Keys to Career Success
As the number of manufacturing jobs continues to decline in the United States, many quality professionals have become concerned about job security and opportunities to attain career success. But like Joseph Juran and W. Edwards Deming before them, each...
Uniform Maker Sews Up Success With Scorecard
Operadora Ganso Azul S.A. de C.V. is an ISO 9001 sewing factory in Mexico facing growing competition for China. In 2000 when the company began operating as a maquiladora producing uniforms for police officers and firefighters, rapid expansion created...
Shifting Quality Into High Gear
Park Place Lexus (PPL), located in the Dallas metropolitan area, is the first automobile dealership to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Determined not to be just another car dealership, PPL leaders looked outside the industry to...
International Outsourcing: Value vs. Economics
International outsourcing has become the easy way out for many organizations seeking to stay competitive in a global economy, whereas establishing a lean Six Sigma organization requires sustained and consistent hard work. Proponents say outsourcing is...
Use SPC for Everyday Work Processes
Despite the advantages of statistical process control (SPC), many organizational implementation efforts have not been successful or self-sustaining. This has nothing to do with the methodology, but is a case of using the right toolbox but the wrong...
Selling Quality Ideas to Management
Many great ideas fall by the wayside because management does not accept them. This may be because the idea must compete with other priorities or the owner doesn't do enough to sell the idea to management. Three effective ways to enhance an idea are to...
Career Corner: How To Become an Internal Consultant
This article is not about how to become an external consultant - it is about enriching your quality job by assuming a role of internal consultant....
Quality in the First Person: Perfectionists Make Bad Machinists
I entered the strange and wonderful world of quality in 1985. Previously, I was a machine operator in an industrial shock absorber factory. I cut chrome plated rod and operated two computer numerical control (CNC) machines....
Your Customers Are Talking, But Are You Listening?
Few companies have a process to listen to their customers and act on the information. Without a method to measure how satisfied customers are, the door is left open to the competition. The listen, collect, analyze, learn, improve (LCALI) process can...
What Are Quality Reputations Worth?
The practical successes of Six Sigma have shown that quality initiatives have a substantial effect on an organization's bottom line. Yet quality professionals may experience difficulty convincing managers to keep up the efforts once a quality objective...
Manage Complaints To Enhance Loyalty
Every customer complaint represents a chance to correct a flawed process, educate a customer, and strengthen loyalty. But unless management can quantify the return on investment of complaint handling, they won't see the link between complaint handling...
After Six Sigma - What's Next?
A systematic scientific approach is fundamental to dealing with problems of variability that cause costly defects and quality problems. This idea has remained the foundation of numerous incarnations of quality management and is the basis of the current...
Statistics Roundtable: Play It Again, Sam
People who know a lot about old movies say Humphrey Bogart, who played Rick Blaine in Casablanca, never really said, "Play it again, Sam" to Dooley Wilson, who played Sam. But the saying continues to stick....
Quality Attitudes
As a Czechoslovakian, I am lucky that my parents sent me to the Prague English Grammar School for 13 years. All subjects were taught by English speaking teachers, and with the exception of Czech class and......
Crosby's 14 Steps to Improvement
In order to be successful, a company quality improvement effort must be well thought out and implemented according to plan over a long period of time. It requires management to stay at it constantly. Philip Crosby's 14-step quality improvement program...
The Write Stuff For Quality
Effective writing is a powerful skill that can add value to your organization. The more you utilize basic language techniques, the easier it will be for your readers to interpret and understand your workplace writing. This article, adapted from...
Six Ways To Benefit From Customer Complaints
Customer service is one of the few areas where service organizations can achieve an advantage in a competitive marketplace. Six ideas are presented to help organizations improve business performance through the handling of customer complaints....
Service + Quality: A Formula for Growth
Have you assessed your career goals and skills in relation to the job market lately?...
Mini-Scule
Forty-three people from diverse industries, with a wide range of credentials and work experiences, were hired to form an internal consulting unit within a large organization. From the outset it was obvious the individuals' egos would be problematic....
Lean Thinking for Knowledge Work
Productivity in the service sector trails manufacturing by a wide margin. Since the early 1990s, the Toyota Production System (TPS) has been heralded as the standard for manufacturing environments, but early attempts to apply it to nonproduction work...
The Next Level in Employee Empowerment
Individual and organizational effectiveness has been handicapped by the manner in which employee empowerment has been practiced in the past. The concept of employee determination takes employee empowerment to the next level by allowing individuals to...
Timeless Wisdom From Crosby
Philip Crosby's book, Quality Is Free, changed the way managers looked at the cost of poor quality. Written 25 years ago, Crosby's management principles are as valid today as ever. Thirteen quotations from the book illustrate Crosby's deep insight into...
How To Handle Rough Spots On Your Resume
When I first met Mike, I could tell he was in the right job. He had been a recruiter for more than 35 years. His enthusiastic, friendly but straightforward approach was perfect for introducing potential employees to potential employers....
Outsourcing Quality
Our company provides outsourced quality services to businesses and federal agencies. How is business? It's booming. There has been a dramatic expansion of outsourced quality services in the last year....
A Roadmap For Change
This excerpt is from the book Juran Institute's Six Sigma Breakthrough and Beyond. The book is available from Quality Press, item P1089. Copyright restrictions do not allow its individual sale or its placement on My ASQ....
Standards: Baselines for Improvement
There are many kinds of standards: ones that apply to a wide variety of products and services, ones that cover a wide range of processes and test methods and even ones that provide guidance or requirements for management systems....
Quality Challenges in Global Companies
Quality management system implementation in multinational corporations is often hindered by factors related to cultural differences among its affiliates. A survey indicates major factors affecting QMS implementation include cultural limitations,...
The Metamorphosis of the Quality Professional
Over the next decade, quality professionals can expect to see their roles increasingly absorbed into project management and other areas. To survive in this environment, quality professionals will have to acquire new competencies....
A Tribute To Phil Stein
ASQ and the metrology community lost a powerful champion and a wonderful friend with the passing of Philip G. Stein....
Quality in the Fast Lane
The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) has developed a streamlined approach to assessing its field offices using Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria as a guide. In the past, field office assessments used either self-assessment or outside...
Column: Career Corner: What's In It for Me?
If you're reading Quality Progress, you are most likely a member of ASQ. If you attend your local section's meetings, you no doubt constantly hear about the need for volunteers to help with the section's activities....
What's in it for me?
If you?re reading Quality Progress, you are most likely a member of ASQ. If you attend your local section?s meetings, you no doubt constantly hear about the need for volunteers to help with the section?s activities....
The Legacy of Ishikawa
Kaoru Ishikawa was a prime mover of quality in Japan who believed in quality through leadership. His six quality concepts form the basis for a holistic approach that is the unique Japanese approach to quality improvement. Ishikawa’s focus on...
Outsourcing and Jobs
Jim (name changed) had been looking for a quality director or manager position with a pharmaceutical company in the Northwest. We'd met at one of my Value Added Auditing workshops, where he'd been upgrading his risk management skills....
Better Teaching with Deming and Bloom
The quality management concepts of W. Edwards Deming can be combined with Benjamin Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy to improve teaching methods. To integrate these concepts, a quality control sheet is developed to monitor improvement, integrate subject...
Can TL 9000 Contribute to Telecom's Turnaround?
Since TL 9000’s inception near the end of the 20th century, managers and executives have harbored significant skepticism toward the quality management standard for the telecommunications industry....
Making Stakeholders a Strategic Asset
Employees and business partners have an important role to play in organizational improvement. Quality models indicate that managing stakeholders to enhance their value generation capability can be a winning strategy....
Put Some SAAS in Your Career
Have you ever wondered why friends, associates or co-workers get ahead faster or move on to other positions? Have you ever assessed your own career?...
Column: Standards Outlook: Strategies for Improving Business Performance
Most organizations face dozens of extraordinary conditions in today's business environment, including aggressive competitive strategies from their opposition, daunting regulatory situations and the pressures of...
Quality, Not Quantity, of Management
This article is from the book The Power of Management Capital: Utilizing the New Drivers of Innovation, Profitability, and Growth in a Demanding Global Economy, available through Quality Press, item number
Column: Frontiers of Quality: The Six Sigma Sweep
Like the Packer Sweep, Six Sigma was not totally original. It was built on the work of others and continues to be enhanced. Six Sigma works because it emphasizes focus, planning, constant practice (every project is a practice session) and dedicated...
The Seven Deadly Sins of Quality Management
Root cause analysis is the structured investigation of basic causal factors leading to quality failure. When the root cause resides in the fundamental values of an organization, eradication can be extremely challenging. Problems ascribed to...
Column: World View: Quality Management And the World's Largest Corporations
Many of today's global corporations are more powerful economically than some countries. Decisions made in offices by board members can influence the course of events worldwide, sometimes to the same extent as decisions made by politicians-but with less...
What I Learned On My Business Trip
Thanks in part to technological advancements and expectations that have been raised in part by companies, customers of all types of services are becoming more demanding. Customers also expect to be cared about as individuals and can harbor deep...
Quality's Six Life Cycle Stages
A tool referred to as “quality life cycle” provides a strategic mechanism to chart and sustain quality while proactively countering shortcomings of its implementation, such as stagnation and limited application, which can ultimately result in failure....
