- Cost of Quality
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Data Quality
- Design of Experiments
- Environmental Manag. and Sustainability
- Global Quality
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- ISO 9000
- Laboratory
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrics
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Project Management
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Safety
- Six Sigma
- Social Responsibility
- Software Quality
- Standards
- Statistical Process Control (SPC)
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Total Quality Management
- Certification/Registration (management system Standards)
- Risk Management
- Software and Technology (for statistics, measurement, analysis)
- Information Management
- Customer Experience Management
- Food Safety
- Awards
- Strategic Planning
Career Corner: Stake Your Ground
Stakeholder analysis has become standard practice among quality practitioners....
What Makes You Tick?
Uncoordinated internal operations create organizational inefficiencies, a lower level of customer service and unnecessary delays in management decisions, resulting in increased costs....
Avoiding an Avalanche
Organizations that make products with rigorous quality requirements face numerous challenges associated with meeting objectives—ranging from complying with standards to operating in highly-regulated and frequently audited environments....
Balancing Act
With common quality methods and standards in place, manufacturing organizations share a daunting challenge: an increased volume of electronic and paper-based data collected during process development and manufacturing....
Statistics Roundtable: One Size Does Not Fit All
The need to improve is ever present in all endeavors and will continue to be so. We live in a dynamic world. As predicted in the second law of thermodynamic and entropy, the world will continue to change....
Measure for Measure: Verifying the Art
Measurement may be considered a science and an art. It is a science in that it is based upon the laws of physics and math. Some consider it an art because elements of human judgment are needed to translate measurement from abstract to real application....
Innovation Imperative: Seize the Opportunity
I bought a copy of the Scientific American and skimmed through the articles during my flight until I came to Michael Webber’s, “How to Make the Food System More Energy Efficient.” He had my attention....
Apples to Oranges?
Consumers around the world demand safe food. Through the years, retailers and food companies have pushed their suppliers to have food safety systems and improve on them. The drive started with suppliers being required to have third-party good GMP audits....
Back to Basics: Minimizing Chaos
Much has been written about document control and management. But applying these basic principles can help transform a nightmare into a well-managed system....
In the Crosshairs
In 2005, Fairbanks Morse Engine discovered that work content analysis can help clearly define product families and can align improvement activities in a leveraged execution....
Rain Gauge
The Six Sigma define, measure, analyze, design and verify process is appropriate for exceedingly complex engineering construction problems that require the use of simulation and design of experiments....
Standards Outlook: Get in Front of the Problem
Considering the unfortunate fact that product recalls and their disastrous results seem relatively common, it’s curious why so many organizations resist formal efforts to address preventive action....
Standards Outlook: From the Trenches
ISO 9001 and the COSO internal control guidance document used by financial organizations that must comply with the requirements of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act don’t have a lot in common, but one thing they share is the need to update the current version....
Measure for Measure: First Step Toward Disaster
Users who take it upon themselves to forego calibration without adequately evaluating the impact of their decision within a specific measurement application increase the likelihood of making a bad measurement-based decision....
Law and Order
The laws created and enforced by government are among the most important works of humankind. They address the most significant societal problems and have a direct impact on human rights, living standards and the quality of life of every person....
Perspectives: Added Structure
Global good manufacturing practices (GMP) and regulatory guidelines ensure the “safety, identity, strength, quality (and) purity of drug(s).” Manufacturing and quality control testing of approved drugs fall under these GMP regulations....
Career Corner: Risky Reputation
Formerly the work of marketers, an organization's image and reputation are integral to quality and risk-based management systems. They are everyone's business in sustaining corporate integrity, and they deserve the attention of quality professionals....
Clever Combination
As software use increases in safety-critical applications, we must implement quality improvement tools and techniques to identify software failures before they have a critical effect on the completed system or a fatal effect on the end user....
Rethinking Treatment
Changing and improving complex processes in healthcare settings are no easy tasks. They require a systems approach using a variety of quality improvement methods and tools....
Up and Away
Do you want to quickly test your creativity? Take a sheet of paper and draw a big circle on it. Draw a dot on the paper. This exercise is part of a test given to children entering kindergarten to find out their baseline levels of creativity....
Tangled Mess
Many of the world's factories are designed in ways detrimental or unhealthy to product quality. The typically complex and lengthy flow times multiply process variables, which can obscure and delay the discovery of defects and nonconformities....
Standards Outlook: Revised Thinking
COSO developed the internal control integrated framework in 1992 in response to the savings and loan scandals of the 1980s. COSO is now 20 years old and is due for an upgrade to incorporate changes in the financial environment....
The Power of Positive
In his 2006 book, The World is Flat, Thomas Freidman cites the many challenges globalization puts on corporate life: changing political realities, social entrepreneurship and the effects of the internet....
Perspectives: Taken for Granted
The ISO 9000 series is Quality 101, and as quality practitioners, we should never forget it....
Fail-Safe FMEA
The appropriate use of quality risk management can help organizations comply with regulatory requirements, such as good manufacturing practices or good laboratory practices....
Standards Outlook: Clearly Defined
It seems that everyone knows the difference between a system and a process. We know processes and systems are related, but most of us aren’t sure when one begins and the other ends....
Salary Survey 2011: Part 1, Section 17: Salary by Highest Level of Education and Yrs in Quality Fld
Salary by highest level of education and years in the quality field for U. S. respondents / FIGUre 1 Salary by highest level of education and years in the quality field for Canadian respondents / FIGUre 2 53,217 62,871 72,863 55,990 70,437 74,583 74,238 ...
Career Corner: Add Risk to Your Job Title
Add risk to your job title if you’re a quality professional or a senior quality manager. This will enhance your marketability if you’re looking for a job and your chances for promotion if you’re employed....
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....
Site Seeing
Assessing exposure to risk events and initiating proactive risk mitigation actions must be a priority of organizations worldwide. Fortunately, there’s a conceptual and methodical approach to conducting a risk-based quality audit....
Healthy Skepticism
It’s important not to underestimate the intense, personal nature of change as each employee in the healthcare industry transitions from the familiar paper-driven world to an entirely electronic one....
HU Goes There
After you've identified the root cause of a problem, what tool do you use to fix it? Enter a problem-correcting tool called the harmful/useful (HU) diagram....
Quality in the First Person: Quality Helps Kick Cancer
As a quality professional, I can’t help but look for ways to use quality tools in anything from correction to prevention, from work to everyday life. I have two examples of how quality tools and processes can help people overcome life-changing challenges....
Certification at Work
Organizations face difficult decisions every day: where to invest, how to focus employees and how to drive a competitive advantage in their markets. A decision to launch employee training cannot be taken lightly....
Expert Answers: August 2011
Connecting SOPs and IT ... quality assurance vs. quality control ... looking for remote audits....
Risky Business
In highly regulated industries that manufacture pharmaceuticals, foods and cosmetics, quality control scientists have been known to perform sampling and testing to determine the acceptability of finished products. Throughout the last decade,...
Get in Touch With Your Emotions
Emotional intelligence is one of the key traits shared by organizations that succeed in a dynamic world characterized by innovative technology, a diversified workforce, easy access to information and economic globalization....
Walking the Talk
Frequent service interruptions led Argentina-based Telefónica Group to establish a project that increased the reliability of its network and, in the process, garner gold honors at the 2010 ASQ International Team Excellence Award competition....
Not Your Normal SOP
To ensure business activities are performed correctly and consistently, it is vital to be compliant to numerous quality, safety and regulatory requirements. One way to do so is to understand and develop thorough procedures—and then follow them....
Standards Outlook: Taking Control
Organizations need controls to ensure objectives are achieved. It’s management’s job to establish, implement and monitor controls, and the auditor’s job to determine whether they are adequate....
Are You A Good Problem Solver?
If you are like most people, you probably think you are a pretty good problem solver and have a good overall understanding of problem-solving practices. Yet, because you are reading this article, you also understand the value of continuous learning to...
Measure for Measure: Military-Grade Advice
In 1990, the new chief of the U.S. Air Force's laboratory certification office offered a few words of advice to the managers of the USAF calibration laboratories on how to set themselves up for success—advice still applicable today....
Standards Outlook: Spring Into Action
In a lot of organizations, quality is relegated to the status of a long-forgotten initiative the organization “finished.” In these cases, what should a quality professional do?...
The Way to Engage
To be successful in today’s competitive global economy, more and more companies rely on suppliers and expect them to be on top in the areas of quality, cost and delivery....
Career Corner: The Missing Links
The Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence presents an ideal pattern of values to which quality professionals can aspire. Tracking its development throughout close to a quarter century reveals shifts in the quality community’s thinking...
Expert Answers: April 2011
Size matters when remedying poor quality ... Examining process capability indexes....
If You Build It, They Will Come
After decades of rising healthcare costs and individual stakeholder initiatives to cut expenses, annual medical cost trends continue to outpace all other employer economic indicators. The current economic crisis and federal healthcare reform discussions...
Loud and Clear
An company's use of metrics to drive and measure success can help it maintain a leadership position in its industry. A commitment to applying performance management tools has increased efficiencies, reduced cost and improved customer satisfaction scores....
Statistics Roundtable: Further Explanation
The purpose of a roundtable is to facilitate discussion. Here, we want to facilitate discussion on statistical engineering....
3.4 per Million: Firefighting With DMAIC
As quality professionals, we like to solve problems by finding root causes and putting fixes in place. As a rule, we don’t like to fight fires, but sometimes we have to....
Career Corner: Curbing Career Fears
Books on careers usually contain some advice on strategic thinking. They counsel getting the big picture, sometimes by applying the tools and techniques of business planning. This can be done, for example, by conducting a strengths, weaknesses...
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....
Taking the Reins
To stay in front of the competition, successful organizations know they can never stand still. There are always ways to innovate and improve the way they do business....
Expert Answers: July 2010
The "quality police" perception ... cutting down data-entry errors....
Bull's-eye
All companies want to build a stronger brand by ensuring customer satisfaction. Along the way, of course, the companies want to make a profit....
Waste Management
With the assistance of statistical process control and other quality methods, Fluor Hanford helped ensure all tasks were carried out safely during what has been called the world’s largest environmental cleanup project....
Discussion Warranted
Warranties are important attributes of most business transactions. Their comprehensive impact on a company’s bottom line, however, is not always clearly understood—even by the people who deal with product quality and reliability on an everyday basis....
Quality 3.0
Two quality leaders weigh in on the current direction of quality management, sustainable quality improvements and their visions of what “Quality 3.0” will bring....
Safe Landing
Paramount to improving customer service is better understanding what the customer deems to be important and implementing the changes. To meet that challenge, JetBlue Airways used text analytics software....
Standards Outlook: Trust, but Verify
Grouping product, service and process audits together is somewhat natural, because a process audit may include a product or service audit. I’ve dubbed the combination a verification audit....
What's on the Horizon
As an industry evolves, so, too, do the standards and regulations that govern it. The aviation industry has seen several changes made recently, and more are on the way....
The Right Move
Shortcomings in both measurement systems and traditional methods for assessing customer satisfaction affect the ability of most firms to directly link quality improvements to changes in financial performance....
Standards Outlook: Revised AS&D Standards Take Flight
The International Aerospace Quality Group has released the IAQG 9100:2009 aviation, space and defense standards in all three of its sectors....
The Right Mix
Six Sigma offers a framework for process improvement based on objective data. W. Edwards Deming once said, “In God we trust: All others bring data.” For many Six Sigma practitioners, that’s become their undying motto....
Keep on Truckin’
In July 2005, a transportation representative at Bayer MaterialScience identified a potential problem with the way the company chose its shipping carriers. Bayer, a global manufacturer of polymers used as raw materials for products such as compact...
3.4 per Million: Smart Talk
When you examine the success of Six Sigma at Motorola, one characteristic that is frequently listed as a critical success factor is the common language it created. That attribute meanders its way into all types of Six Sigma conversations....
Practice What You Teach
Many education institutions do not have a foundation conducive to sustainability efforts. For many, change will be cumbersome. Opportunities exist, however, and persistence will be an ally....
A DMAIC Makeover
Define, measure, Analyze, improve and control (DMAIC) is the common roadmap for Six Sigma projects. But there are potential weaknesses in this roadmap that could be addressed with a simple, proven adjustment to DMAIC....
Standards Outlook: Conducting a Document Review
Some industry sectors require documentation that has word-for-word traceability between the MS documentation and audit criteria. For internal audits, document reviews can be part of a routine audit of an area, rather than a separate document review. Docum...
What's Up?
Study participants outlined the forces, four scenarios in which they might play out, and the implications to quality, organizations and the profession. Study participants were asked to envision the implications of the key forces and scenarios for quality ...
Online Sidebars Sanders
Increasing movement from quality of product to quality of management and the organization. The systems approaches the quality profession has evolved through ISO 9000 and other management system standards will be valued by organizations looking to bring qu...
Futures Study
Forces of Change From All ASQ Futures Studies Table 1 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008 Changing values Partnering Quality must deliver bottom- line results Globalization Globalization Globalization Learning systems Management systems will increasingly absorb the...
Starting From Scratch
Graduate students studying quality developed the Quality Systems Development Roadmap to help organizations do this, using application templates from the Lean Six Sigma Quality Transformation Toolkit. However, new companies, organizations without an enterp...
Newer Better Faster
The Small Business Administration has indicated that the majority of innovations are consistent with the continuous improvement commonly used in the define, measure, analyze, improve and control (DMAIC) Six Sigma method....
In the Know
More and more organizations are choosing outsourcing as a necessary means of remaining competitive in the global economy. Quality professionals must consider building a body of knowledge completely dedicated to the subject of quality in outsourcing....
3.4 per Million: After the Low-Hanging Fruit
There are four major approaches for organization-wide improvement efforts that fall under the label “lean Six Sigma,” as evidenced by current practices at many industrial organizations, service organizations and consulting firms....
The Road to Improvement
Registration of public organizations to the ISO 9001 quality management standard can be difficult because of their complex operations and extensive documentation....
From the President: Quality and the Three Conversations
For generations of authors, that intimidating D-word—deadline—makes even the bravest among us cringe. So when QP’s editor reminded me at a recent board meeting that the due date of this column, my first as ASQ president, was quickly approaching...
The Remedy for a Data Dilemma
In 1994, Bellin Health volunteered for a pilot assessment managed jointly by the Baldrige National Quality Program and the Joint Commission. This assessment helped Bellin focus on developing an integrated measurement system....
Expert Answers: March 2008
Outlook on outsourcing ... When does Six Sigma suffice?...
Conflict and Complexity
Fourteen years before the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch in 1986, NASA unknowingly set in motion a series of events that culminated in the tragic disaster that stunned the proud space agency and rocked a nation....
Standards Outlook: Product vs. System Quality
We live in an era in which complex and technologically advanced products are produced on a regular basis. Little concern is given to the engineering and advanced process capabilities that are required to produce them....
Navigate Your Career Path With QP’s Annual Salary Survey
45 Section 6 Salary by Number of Work Hours Online Section 7 Salary by Nonexempt vs. Exempt Status Online Section 8 Salary by Number of Years of Quality Experience and Highest Level of Education Online Section 9 Salary by Number of Years in Current Posit...
Salary Survey-Regular Employee and Self-Employed Consultants Results
45 Section 6 Salary by Number of Work Hours Online Section 7 Salary by Nonexempt vs. Exempt Status Online Section 8 Salary by Number of Years of Quality Experience and Highest Level of Education Online Section 9 Salary by Number of Years in Current Posit...
Eight Steps to Sustain Change
Improvement projects often focus on a problem, its measurement, analysis, and eventual solution, but fail to consider how improvements will be permanently integrated into the daily routine. Resistance is a natural response to change, but it can be...
Lean Lessons: In the Office: Where Lean and Six Sigma Converge
When focused on the reduction in process variability, Lean Six Sigma efforts can improve the predictability of the office environment and improve the flow of information....
Deployment: Start Off on the Right Foot
Deploying lean Six Sigma can produce fantastic results that are worth all the hard work of deployment. Managing change, securing leadership commitment, managing talent, and getting the right accountability will make the difference between a...
Using FMEA to Assess Outsourcing Risk
Although outsourcing is a growing trend among U.S. businesses, there are risks involved and not everyone benefits from such arrangements. The advantages of outsourcing must be weighed against risks and go beyond cost savings. Without a systematic...
Nanotechnology: A Big Little Frontier for Quality
Nanotechnology is a field of applied science that deals with arranging particles...
3.4 Per Million: How to Identify and Select Lean Six Sigma Projects
Lean Six Sigma is a powerful method for improving existing products, processes and services. Six Sigma was developed by Motorola in 1987. Motorola’s Six Sigma yielded significant financial results...
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...
10 Quality Basics
In an overview designed to give quality newcomers a glimpse of the knowledge they need to succeed, ten regular Quality Progress contributors write on 10 basic quality topics that are fundamentals essential to surviving in a quality role. Topics covered...
Standards Outlook: Preparing and Structuring an Audit Report
Preparing a quality management system (QMS) or environmental management system (EMS) audit report can be a hurried, punch list--a list of minor things to be completed at the end of a project....
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...
Quality Focus Good for Business
Premier Inc., a San Diego-based healthcare alliance, is a 2006 recipient of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) in the service category. The firm credits employee involvement, experience gained while earning a state quality award, and...
One Good Idea: 60 Minutes To A Solution
We’ve all been in those meetings. You know the type: Everyone knows what the problem is. Lots of ideas are chewed on and spit out. The group shares anecdotal experiences about the problem, but nobody records anything....
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?...
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...
How to Fail the ISO 9001 Driver's Test
An ISO 9001 audit can be likened to the process of getting a driver's license when you think of the auditor as a department of motor vehicles tester who must examine your vehicle and its key operators before granting certification. ISO 9001 requires...
Lean Lessons: Attacking Lean Wastes
One of lean's core concepts is that inventory is not an asset but a cost and waste. For many firms, the most important lean wastes are the muda of overproduction and excess inventory....
