- Auditing
- Cost of Quality
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Data Quality
- Design of Experiments
- Environmental Manag. and Sustainability
- Innovation
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrics
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Project Management
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Reliability
- Six Sigma
- Social Responsibility
- Software Quality
- Standards
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- AS9000
- Certification/Registration (management system Standards)
- Risk Management
- Food Safety
- Economic Case for Quality
- Strategic Planning
Career Corner: Stake Your Ground
Stakeholder analysis has become standard practice among quality practitioners....
The Power of Prediction
Inconsistent supplier delivery can negatively impact an organization’s ability to serve its customers. Using quality and statistical methods can help predict demand and minimize the impact of supplier inconsistency....
Standards Outlook: The Missing Key
Past perceptions about conformity to ISO 9001 suggest an organization may have a good quality management system, but it can still produce junk. But ISO 9001 does provide reasonable assurance that the output of the system will meet customer needs....
To All Corners of Kenya
Effective supply chains deliver products on schedule and within budget to customers. Those customers shouldn’t have to think about the behind-the-scenes process or worry about whether the goods will be delivered on time....
Expert Answers: June 2013
Auditee refuses nonconformance report ... Customer service quality in the banking industry...
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....
Innovation Imperative: Risk and Development
In my first Innovation Imperative column, I wrote that, in short, innovation is a risky business. In this month’s column, I am going to move beyond identifying the nature of the risks we must address and look at how we manage those risks....
3.4 per Million: Roundabout Estimation
THE IDEAL IN Six Sigma is to directly measure your inputs and outputs. What can a quality practitioner do when that’s not possible or practical?...
Paving the Way
Data and information are at the heart of good investigations and decision making, but are all kinds of data the same? What are the major categories and types of questions to ask to collect and analyze data?...
Career Corner: Build Your Economic Case
Do you realize that one of the greatest means for professional development is attending a quality industry conference? But first, you need to get there....
Back to Basics: Winning Them Over
You’re the new quality manager. You meet the management team and it seems committed to quality and fulfilling regulatory requirements. You’re relieved. Obtaining buy-in is half the battle....
Tool Time
“Does everybody know what time it is? It’s ‘Tool Time’!” On “Home Improvement,” one of the most watched TV sitcoms in the U.S. in the 1990s, Tim and his assistant, Al, demonstrated to their television audience what tools they had and how to use them....
Expert Answers: March 2013
Supplier audits ... Requiring ISO certification...
Before the Fact
The FDA has ratcheted up its surveillance and inspection activities on the suppliers of food and dietary supplements. Growing concern over protection of America’s food chain has been voiced by the FDA’s commissioner of food and drugs....
Know the Why
One of the primary reasons improvement projects fail is a lack of alignment with an organization’s vision, mission, goals and objectives. In an attempt to avoid that issue, a government agency in Guyana deployed a multi-tool method for improvement....
Quality in the First Person: Keeping It Continuous
My journey into quality is a story that I’ve told a few hundred times because it’s become a part of my outreach to customers in beginning the relationship-building process. I am the founder of an accreditation organization for the healthcare industry....
Standards Outlook: Corrective Action Challenge
The purpose of corrective action is to prevent the recurrence of the problem. There are usually many actions that can be taken to address the problem, ranging from incremental changes to innovative solutions....
Why Certify?
These stories are told by people at different stages of their careers. One of the things they have in common, however, is they’ve carefully considered the costs and benefits of ASQ certification....
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....
Out in Front
“The job of management is not supervision, but leadership.” … “The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and to simultaneously bring pride of workmanship to people.”...
Innovation Imperative: Put It on Paper
Last year, the ASQ Quality Management Division’s Innovation and Value Creation Technical Committee conducted its first evaluation of ASQ readiness for innovation certification....
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....
Salary Survey 2012: Facing Tight Times
The more things stay the same, the more quality professionals must look for productive ways to change. For the first time since QP began its annual salary survey, the most important indicator—average salary—has become frustratingly stuck in place....
Career Corner: Trade Your Expertise
Most readers have an idea of what a mentor is. Perhaps you have received counsel or knowledge from an experienced mentor or mentored a person seeking your advice. But there is a lesser-known mentoring relationship—a peer-to-peer relationship....
Salary Survey 2012: Part 1, Section 6: Salary by Number of Work Hours
117,746 105,228 99,432 93,146 80,680 72,965 56,449 0 $ 20,000 $ 40,000 $ 60,000 $ 80,000 $ 100,000 $ 120,000 More than 60 hours ( 1.8%) 56- 60 hours ( 6%) 51- 55 hours ( 10%) 46- 50 hours ( 26%) 41- 45 hours ( 39.9%) 36- 40 hours ( 15.2%) 35 or fewer hou...
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....
Back to Basics: To DMAIC or Not to DMAIC?
Define, measure, analyze, improve and control is a structured problem-solving method. Each phase builds on the previous one, with the goal of implementing long-term solutions to problems. Most problem-solving efforts benefit from a disciplined method....
Volviendo a los Fundamentos: ¿DMAMC o no DMAMC?
Definir, medir, analizar, mejorar y controlar (DMAMC) es un método estructurado de resolución de problemas. Cada fase de DMAMC se basa en la fase anterior, y el objetivo es implementar soluciones a largo plazo a los problemas....
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....
Shift Into High Gear
When customers of tgestiona began expressing dissatisfaction about the its inefficient service and delivery processes, it began a transport optimization project that earned gold-level status in the 2012 ASQ International Team Excellence Award process....
Lasting Impression
A recent paper found that quality initiatives have made significant contributions to three primary indicators of economic well-being: gross domestic product, corporate tax revenues and employment....
Healthy Returns
The future of any enterprise depends on the quality of its customer service. All organizations—even those manufacturing products—are service organizations because all create value for customers by performing services....
A Service Framework
To help service quality professionals negotiate the unique challenges they encounter, the ASQ Service Quality Division envisaged the Service Quality Body of Knowledge as an umbrella framework....
Making Contact
For an organization to be able to truly understand how well it’s meeting customer expectations, more concrete, measureable metrics must be used....
Hearing Aids
Today, hundreds of organizations regularly conduct surveys and focus groups, solicit comments and complaints, scour social media and gather data from other sources....
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....
Expert Answers: October 2012
Finding the right role ... Audit mismatches ... Accuracy in calibration...
(Re)visionary Thinking
The preeminent ISO standard on environmental management, ISO 14001, is being revised to incorporate new approaches in the field of environmental management systems and meet stakeholder expectations that have evolved since it was first published in 1996....
Pick Your Spots
In the rush to achieve results, lean Six Sigma programs can get derailed because projects are pushed through the organization, leading to the selection of the wrong projects and suboptimizing the entire enterprise’s goals....
Pointed in the Right Direction
Last November, ISO published a new edition of ISO 19011—Guidelines for Auditing Management Systems. This marks a further evolution in management system auditing and in ISO’s approach to the drafting of management system standards....
Standards Outlook: On the Lookout
Audit program managers have always dealt with risk in some manner. They’ve analyzed and evaluated risk, as well as monitored and reported it. Now, all of those activities are becoming a formal part of an audit program manager’s duties....
Back to Basics: Good to Great
Quality systems audits provide a great opportunity for an organization to reinforce its strengths and minimize its weaknesses. Throughout the process, auditors play the major role in maximizing the value of the audit....
Career Corner: Light Your Fire
It takes the right team members to create an enabled, empowered, motivated, cross functional, self-directed team capable of selecting the most important tasks, and then efficiently and effectively solving the most critical problems....
Innovation Imperative: A Question of Balance
Many people say that mentioning standards and innovation in the same breath is a contradiction in terms. Evidence from the real world says otherwise....
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....
In the Trenches
Deploying a quality change program is something every organization needs to do sooner or later, whether it involves lean, Six Sigma, the Baldrige criteria, kaizen or any other improvement effort. But managing a change program is a double-edged sword....
Change Ability
Building on the creative spirit of each individual joined with others is at the heart of transforming organizations so they don’t just weather forces of change, but also capitalize on the immense energy inherent in the surge....
Blaze Your Own Trail
We used to put our careers into the hands of our organizations. If we worked diligently enough, they might reward our efforts with a series of promotions. This template for career advancement was a clean 45-degree line....
Learning to Fish
The career excellence diagram, a modified version of the fishbone diagram, can be used to create desired results in career development by identifying causes that will ultimately lead to success....
Quality in the First Person: No Such Thing as Altruism?
It was an argument that got people out of their chairs and yelling, a verbal war that pitted students’ basic moral principles against one another. The professor set the class up for this. At issue was the assertion that there’s no such thing as altruism....
Expert Answers: June 2012
Continuous vs. discrete data ... Get IT under control ... You must measure ......
In the Spotlight
Based on what we know about the skills needed for innovation management, what quality management functions, responsibilities and skills can be applied to manage innovation?...
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....
Perspectives: Relying on the Basics
It’s difficult to improve a process that isn’t running. Equipment reliability from a manufacturing equipment perspective is typically the purview of maintenance teams and may include watch-over by the engineering team....
One Good Idea: Designing for Accuracy
For this column, I used regression analysis and design of experiments (DoE) to create a model for predicting production rates in a paper stock cutting facility....
Career Corner: Waiting for the Phone to Ring?
Whether you're employed or unemployed, if you are waiting for the phone to ring or for an email to arrive inviting you to explore a new job opportunity, you are awaiting a miracle. And we all know how often a miracle occurs....
Make the Leap
Kaizen events, also called kaizen blitzes or workshops, are intensive drives by dedicated teams of workers to fix broken processes or design new ones. They are arguably the best change vehicles in the organizational change fleet....
Standards Outlook: What's Old Is New Again
The time appears to have finally come to start another major revision of ISO 9001. But before moving forward, it’s a good idea to look back at where we’ve been....
One Size Fits All
There’s a reason why simple tools endure: They work, regardless of the situation. That’s a characteristic shared by the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence....
Beyond the Basics
A movie sequel often can be as, if not more, captivating than the original. Essentially, a sequel builds on the original, continuing a journey with familiar characters and settings, developing ideas and unveiling more insight....
Career Corner: Should You Blow the Whistle?
Becoming a whistle-blower is no easy choice, even for quality professionals knowledgeable of organizational behavior and accustomed to audit processes with clear guidelines for nonconformance and corrective action....
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....
Rethinking Design
Design thinking offers several tools and concepts that can complement problem-solving approaches normally taught and used by quality professionals....
Email Matters
It is commonly accepted that 80% of data within an organization is unstructured. Emails are considered a part of the definition of unstructured data. But with the right processes, it is possible to get email under control....
Innovation Imperative: Unplugged
Many people think technology drives innovation. In fact, the opposite is true....
Quality Curriculum
Does quality exist as an entity independent of business? Are the business of quality and the quality of business simply two sides of the same coin? No matter—the quality discipline has become inextricably woven into business....
3.4 per Million: Know What You Want
Having learned Six Sigma in the 1980s now creates an interesting box to live in today. Six Sigma was a strategy to achieve the corporate vision of total customer satisfaction....
Career Corner: Keep Your Toolbox Full
Be aware of all the tools at your disposal to excel at your job. Your career as a quality professional depends on your ability to recall a specific quality tool and apply it when necessary....
Online (Taylor)
Insights from developing a quality management and continuous improvement curriculum can be applied in an operations management context to teach quality principles to general management....
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....
Practice Makes Perfect
Significant problems can occur during full-scale production when new manufacturing processes are poorly conceived. Therefore, it is incumbent on R&D organizations to employ effective procedures that ensure sound manufacturing process development....
Statistics Roundtable: Gage R&R Reminders
Major characteristic specification limits of a popular brand were 3% and 4%. Product with lower than 3% lacked consumer appeal, and product with greater than 4% had reduced shelf life....
Online Conklin: The Road More Traveled
After being part of a great team that implemented process management at Plant Able in the XYZ division of Heavymet, I took the show on the road to our sister facility Plant Baker....
Quality in the First Person: Quality at Its Core
After leaving the manufacturing sector for 12 years and then returning, I found quality was still what drew me to the industry. Quality has carried me through my professional life, as well as my personal life, in ways I never realized were possible....
Standards Outlook: Know Your Future
The future is a subject of great interest to quality practitioners. So let’s look for initiatives that may be right around the corner. Armed with the right information, you should be able to get a head start on the competition....
3.4 per Million: The Way to Fail
Several months ago, I received a call from a lean Six Sigma leader from a large multinational organization who was concerned because his organization was having great difficulty completing projects....
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....
How Do You Compare?
Organizations often are unable to leverage benchmarking as a process to deliver excellence in business performance. This could be due to a lack of understanding of benchmarking as a process or lack of clarity on where it could add business value....
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....
40 New Voices of Quality
When QP set out to find the individuals who will give a voice to the new generation of quality professionals, one of the hopes was that the group’s makeup would lend insight into what the future holds....
Expert Answers: October 2011
A QMS checklist ... Selecting a Six Sigma project ......
Career Corner: Planning Ahead
When TQM became a strategic imperative for competitive advantage, celebrity CEOs became cheerleaders, quality maturity was measured by more vice presidents for quality, and academics traced quality’s history from inspection to customer-focused strategy....
Online Figures One Good Idea
Planning Execution Hierarchy Aim Quality manual Procedures Work instructions Forms Records Quality management system documentation pyramid / Online Figure 1 Transforming the document pyramid / Online Figure 2 Aim Quality manual Procedures Work instructio...
Online Tables Standards Outlook
Developed the following business process measures: 4 � documented results of management review meetings 5 � Customer satisfaction measures 5 � Measurable objectives used in product or service improvement 1 � balanced scorecard ( please indicate measures ...
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....
Standards Outlook: How Will You Manage
While the required skill sets of quality and regulatory professionals constantly change, and capability upgrades must be ongoing to ensure success, it was hard to predict that branching out into project management would be the next hurdle....
Ford's Focus
“Triple bottom line” refers to the measurement of a business’s impact on people, planet and profits. These metrics may seem aggressive, but Henry Ford proved their intelligent interpretation and application makes them synergistic and mutually supporting....
Career Corner: Wowing the Boss
No matter the organization, type of job or department size—everyone has a boss. Even if you have your own company, there's always someone to whom you are responsible and to whom you report. CEOs and board chairmen all report to their boards of directors....
The Right Stuff
The reality for many leaders is they are engaged in making decisions that affect everyone in the organization, but most of them have little evidence of whether decisions are being implemented as intended....
A Change in Focus
It is ironic that the life-sciences industry’s approach to quality management systems has been lagging rather than leading due to a fundamental focus on compliance with regulation versus a holistic process for improving quality....
Pushback Prevention
“Our quality program doesn’t seem to be working.” This statement, or a similar one, is frequently repeated by executives and managers who believe quality-focused projects are not meeting expectations. Such perceptions are often reinforced by published...
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....
Standards Outlook: Hand in Hand
Beginning July 1, all aviation, space and defense (AS&D) quality management system (QMS) certification body audits were required to be conducted according to a newly released AS&D QMS standard....
Reversing Course?
THE OUTSOURCING OF FUNCTIONS once performed by organizations’ internal departments has been increasing in quantity and scope....
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....
Perspectives: Wake Up and Smell the Cookies
MY RECENT TRANSITION from the automotive sector to a company in the food industry held some unusual surprises: • The overall equipment effectiveness, capabilities and yields were shockingly low in the food industry....
The First Step
In his penetrating and perturbing 2009 New Yorker article, Atul Gawande explored the huge cost differential between care in McAllen, TX, and care at other spots in the country with similar demographics and medical sophistication. His conclusion was that...
