- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Design of Experiments
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- Inspection
- ISO 9000
- Laboratory
- Lean
- Metrics
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Management
- Project Management
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Six Sigma
- Social Responsibility
- Standards
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Risk Management
- Customer Experience Management
- Food Safety
- Economic Case for Quality
Back to Basics: Light Bulb Moment
NEWLY CERTIFIED Six Sigma Black Belts often struggle with understanding how the various quality tools work together. It took me a few projects before I began to see linkage. As I teach and mentor new Belts, I use an analogy that hits close to home....
Career Corner: Stake Your Ground
Stakeholder analysis has become standard practice among quality practitioners....
Parts of the Process
Repeatability and reproducibility studies are based on the concept of variance components estimation. This is a remarkable achievement of statistical science because people usually think in terms of means and trends, not variation around a mean....
Quality in the First Person: It's a Process
I have been a Type 2 diabetic for 40 years—about as long as I’ve been in the quality field. Currently, there is no cure for diabetes. But it can be managed....
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....
Expert Answers: June 2013
Auditee refuses nonconformance report ... Customer service quality in the banking industry...
Mood Righting
U.S. organizations face monumental challenges as a global economy has emerged. Arguably, the global economy is driving competitive forces to levels unimaginable only a few decades ago....
One Good Idea: Act the Fool
Almost every workplace has a few heyokas and they are vital to the organization’s survival....
Expert Answers: May 2013
Lean case studies from IT organizations...
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....
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?...
Heart of the Matter
The goal of most processes in the manufacturing and service industries is to produce products or services that exhibit little to no variation. Variation is defined as “where no two items or services are exactly the same.”...
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....
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....
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....
Career Corner: Out of Hiding
While I was the senior statistician for a manufacturing division of a major aerospace firm, I shared the concept of the hidden factory with a statistical quality control (SQC) training class composed entirely of senior and middle management....
The Right Ingredients
In Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming writes, “Everyone doing his best is not the answer. It is first necessary that people know what to do.” To ensure people know exactly what to do, all activities within the organization should be system oriented....
Don't Lose Patients
Clinch Valley Medical Center—a for-profit, 175-bed hospital operating in western Virginia and part of a healthcare organization with operations in 18 states—has been undertaking lean Six Sigma initiatives for approximately three years....
Career Corner: Who's Responsible?
One factor not often discussed in career development is career level of the individual. A 20-something-year-old manager often has different goals and career satisfaction levels than a 40-something-year-old manager....
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....
The Right Blend
Faced with cost reductions and scheduling changes, a chemotherapy mixing room (CMR) implemented the define, measure, analyze, improve and control method and lean tools to optimize operations....
Lessons in Labeling
What kind of care would you want for a loved one fighting cancer? This is the question the experts at Cancer Treatment Centers of America ask themselves every day and motivates employees to create a culture where continuous improvement becomes a habit....
3.4 per Million: Box Paradox
Without any data to support this, I’m willing to wager that anyone who has been employed in a manufacturing or transactional environment for five years has either been directed to or heard someone direct others to “think outside the box.”...
Expert Answers: February 2013
Root cause analysis...
Online Figures - Ramsay
Year Verct( dys) # Rpts FinRpts InvTech #_ Staff 2003 296 31 13 1.00 216 2004 829 24 11 2.24 190 2005 309 22 12 1.65 210 2006 222 22 9 2.35 225 2007 171 17 5 3.58 247 Verct( dys) = verification of claims cycle time # rpts = number of reports for the boar...
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....
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....
One Good Idea: Ultimate Originality
When developing products for a new market, innovative ideas are essential. A tool that can be used to spark innovative new product ideas is the ideate, define, design and validate (IDDV) method....
Quality in the First Person: Failure of Inspection
Inspection often occurs at the end of the production line. As a result, the information gained from identifying problem pieces comes too late to make adjustments in the process, let alone isolate places in the process that are causing the problem....
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....
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....
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....
Expert Answers: January 2013
Six Sigma staffing ... Calibration vs. verification ......
3.4 per Million: No Specification? No Problem
In a column earlier this year I referenced a nine-step approach for determining an organization’s long-lasting operational metrics and how to decide where to focus improvement efforts so the entire enterprise benefits....
Salary Survey 2012: Crunching the Numbers
The 2012 survey was sent to 54,337 members. Of the 6,857 individuals who started the survey, 6,857 completed the questionnaire for a response rate of 11.2%....
Quality in the First Person: Who Is the Customer?
The Christmas season is a good time to study processes because shopping provides a prime example. During this time, men tend to revert to a “hunter-gatherer” state, while women are diligently searching for the optimum gift....
Back to Basics: Breaking It Down
A3 thinking is based on the plan-do-check-act cycle. This powerful way of thinking is transcribed on a piece of paper (the A3 report) a team of employees can use to produce a desired outcome for a proposed process....
Salary Survey 2012: Part 1, Section 5: Salary by Six Sigma Training
S. employees, Canadian employees, international employees Salary by highest level of Six Sigma training for Canadian respondents / Figure 3 115,929 170,000 133,600 91,538 89,811 79,511 84,000 87,750 103,314 92,094 84,608 77,523 65,000 94,000 105,062 84,8...
Volviendo a los Fundamentos: Lo Descomponemos
El pensamiento A3 está basado en el método de planificar-hacer-verificar-actuar. Esta potente forma de pensamiento se transcribe en un pedazo de papel que un equipo de empleados puede usar para producir un resultado deseado para un proceso propuesto....
Salary Survey 2012: Part 1, Section 4: Salary by ASQ and RABQSA International Certification
Percentage of respondents holding aSQ certifications / Table 1 2012 2010 2008 Certified quality auditor 22.9% 24.1% 24.2% Certified quality engineer 20.4 23.7 21.6 Certified manager of quality/ organizational excellence 12.6 13.7 12.6 Certified Six Sigma...
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...
Salary Survey 2012: Part 1, Section 14: Salary by Organizational Quality Infrastructure
Salary by quality department membership for U. S. respondents / Table 3 Part of a quality department Not part of a quality department Percentage Average salary Percentage Average salary All respondents 80.7% $ 84,445 19.3% $ 96,346 analyst 63 64,330 37 7...
Salary Survey 2012: Part 1, Section 18: Salary by RABQSA International Certification
Part 1. Regular Employee Results Section 18. Salary by RABQSA International Certification Details on RABQSA Certifications Salary by RABQSA certifications for U. S. respondents / Table 1 Aged care professional APIQ auditor AS9100 aerospace experience aud...
Salary Survey 2012: Part 2, Section 23: Base Earnings by Education and Training
1 28,000 28,000 Certified manager of quality/ organizational excellence 20,000 275,000 86,193 9 112,391 100,000 Certified quality auditor 12,000 180,000 56,553 17 87,066 96,521 Certified quality engineer 12,000 214,245 71,048 10 96,625 82,500 Certified q...
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....
Quality in the First Person: Pursuing Excellence
This is the story of my journey from lackadaisical and passive performance to data-driven dominance during my collegiate football career as a punter....
One Good Idea: Keep Moving
Many decision makers do not properly distinguish uncertainty from risk. When this occurs, there’s a tendency to spend too much time studying the problem, leading to a phenomenon often called “analysis paralysis.”...
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....
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....
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....
Back to Basics: Team Effort
By paying attention to these six critical success factors, process management teams can deliver value and earn a position of influence in any organization’s performance management and improvement efforts....
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....
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....
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....
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....
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....
One Good Idea: Finding the Gaps
The gaps model of quality can help an organization take a big-picture look at its processes. There are five potential quality gaps, which are be described in this article using examples from a passenger airline service....
Back to Basics: The Big Picture
Business competition is an unending race with multifaceted measurements of success. One success factor is productivity: the ratio of value added—such as service rendered or products produced—versus the associated cost....
Quality in the First Person: Know No Bounds
For me, the common denominator in optimal job satisfaction and employment progression nearly always relates to an organization’s people focus—or lack thereof. I began to develop a strategic plan that would prepare me for a major transition....
Expert Answers: August 2012
Innovation issues ... SPC vs. SQC ......
Career Corner: Mapping the Future
As quality professionals, one technique we are all taught is change management. But how we learn to embrace and manage change doesn’t just apply to our job tasks and duties. Career development also requires applying a change management process....
Improving on Excellence
With the changing face of healthcare in the 1990s, the Mayo Clinic started to measure more thoroughly the results of its efforts to track quality. So it enlisted the help of the Juran Institute to begin a full-fledged quality improvement program....
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....
Back to Basics: Smart Charting
Control charts are at the foundation of Six Sigma. They serve as the primary tool to filter out the probable noise (inherent variation or common cause) from the potential signals (nonrandom variation or special cause)....
One Good Idea: Easy A
It is almost as easy to fail a certification exam by making mistakes while answering questions—even if you know the answers—as it is to fail by not mastering the body of knowledge....
Expert Answers: July 2012
Reigniting quality ... Going nuclear...
Career Corner: Turn, Turn, Turn
In the quality world, I have seen my share of heated conversation about why (fill in the quality technique of your choice) works or doesn’t. The passion usually does not run as deeply as on a soap opera, but it comes close on occasion....
The Audit Answer
Graduate students at Bowling Green State University studied the Quality Systems Educational Collaboration, a program that addresses workforce and technical assistance needs for organizations, and disclosed areas for improvement using Six Sigma methods....
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....
3.4 per Million: The Significance of Simulation
The certified Six Sigma Master Black Belt body of knowledge, introduced in 2010, included the subject of simulation and, specifically, digital process simulation. This is refreshing because this tool is often omitted from lean Six Sigma training....
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....
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....
On the Right Course
In today's competitive business environment, organizations do not always limit their concerns to those of shareholders and customers....
Valuable Resource
Talent development is addressed in three key components of sustainability management systems: international standards, social responsibility (SR) reporting and performance excellence frameworks....
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....
Volviendo a los Fundamentos: Equípo En Ventaja
Los equipos de gestión de procesos proporcionan un marco a través del cual pueden ser evaluados y optimizados procesos de funciones cruzadas complejos....
Statistics Roundtable: Going on Feel
Customers consider consistent quality to be one of the most important product and service attributes. Often, it’s the most important....
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....
3.4 per Million: Next in Line
In quality, the sequel is what usually makes things better. Who knows how often savings have been left on the table because organizations failed to look ahead to the next project?...
Expert Answers: April 2012
The right way to roll out Six Sigma ... Dealing with troublesome auditees....
Volviendo a los Fundamentos: Una Combinación Creativa
La combinación de herramientas es una técnica que utilizo con los equipos cuando mediante el uso de un diagrama de espina de pescado para análisis de causa raíz potencial no muestra ninguna dirección obvia....
Back to Basics: Creative Combination
I have been facilitating lean Six Sigma projects and coaching other belts through their projects since 2002. Combining tools is a technique I use with teams when potential root cause analysis through a fishbone diagram does not show any obvious direction....
Rethinking Design
Design thinking offers several tools and concepts that can complement problem-solving approaches normally taught and used by quality professionals....
Volviendo a los Fundamentos: Comprendiendo La Variación
La causa de una no conformidad debe coincidir con la presencia de una variación. Con respecto a esta variación, ¿es la causa fuente común o especial de la causa?...
Career Corner: Survival Kit for Success
The employment process is a two-way street. By understanding the basic needs of an employer, we can determine how to fulfill our needs at the same time....
Back to Basics: Understanding Variation
Organizations with quality management systems compliant to ISO 9001:2008 are required to take action to eliminate the causes of nonconformities. If determination of variability type is absent from problem-solving methods, it leads to ineffective actions....
Taking the Wheel
Customer experience has become the mantra of senior management looking to enhance revenue and margins. In fact, more companies are trying to differentiate themselves not only on product quality but also on total customer experience....
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....
Wasted Words
Lean tools are embedded with elements that encourage effective communication. Whether it’s color-coded work spaces or transparent parts bins, these tools foster an environment in which cycle times are reduced while raising quality....
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....
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....
Perspectives: Taken for Granted
The ISO 9000 series is Quality 101, and as quality practitioners, we should never forget it....
