- Cost of Quality
- Criteria for Performance Excellence
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Design of Experiments
- Engineering
- Environmental Manag. and Sustainability
- Global Quality
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- ISO 14000
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Basic Quality
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Project Management
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Reliability
- Safety
- Six Sigma
- Small Business
- Social Responsibility
- Standards
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Best Practices
- AS9000
- TL 9000
- ISO/TS 16949
- ISO 22000
- ISO 26000
- Compliance
- Risk Management
- Information Management
- Economic Case for Quality
- Awards
- Strategic Planning
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....
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....
Get Them in the Game
The key to developing a high-performance, quality-oriented workforce is maintaining a high level of employee engagement....
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....
Expert Answers: September 2012
Sustaining excellence ... Blood bank error...
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....
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....
Standards Outlook: Ingraining Innovation
The concept of innovation has been around for a while, but it has grown and evolved to become an issue of significant, if not critical, importance to organizations....
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....
Back to Basics: Team Advantage
Process management teams provide a framework through which complex, cross-functional processes can be assessed and optimized. By focusing on these seven activities, process management teams can provide the value they are uniquely positioned to deliver....
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....
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....
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....
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....
Growth Chart
Globalization, as well as demands from people, business and technology, require organizations to deliver high-quality performance to remain competitive. Quality methods can allow alignment with rapidly changing and increasing customer expectations....
Reaching Out
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides describes life at Ford Motor Co. in the 1920s, detailing how unskilled workers tried to match the calculated pace of assembly lines and a manufacturer that made almost every part itself....
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....
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...
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....
Organize How You Innovate
It is difficult to underestimate the role of innovation in the success of an organization. ISO 9004:2009 redefines the role of improvements and innovations within a quality management system....
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....
Getting on Track
ISO 26000 is here. Are you ready? Maybe the better question is: Do you care? You should. ISO 26000 Guidance on Social Responsibility has been touted as the new standard that can help manage social responsibility issues at your organization....
Getting on Track/Por el Buen Camino
ISO 26000 is here. Are you ready? Maybe the better question is: Do you care? You should. ISO 26000 Guidance on Social Responsibility has been touted as the new standard that can help manage social responsibility issues at your organization....
What Have We Learned?
In a general way, the disaster in Japan provides us with a good context to see what lessons can be learned from fundamental quality management science....
One Good Idea: Going Up?
Need to pitch an idea about quality to a busy executive? If so, an elevator speech may be just what you need....
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...
Trial and No Error
For years, the Veterans Affairs Cooperative Studies Program Clinical Research Pharmacy Coordinating Center has been working its way toward earning a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. In 1996, the center first started looking at the Baldrige...
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....
Online Sidebar 1: What makes the ISO 9001 QMS work?
In addition to the marketing advantages, which everyone seems to understand, there are a number of different aspects to the ISO 9001 quality management system (QMS) that contribute to its success. Of these, three tend to stand out....
Sustainable Future
The new international standard ISO 9004:2009—managing for the sustained success of an organization—a quality management approach, brings quality management to a new area of sustained success. The standard adds a new term, sustained success...
Top This
Besting your competitors means outdoing them when it comes to quality, safety, service, productivity and financials. The question is how to stay on top after you’ve planted your flag at the apex of your industry....
Now What?
This is the story of one organization’s efforts to develop and implement a dissemination process that would consistently spread its improvement solutions across all facets of the organization....
Statistics Roundtable: Tried and True
A review of past Statistics Roundtable columns reveals that statisticians and quality professionals are always looking for better ways to increase the breadth and effectiveness of the use of statistical thinking and methods....
Standards Outlook: Taking Responsibility
Social responsibility and sustainability are issues that have gotten the attention of most countries around the world, and they're growing in importance in quality circles....
Leaning Toward Green
Lean practitioners have long challenged employees to question why a process is performed in a particular way, whether it is necessary, and to shift their paradigm to implement a simpler, more efficient way to provide value to the customer....
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....
Career Corner: Rise to the Top
We all hope 2010 brings better economic times. What has the economic bust taught organizations and quality professionals about weathering the storm? It’s shown us we have the tools to survive down times, restructures and reorganizations....
Quality in the First Person: Accidental Destiny
John Ruskin once said, “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent effort.”1 How many of us who work in quality came into the profession by accident? I, for one, can raise my hand. I started my career as an apprentice tool...
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....
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....
Danger Zones
I’ve often been asked to identify the toughest questions in the Baldrige criteria. Which questions make or break an assessment? What answers does an examiner seek that aren’t explicitly asked for in the criteria? What questions are the hidden jewels?...
Tune Up
Six Sigma has many meanings. In its simplest context, Six Sigma can be defined statistically as the attempt to achieve near-perfection by having no more than 3.4 errors per million opportunities, or being 99.997% correct (or defect-free)....
In a Perfect World
During an interview with QP, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill speaks about the U.S. healthcare system, the signs of economic calamity everyone ignored, and the U.S. government's resistance to the quality way of thinking....
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....
Narrow Healthcare's Quality Chasm
Today's healthcare leaders face the need to effectively manage not only the clinical but also the business side of their operations. This includes demonstrating cost reductions, overall organizational improvement and long-term sustainability....
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....
FMEA Minus the Pain
Failure mode effects analysis has stood the test of time as a powerful risk assessment tool for products, processes and systems....
Back in Circulation
As the applications for lean expand, organizations must realize lean’s usefulness goes beyond environmental efforts. But first, we must look at the history of lean and to understand how its future fully complements social responsibility....
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....
Perspectives: Adapting to Troubled Times
Quality personnel should recognize the economic climate as an opportunity to demonstrate the impact quality can have. It’s up to them to adapt their skills, techniques, tools and leadership styles to help their companies navigate the troubled waters....
The Quality Professional as Organizational Gardener
Many quality professionals understand that the answers to these questions require the ability to envision their organizations as living entities, existing within their understanding of systems theory. We work with organizations and people, not on organiza...
Career Corner: Something Worth Catching
CAGS stands for capability + adaptability + growthability + sustainability. It’s a formula for success in any field....
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...
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....
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...
Small Business, Big Feat
Efforts to continuously improve employee and customer satisfaction, and business practices led PRO-TEC to a Baldrige award. The company has incorporated many best management practices, including lean manufacturing and continuous improvement, and relied on...
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....
Career Corner: Corporations Tout Social Responsibility
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award has added “governance and social responsibilities” to its leadership criteria, codes of conduct are more prevalent, and ethics has taken on new importance in corporate training and business school curricula. In ...
Classroom Lessons Learned
Public education often tries to emulate the successful methods of industry. However, the experience of a school district in California offers several lessons about achieving continuous improvement in the corporate world....
Ghysels Online Sidebar: What Students Think
Moreover, by teaching how to align teachers’ goals to students’ goals, the teachers were more apt to pay attention to organizational goals. Even though we were initially cautious about calling students or parents “external customers” or teachers “interna...
Small Business Leadership: Creating and Preserving a Business Culture
Every business has its own culture that starts slowly and evolves over time as the business becomes more successful and grows. For a small business, it is initially the founder who determines the culture of the firm and the way employees work and...
Retrospective Analysis of a Designed Experiment
Design of experiment (DOE) techniques have been successfully used by India’s Department of Defense Production to optimize the process parameters for a plastic injection-molded part used in the manufacture of tank deterrents. The goal was to get...
Conformity or Sustainability? That Is the Question
Sustainability is an enterprise’s ability to survive and prosper in a rapidly evolving environment, and the essence of sustainability is performance results. Any expenditure of resources that does not generate value produces a net loss and impaired...
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...
Financial Control and Quality
The case for quality should be easy to make, but it is not always obvious to top management who must be aware of and control the corporation’s finances in order to comply with federal regulations. There are two aspects to measuring financial control -...
Standards Outlook: Why a New ISO 9004?
In the rush that is today's business environment, we often worry more about details than we do the big picture....
Career Corner: Has Information About Quality Become a Liability?
While having lunch with a good friend not long ago, I gained unique insight into a very real concern for those of us in the quality profession and the organizations we work with....
The Power of Process Orientation
Hidden barriers to the success of continuous improvement programs exist in most companies and often transcend tactics applied to produce cultural change. These cultural conditions are not always obvious, but their symptoms include organizational silos...
Bringing Lean To the Office
Lean methods produce quicker results than other quality methods, and they readily apply to office work. Lean uses three principles to create more value while reducing waste and cost. A team of college students gained hands-on lean experience with two...
Standards Outlook: Circling the Wagons
The U.S. technical advisory group to International Organization for Standardization technical committee 176 (ISO/TC 176) recently released a document called Quality Management Systems—Advice From ISO/TC 176 for Sector Specific Applications.1...
Advancing From Compliance To Performance
Poor ethics has recently been recognized as a controllable factor that can either make or break and organization. If organizations would practice ethics as a logic-based discipline and quality problem, they would reach higher levels of performance that...
8 Dimensions of Excellence
Despite a stated desire to be customer focused, most companies tend to measure process performance more intensely than the outcomes customers experience. The 8 Dimensions of Excellence expand and balance the definition of success, beginning with the...
A Quest For Quality
Hamilton Health Services, a Canadian healthcare organization with a multi-site emergency room program, used quality facilitators in six continuous quality improvement projects over a period of one year. Quality facilitators provide resources needed to...
Good News - If You're Ready
Futuring is a structured look ahead aimed at enhancing anticipatory skills. ASQ's most recent futures study, conducted in 2005, identified six key forces of change: globalization, innovation, outsourcing, consumer sophistication, value creation, and...
The Forgotten "C" in DMAIC
When using Six Sigma's define, measure, analyze, improve, control (DMAIC) approach in an improvement project, quality practitioners often either neglect or poorly execute the control stage, jeopardizing the......
Change Healthcare Organizations From Good to Great
The Institute of Medicine estimates that the cost of the medical errors resulting in thousands of deaths each year and injury to thousands more is over $20 billion annually. While these figures are unacceptable, the good news is that the application of...
The Cause and Effect Of My Quality Journey
My first encounter with quality occurred when I was a teenager and read in the newspaper that a human error resulted in a patient's death at a hospital. That incident created a shift in my life....
The Future of Quality in Indianapolis
ASQ's Indianapolis Section 903 has typically focused on projects that could be completed within the year but, conscious of the effects of short-range planning, the section decided to develop a five-year strategic plan to increase responsiveness to the...
Environmental Communication Standard on the Horizon
Is your organization holding an open house, issuing an environmental or sustainability report or responding to requests for information on environmental risks?...
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...
Sustainable Growth in a Standardized World
Many believe an organization is either growing or dying and that growth includes more than just size....
Climbing Mount Sustainability
This year marks an anniversary of sorts for Interface Inc., which produces about 40% of the world’s commercial carpet tiles. Ten years ago, I challenged my company to a new way of thinking: to embrace a new paradigm...
The Triple Top Line
Quality and sustainability are intertwined and provide win/win/win solutions for both the short-term and long-term effects of design on social responsibility, environmental performance and business results. These elements comprise a triple bottom line....
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....
Column: Standards Outlook: The White House Manages Green
Discussion of environmental management systems (EMS) implementation typically evokes corporate initiatives, such as the worldwide effort among many in the automotive industry to achieve ISO 14001 certification....
Coming Soon: The Future
Issues presented at the third futures study conducted by the American Society for Quality are highlighted. Conducted to energize strategic planning efforts, the study was guided by representatives from the Alternative Futures Institute and drew...
Peter F. Drucker: Delivering Value to Customers
Before Peter F. Drucker published his seminal book defining management as a formal discipline, there was no coherent body of knowledge addressing management issues. Drucker rejects the commonly held belief that the purpose of business is to make a...
Sustainability: Enlarging Quality's Mission
The past twenty years have seen major changes in the way business is conducted. Quality has taken on an entirely new meaning in the 21st century. In a global economy customer satisfaction, while still a critical business goal, must share the stage with...
Mooooving Toward Six Sigma
A modern dairy farm is a complex, highly integrated system that is capital and labor intensive with low profit margins. One of the largest expenses is purchased feed, yet current quality management practices on these farms fail to make use of analytical...
Journey to the Baldrige
The year's Baldrige winners are profiled. They include Operations Management International Inc. (OMI), Spicer Driveshaft (SD) (an operating unit of Dana Corp.), Karlee Co. Inc., and Los Alamos National Bank (LANB)....
Column: Standards Outlook: From Deming to ISO 9000:2000
Lip service isn't enough; management must understand and carry out its obligations to achieve sustainability and growth
For quality programs to be successful, management must take an active role in their implementation. Plenty of guidelines are available in the work of quality leaders such as W. Edwards Deming and in more recently developed standards and programs such...
Service Quality and Higher Education Do Mix
In 1996, Indiana University Southeast recognized that it would have to begin competing for students and needed to establish a reputation for providing high-quality experiences for all of its students. The university's first step toward its goal was to...
Management System Standards Poised for Momentum Boost
Growth in the standards industry is driven by: the ISO 9000 revision; proliferation of sector specific standards; the importance of environmental management; and the future of health and safety management standards. ISO 9000:2000 will be completed...
Help Your Career And the Environment
Companies can improve revenues through risk management
So as the quality movement wanes, wise quality professionals are seeking the next generation idea so they can position themselves and improve the competitive advantage of their organizations. In our world where sustainability matters, quality now means me...
Back to the Future
The ASQ Foresight 2020 project has generated scenarios on the future of quality and the role of the quality professional. Facilitated by the Institute for Alternative Futures, the project is a successor to ASQ's first futures study, which had 2010 as...
ISO 14000 and the Bottom Line
A proactive environmental policy linked to ISO 14000 must be based on strategic planning and implementation. Key elements are commitment to prevention and to continual improvement as well as an assurance of compliance with regulations and laws....
Putting Quality in Knowledge Management
Rapid access to expertise within an organization is a purpose of knowledge management. Quality professionals have critical leadership and educational roles in the harvesting of that knowledge and in the management of corporate memory. Knowledge is...
