- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Environmental Manag. and Sustainability
- Baldrige National Quality Program
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrics
- Problem Solving
- Process Management
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Small Business
- Social Responsibility
- Standards
- Teams
- Total Quality Management
- Information Management
- Customer Requirements
- Awards
- Continuous Improvement
Added Traction
The balanced scorecard (BSC) has been accepted in the business world as a valid instrument with which to translate and deploy an organization’s business strategy throughout its infrastructure....
Starting Line
So, you’ve volunteered (or, as one of my coworkers says, you’ve been “volun-told”) to lead your company through the implementation of ISO 9001. Now what do you do?...
PDSA Leads to Top Accolades
Force field analysis. Two-way communication. SWOT analysis. These terms are likely familiar to quality professionals in the manufacturing, service and possibly even healthcare fields. But to those in education? It’s unlikely....
Change That Sticks
Process improvement is gaining more attention as organizations face budget cuts, competition from developing markets overseas and a challenging economy....
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....
No Longer Waiting for Answers
The emergency department at Presbyterian Hospital in Charlotte, NC is often stretched beyond capacity. Patient volume in the 43-bed ED has jumped 34% in the past four years, and more than 86,000 people are expected to seek care there this year....
Climbing the Career Ladder: It's Up to You
With as much information on the subject of career development as there is available today, the real challenge is recognizing that you, not your employer, are responsible for your own career development, and then finding a structure to guide your plans....
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...
Baldrige - Just What the Doctor Ordered
The Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) University Hospital Hamilton's commitment to quality has won it the 2004 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the healthcare category. Part of the hospital's existing quality program is its five pillars of excellence...
Sustainable Growth in a Standardized World
Many believe an organization is either growing or dying and that growth includes more than just size....
Your Gateway to Quality Knowledge
For the past decade, the Quality Information Center (QIC) at ASQ’s Milwaukee headquarters has collected and compiled material from quality professionals in academics, manufacturing and service to create a definitive quality body of knowledge....
Print Perfect
Branch-Smith Inc., a fourth-generation printing company, had its origins in the unlikely success of a boy born without arms in 1868. The company as it exists today takes inspiration from founder Aaron Smith, who taught himself to type with his toes,...
Rx for Excellence
SSM Health Care (SSMHC), the first healthcare winner of the Malcolm Baldrige Award, has been showing the world that a focus on continuous improvement can help the ailing healthcare sector. SSMHC operates as a private, not-for-profit system that owns,...
Check Out This Baldrige Winner
In 1993 Clarke American, a manufacturer of bank checks, faced a major business crisis due to industry consolidations and competition from direct mail suppliers. It was a defining moment for Clarke's new president and CEO, and a catalyst for the...
From Design to Action: Developing a Corporate Strategy
Some economists believe that today's turbulent world does not lend itself to traditional strategic planning approaches. Almost daily, sudden changes in the environment challenge carefully constructed plans and require fundamentally new approaches. The...
Penn State's Commitment to Quality Improvement
Penn State University's commitment to continuous quality improvement (CQI) began in 1991 when former executive vice president and provost John Brighton and former president Joab Thomas created a university council on continuous quality improvement...
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)....
The Road to TL 9000: From the Bell Breakup to Today
In accordance with divestiture, the seven Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) resulting from the 1984 breakup of AT&T were required to stop manufacturing products and begin purchasing all materials from suppliers. This situation necessitated a...
When Culture Resists Change
Organizational change requires the alignment of behaviors and thoughts to a clear and well communicated vision. Resistance to change is really resistance to personal loss of control. Such resistance can be thwarted by helping all understand their...
Beyond Vision: Creating and Analyzing Your Organization's Quality Future
To establish a strategic quality future for an organization, there are seven futuring tools. The tools facilitate creation of a vision and critical examination of forecasts into the next five to ten years. The goal is to close the gap between present...
Benchmarking Your Plant Against TQM Best-practice Plants: Part 3 of 4
The Tennant Co. plant is the third of four world-class operations described in a series of articles on quality practices. The total quality management structure at Tennant includes a quality manager, a senior vice president of industrial markets, and...
Does Higher Education Practice What It Teaches?
Business schools at four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. not only teach total quality management (TQM) to their students. They also apply TQM in their own administrative and support functions. But the schools and their institutions could do...
Building in Quality
The renovation of a farmhouse was the target of quality improvement concepts and techniques. The family aligned the renovation plans with its vision and mission statements. They brainstormed and weighted criteria for the renovation processes. For...
What a Wonderful World It Could Be
A community quality council (CQC) brings the principles of total quality management (TQM) into daily community life. It is a forum through which all elements of the community can use TQM principles to maintain leadership, create a vision, establish a...
Redefining a Process in 14 Steps
Process improvement requires prerequisites, people, and a series of redefinition deliverables. To satisfy prerequisites, the process should be understood, and it should need quality improvement. The organization should have the leadership, expertise,...
Maintaining Focus Within Your Organization
Vision brings common understanding to the stakeholders of a company. But they must be wary of the seven deadly distractions. First, employment involvement is ineffective if it does not include senior management. Second, training becomes wasteful when it...
The Gentle Art of Chartering a Team
Establishing a problem solving team comprises six steps. This chartering process is overseen by a quality council. First, the quality council identifies a total quality management (TQM) executive to create the team. A team facilitator, who may be the...
Focus the Strategy to Achieve Results
Successful total quality management (TQM) depends on leadership commitment. Important expressions of this commitment are vision and goals. Vision statements should be vivid, action-oriented sentiments that force an organization and its members to make...
The Conference Method of Redesign
Restructuring of an organization can be accomplished efficiently by a sociotechnical analysis. The technique is based on Fred Emery's and Eric Trist's Future Search Conference. A case study of the conference method used groups and subgroups to...
Visioning: The Concept, Trilogy, and Process
An organization's members need a vivid image of perfection. Resources for this vision include the visioning concept, vision trilogy, and visioning process. The visioning concept empowers organization members to strive for tomorrow's goals. The vision...
A Performance Measurement Model
The right metrics are key to identifying what will move an organization to its goals. Metrics can be developed in the eight components of a performance measurement model. First, performance categories indicate what an organization does. Second, a...
