January 2002
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...
A User Friendly Financial Reporting System
In the late 1980s Master Industries, Inc. began implementing W. Edwards Deming's 14 points and management philosophy to create a customer focused and employee oriented culture committed to continuous improvement. More recently, the company integrated...
What Should Be Changed?
Tools from two change management systems are compared to show which give managers the best results when implementing changes. The theory of constraints (TOC) features a set of five tools to examine the entire system for continuous improvement. One of...
The Essential Six Sigma
The disciplined quality improvement features of Six Sigma methodology offers companies nearly all of the elements of Total Quality Management (TQM), and it is much easier to incorporate into a business system. In addition, Six Sigma utilizes technical...
Design for Six Sigma: 15 Lessons Learned
Despite its growing popularity, Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a difficult transition for most companies. Six Sigma professionals from a number of major corporations share their experiences switching from a deterministic to a probabilistic design...
Striving for Sick Sigma
A satirical look at common misuse of quality tools and flawed reasoning in actuality highlights one company's serious commitment to quality and customer...
Quality in the Classroom
Institutions of higher learning have only recently begun to address the issue of how to offer quality products and services. The present turbulent economy coupled with the accreditation requirement for relatively low individual faculty course loads...
ASQ News
Three of the 2001 winners have also won state quality awards: Clarke American Checks received the 2001 Texas Award for Performance Excellence; Pal's Sudden Service won the 2001 Tennessee Quality Excellence Award; and Pearl River School District was winner...
Measuring Quality In the Department of Defense
Events of Sept. 11th reinforce the finance and accounting division's transition to a customer focused, strategy based organization
In July 2000, Tom Bloom, our director, saw the need for the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) to move to a customer focused, strategy based organization, structuring our efforts along business and product lines. We can compare the quality of a...
Column: Emerging Sectors: Measuring Quality In the Department of Defense
The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) is the accounting arm of the DoD. The deputy secretary of defense directed the consolidation of the finance and accounting operations of the various military departments and...
Implementation and Institutionalization
Learn how to properly handle a large amount of change in your organization
Just as change needs the infrastructure of a change policy, a change policy needs the infrastructure of a business operating system. A standalone change policy, which is not an integral part of a business operating system, is as likely to fail as no chang...
Column: Frontiers of Quality: Implementation and Institutionalization
[abstract from article]
Effectively managing the overwhelming volume of change is the only option for today's leadership teams. Some basic things to help enable other change efforts are:
- Create a change program.
- Create an...
Quality Web Watch
The Professional Marketing Research Society is a Canadian organization interested in marketing and social research. Marketing, advertising, and social and political research professionals can refer to the 2001 PMRS Research Buyers Guide, a searchable dire...
