- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Data Quality
- Engineering
- Environmental Manag. and Sustainability
- Global Quality
- Innovation
- ISO 14000
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Problem Solving
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Safety
- Six Sigma
- Social Responsibility
- Software Quality
- Standards
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Best Practices
- Theory of Constraints
- Total Quality Management
- Compliance
- Certification/Registration (management system Standards)
- Information Management
- Change Management
- Continuous Improvement
Don't Just Talk the Talk
Many companies and organizations talk big about knowing the best way other businesses and groups can work to drive continuous and process improvement. Often, these businesses don’t take their own advice. Once in a while, however, a group comes along...
Pyramid Power
The next evolutionary step for Six Sigma could be a method called 6TOC (pronounced “six-tock”) that combines principles of lean Six Sigma with the theory of constraints....
Take a Bite Out of Inefficiency
Providing consistent and effective service or product requires a consistent and effective framework for implementing, maintaining and improving tactical and strategic operations. Dentistry is no different....
Know Thyself
There are two schools of thought when it comes to improvement: project-centric improvement and culture-centric improvement. Traditional thought says these approaches have their separate places. But PCI and CCI are inextricably linked....
Change That Sticks
Process improvement is gaining more attention as organizations face budget cuts, competition from developing markets overseas and a challenging economy....
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....
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....
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...
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 ...
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...
Back to Basics: Outputs versus Outcomes
When project objectives are set, the term “deliverables” is often used to specify those tangible things produced by the project. Two key factors, however, are often overlooked....
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
Jan. feature/SD EDUCATION School District Offers Ideas for Continuous Improvement by Maurice Ghysels In 50 Words or Less In implementing a process of continuous improvement, a California school district learned lessons that are applicable to industry. M.G...
Salary Survey-Regular Employee and Self-Employed Consultants Results
45 Section 6 Salary by Number of Work Hours Online Section 7 Salary by Nonexempt vs. Exempt Status Online Section 8 Salary by Number of Years of Quality Experience and Highest Level of Education Online Section 9 Salary by Number of Years in Current Posit...
Part 2 Section 1 Base Earnings by Quality Experience, Education, ASQ Certification and Six Sigma Training (Self-Employed Consultant Results)
In all, 20 part- time U. S. consultants reported no base earnings for the period between June 2006 and June PART 2. SELF- EMPLOYED CONSULTANT RESULTS Section 1. Base Earnings by Quality Experience, Education, ASQ Certification and Six Sigma Training FIGU...
Lean Lessons: In the Office: Where Lean and Six Sigma Converge
When focused on the reduction in process variability, Lean Six Sigma efforts can improve the predictability of the office environment and improve the flow of information....
Deployment: Start Off on the Right Foot
Deploying lean Six Sigma can produce fantastic results that are worth all the hard work of deployment. Managing change, securing leadership commitment, managing talent, and getting the right accountability will make the difference between a...
Lean Lessons: The Benefits of Kaizen and Kaizen Events
Kaizen is a Japanese word typically translated to "continuous improvement." Originally this word referred to subtle, gradual improvements that are made over time. A baseball analogy is hitting singles all game long to score runs....
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...
Standards Outlook: Developing the Voluntary Healthcare Standard
The new Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) voluntary standard for healthcare delivery is in its second review, with an anticipated launch no later than early 2008. AIAG also is pursuing partners for the publication from the healthcare sector....
Lean Lessons: Keeping Lean Alive
We know we cannot stand still in the face of global competition. Our rivals are not standing pat--they are improving their processes and systems to catch up or overtake us. If we do not improve, sooner or later our customers will prefer our rivals....
Make Healthcare Lean
The principles of lean manufacturing are as applicable to healthcare as they are to the automobile industry. However, unlike manufacturing, healthcare management structures are not usually hierarchical, and hospitals generally are not-for-profit. Value...
Standards Outlook: Supply Chain Management Remains Aerospace Challenge
The aerospace industry is in the process of shedding new light on the customer-supplier relationship, especially in the never ending quest to deliver defect free, safe and reliable product....
Core Roles in a Strategic Quality System
When establishing and maintaining a strategically viable quality system, senior management defines the roles played by groups, departments, or functions within the organization using risk/benefit analysis to determine the best fit in terms of logistics,...
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...
Lean Lessons: Building Blocks
Is your organization wasting its valuable resources? Waste can directly impact your organization’s costs, quality and delivery, and may lead to excess inventory, unnecessary movement, unintentional waiting time, untapped......
Faster Turnaround Time
In 2004, North Shore University Hospital (NSUH) used Six Sigma to reduce bed assignment delay turnaround time that made it difficult to balance capacity needs. A capstone project revealed incorrect use of the hospital's bed tracking system. The goal was...
Lean Lessons: All About Lean
Lately, lean has been receiving a lot of attention from quality professionals, management and the media. After getting its start in manufacturing, it has now migrated to nonshop floor activities in sales, customer service, accounting, HR......
After Six Sigma - What's Next?
A systematic scientific approach is fundamental to dealing with problems of variability that cause costly defects and quality problems. This idea has remained the foundation of numerous incarnations of quality management and is the basis of the current...
3.4 per Million: Put the Pieces Together
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This isn't a particularly new idea; it has been around for years. We even have an entire profession built around it....
ISO 9000 In Service: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
When the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began requiring ISO 9001 certification for its new business contracts, claims processing contractor Palmetto GBA decided to pursue certification for its existing contracts as well. Getting a...
Curse of the Super-fish-al
Root cause analysis teaches us to ask, "Why?" five times, and from this I developed these five ways not to use a fishbone....
Quality Intervenes at a Hospital
The Nebraska Medical Center, the state's largest teaching hospital, began implementation of Six Sigma in 2002 in response to a decline in patient volume in its interventional radiology department. A Six Sigma team was assembled to address problems in...
A Roadmap For Change
This excerpt is from the book Juran Institute's Six Sigma Breakthrough and Beyond. The book is available from Quality Press, item P1089. Copyright restrictions do not allow its individual sale or its placement on My ASQ....
A Solid Foundation
Any discussion of implementing Six Sigma is typically accompanied by a conversation around top management buy-in and the fiat that it is a top-down initiative. They are independent issues, so I'll separate them for discussion and clarity....
What's Wrong With Six Sigma?
Many organizations experience disappointment with the results of their Six Sigma deployment efforts. This is because they may be applying Six Sigma on too grand a scale, when, in fact, its tools may be used separately or combined with other techniques....
Simplify Baldrige for Healthcare
The growing number of applicants for the Baldrige award in healthcare points to the need for a set of tools to help organizations assess themselves. A healthcare self-assessment matrix and opportunity for improvement worksheets are provided to help...
Next generation ISO 14001.
ISO 14001, the international standard on environmental management system (EMS) requirements, has been undergoing review and revision for five years....
Next Generation ISO 14001
ISO 14001, the international standard on environmental management system (EMS) requirements, has been undergoing review and revision for five years....
Overcoming Resistance to Change
Organizational changes fail not for technical reasons, but because of people’s inherent resistance to change. Because the price of failure is so high, change should not be attempted until readiness to accept change is measured. Two methods to gauge...
Handling the Human Side of Change
Quality efforts and their accompanying flurry of training activities continue unabated in many organizations. Many have morphed to adapt to the current crazes of Six Sigma and lean....
The Message Is Clear
Information and Analysis Data and information are gathered, integrated and categorized into two types of measures: perfor- MALCOLM BALDRIGE NATIONAL QUALITY AWARD Global marketing and sales group Sector management Reviews Customer and market analysis Com...
Corporate Social Responsibility
Corporate scandals such as those involving Enron and WorldCom may finally be awakening corporate America to its social responsibilities. Such scandals are creating concern about business ethics and governance....
Managing Supplier Relationships
Effective supply chain management (SCM) can provide companies the competitive edge by adding stability and predictability to their supply stream. Manufacturers can identify vendors that provide high quality service and developing close,...
Quality's Six Life Cycle Stages
A tool referred to as “quality life cycle” provides a strategic mechanism to chart and sustain quality while proactively countering shortcomings of its implementation, such as stagnation and limited application, which can ultimately result in failure....
Best Practices in Process Management
Process improvement tools have been used to evaluate business processes ranging from employee satisfaction to customer help desk support....
Create a Lean, Mean Machine
"Lean" has been defined as a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste through continuous improvement. Lean focuses on value added flow of resources from the customer’s point of view. To compete in today’s economy a company must...
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...
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...
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...
A Road Map to Six Sigma Quality
At the very least, the champion must have the authority to reject Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 1 I 25 Road Map Implementation Steps FIGURE 1 1. Appoint a Champion 2. Select a cross functional team 3. Develop quantifiable goals 4....
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...
Learning From Mistakes
Through 42 I Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I J U N E 2 0 0 1 L E A R N I N G F R O M M I S TA K E S Current State Value Stream Map FIGURE 1 Yearly forecast Monthly orders Turn 01 I = 37,516 107 days I = 1,270 3.6 days I = 1,612 4.6 days I = 841 2.4 days ...
Intentional Change By Design
Intentional Change By Design Two models help stakeholders implement change by Gregory S. Shinn C H A N G E M A N A G E M E N T 46 I Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I M A Y 2 0 0 1 CONSTRUCTION SUBCONTRACTOR noted for providing quality products and services...
Resolving The Process Paradox: A strategy for launching meaningful process improvement
The strategy is comprised of four phases ( see Figure 1). Phase 1, data collection, collects the information and data needed for 52 I Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I M A R C H 2 0 0 1 R E S O LV I N G T H E P R O C E S S PA R A D O X Process Portfolio Ma...
Implementing Six Sigma in Europe
A cross-cultural perspective
Yes, Six Sigma focuses on process improvement, design and management. Be sure to incorporate soft skills training (for example, facilitation and change management) in your Six Sigma training curriculum. And the CEO of every company that embarks on Six Sig...
Building a Better Doctor
The leadership of the faculty, with support from the majority of members, deliberately chose to make a Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I J U N E 2 0 0 0 I 47 Content review group Associate deans, HoD, DEDE Block chair Case coordinators problems 1- 69 Depar...
Great Quality Consulting
Improvements must be connected to external results
Reid teaches the popular ASQ workshop "Skills for the Quality Consultant" and is the principal consultant with the Performance Design Group in Sarasota, FL. He offers some valuable thoughts and suggestions for those who want to position themselves as succ...
Planning for Knowledge Management
Knowledge management (KM) can improve access to and use of information for decision making and fulfilling organization goals. Development and implementation of KM includes the following steps. First, create a culture that has long-term commitment to:...
Column: Career Corner: Great Quality Consulting
The future for quality consultants won't rest solely on their ability to improve processes, design interventions or give advice. "Improving processes or even improving internal performance is not sufficient if we cannot connect the improvement to...
Making Teams Work
At the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, a one-year pilot project for introducing a team environment generated seven major observations. The pilot project covered both leader-directed teams and self-directed work teams (SDWTs). The...
Quality Today: Recognizing the Critical SHIFT
Five inevitable trends in quality exist today and will continue to develop. First, quality goes softer, in that organizations must attend to the emotional, psychological, and social needs of their employees. Only then can teamwork, cross-functional...
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...
At the Crossroads of Computing and Quality
Information technology has and will continue to influence quality management. The early days of quality management, in the 1930s to early 1960s, focused on statistical process control. During that time, the computer eventually became one of several...
What Higher Education Should Be Teaching About Quality - But Is Not
A survey of colleges and universities revealed inadequate correlation between quality-related topics taught in schools and topics identified as important by winners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The teaching of quality is vital in...
Incorporating the Tools of Creativity into Quality Management
Deming cites the need for innovation in saying that Incorporating the Tools of Creativity Into Quality Management Why organizations should work to foster creativity and innovation by Paul E. Plsek T " If you think you are going to be successful running y...
Continuous Improvement: The Key to Future Success
Business excellence is built on focused strategies and aligned initiatives. For Texas Instruments Defense Systems & Electronics (DS&E), the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria provide the foundation. After winning the Award in 1992, DS&E...
Reengineering and Dumbsizing: Mismanagement of the Knowledge Resource
The information economy is based on intellectual capital, but radical redesigns of organizations can harm the people who supply this capital. Harm is most dramatic in reengineering, a term sometimes used synonymously with "downsizing." When positions...
Managing Transitions
The dynamics of change flow through several stages. To manage these stages of transition is to accept the reality that change is never-ending and that its success depends on how it is perceived. Transitions start with a disengaging phase, in which...
How to Stay Flexible and Elude Fads
Business process management is a comprehensive approach that goes beyond any single improvement technique. Benefits of its team orientation in the flat organization include process improvement and competitive advantage. The most essential processes...
More Voices Speak Out on the Future of the Quality Profession
Readers have reacted to the Quality Progress July 1996 special issue on the future of quality. Direct responses from about 24 readers to questions raised in the issue suggest that quality activities will become more integrated within organizations,...
What Should Higher Education Be Teaching About Quality?
These results correspond closely with the three generally accepted core values of TQM: � Customer focus � Continuous process improvement � Teamwork and participation That is, respondents generally agree that college graduates should: � Have an understand...
What Benchmarking Books Don't Tell You
Benchmarking teams should consider the following tips. First, decrease the usual nine to 12 months required for a benchmarking study by: having team members contribute at least 20% of their time; using expert consultants for parts of the study; and...
TQM, Reengineering, and the Edge of Chaos
Complex-adaptive systems survive through evolutionary forces and self-organization (or positive feedback). This allows them to live on the edge of chaos, successfully balanced between the stagnation of stability and the self destruction of chaos....
The Secrets of Improvement-Driven Organizations
A survey of 300 organizations in 15 industries showed sharp differences in management practices between the top and lower performers. The purpose of the survey was to identify best practices and the links among these practices. A population of 585...
Yes, It Makes a Difference!
Three major problem solving tasks each has its own objective and its own tool. First, the repair task aims to return conditions to where they were prior to the problem. An example demonstrates how a sudden leak in an air conditioning system was...
Small Groups Bring Big Results
Employee participation in quality circles and the leadership of executives as team facilitators enabled an oil refinery to implement total quality management (TQM) at the shop-floor level. This is a labor-intensive, continuous-cycle process industry,...
Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Ohio: A Profile in Change
Transformation from bureaucracy to action-oriented change management requires planning, leadership, and attention to basics. Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Ohio (BCBSO) has used this strategy to compete in the new health care industry. BCBSO's change...
1994 Baldrige Award Recipients Share Their Expertise
36 Quality Progress/ February 1995 How these accomplishments were achieved was briefly addressed during the ceremony by the award- winning companies' leaders: Joseph P. Nacchio, president of AT& T CCS; Earl A. Goode, president of GTE Directories Corp.; a...
