- Cost of Quality
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Data Quality
- Engineering
- Environmental Manag. and Sustainability
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- Inspection
- ISO 9000
- Laboratory
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrics
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Capability
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Sampling
- Six Sigma
- Small Business
- Software Quality
- Standards
- Statistical Process Control (SPC)
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Theory of Constraints
- Total Quality Management
- ISO/TS 16949
- Compliance
- Career Development
- Certification/Registration (management system Standards)
- Information Management
- Customer Requirements
- Economic Case for Quality
- Change Management
- Continuous Improvement
Get Your Checkup
For nearly 20 years, lean and Six Sigma improvement initiatives have been in the quality spotlight, helping thousands of organizations in the United States and elsewhere. But, are hospitals truly embracing the lean and Six Sigma movement?...
Statistics Roundtable: Grab the Brass Ring
Remember going to the amusement park and riding the carousel or merry-go-round? During the ride, there was sometimes a brass ring you could grab from a dispenser.It took some dexterity to snatch the ring from the dispenser as the carousel rotated....
3.4 per Million: Control and Grow Your Enterprise
To achieve maximum efficiencies and financial results in turbulent business and financial markets, executives and senior managers must revisit their business models to make certain measurements lead to the right behaviors....
Online Figures One Good Idea Gojanovic
Control charts of consumer complaint data, 2005-2007 / Online Figure 1...
One Good Idea: Chart Smart
One of the greatest challenges with consumer data is to make sense of it. A particularly useful way to summarize consumer call-in information is the control chart, which can transform data into a time-series graph, along with an estimate of noise....
Driven to Succeed
Strategic planning is an important element in quality management, as evidenced by the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria. A strategic plan is the aim of an organization that helps to reduce variation related to possible strategic outcomes....
Contacts That Count
A team dedicated to improving member contact rates at Healthways Inc. pulled just about everything from its lean Six Sigma toolbox while working on a project and was recognized in ASQ’s International Team Excellence Award competition....
Building From the Basics
Quality control is about models, methods, measuring and managing. It’s about uncovering a problem and finding the solution. It’s about using the right techniques at the right time to make things better....
Calculated Decision
When suppliers create control charts and run capability analyses, they assume their data follow a normal distribution. However, the natural distribution of these quality characteristics—and hundreds more like them—is not the normal distribution....
A DMAIC Makeover
Define, measure, Analyze, improve and control (DMAIC) is the common roadmap for Six Sigma projects. But there are potential weaknesses in this roadmap that could be addressed with a simple, proven adjustment to DMAIC....
Back to Basics: Clearing SPC Hurdles
Statistical process control (SPC) has provided significant cost savings for companies that are fortunate enough to implement it fully. However, implementation challenges can overcome the best of intentions....
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...
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....
Expert Answers: November 2008
Workplace recognition ... Choosing the right chart.
In your particular case, your production run rate is 30 pieces per hour, so you have a variety of charts available to you, including attribute charts. PPAP provides flexibility in how much documentation must be submitted to the customer as evidence the PP...
3.4 per Million: Putting It All Together
For companies that have been asking themselves how to achieve even more improvement, the answer lies in developing a comprehensive process management system that integrates three critical components....
Building Blocks
Like many other countries around the world, Canada offers a national quality award to recognize and encourage organizations to attain outstanding levels of quality performance....
Expert Answers: May 2008
Government and cost of quality ... Understanding the slack factor....
Statistics Roundtable: It Depends
A Shewhart chart is an excellent tool for detecting abrupt process changes. One of its additional properties is its ability to detect small process changes through the use of run rules....
The Remedy for a Data Dilemma
In 1994, Bellin Health volunteered for a pilot assessment managed jointly by the Baldrige National Quality Program and the Joint Commission. This assessment helped Bellin focus on developing an integrated measurement system....
Exercise a Process Improvement Approach for Your Own Personal Wellness
The human body can be viewed as a system of processes in which the output of one process is an input to another. One quality practitioner applied the concepts of systems thinking, process thinking and process management to improve his own health,...
Achieve Compliance Through CI
Using Six Sigma tools for continuous improvement (CI) is a proven method for meeting or exceeding FDA requirements for medical devices. Optical Integrity Inc., a manufacturer of medical devices, used the Six Sigma define, measure, analyze, improve...
One Good Idea: Process Optimization for Service Organizations Isn't Rocket Science
The following is intended for service industry people who are mostly clueless about quality improvement. (You manufacturing people can skip the page because you already get this, right?)...
Standards Outlook: Output Really Does Matter
Auditing is a key component of systems that provide confidence in organizations’ competence, ability and honesty in meeting requirements. For decades we have been using audits for this purpose...
3.4 per Million: Use DMAIC to Make Improvement Part of the Way We Work
Faster, better, cheaper. That’s what organizations across almost all major industries must now do to remain competitive....
Statistics Roundtable: Detecting Dependent Observations in Multivariate Statistical Process Control
Since we must consider many variables at the same time when monitoring a multivariate process, detection of data dependencies between and among the observation vectors is not straightforward. The test procedures that exist for checking for the...
Lean Lessons: Lean Kaizen in the 21st Century
Adapted from a chapter of Lean Kaizen, the author offers key takeaways from the Toyota Production System (TPS). He describes how the kaizen method is the foundation of the The Toyota Way and how it emphasizes efficiency, problem solving and...
The Innovation Process and Quality Tools
Cost control and product quality are only capable of sustaining competitive advantage. It takes product or service innovation to create competitive advantage in a global marketplace. Innovation consists of a series of steps like any other business or...
Nanotechnology: A Big Little Frontier for Quality
Nanotechnology is a field of applied science that deals with arranging particles...
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...
Quality Glossary
Five years after it published its first glossary of quality terms, ASQ has revised that glossary with updated definitions and new entries, many from the lean glossary published in 2005. This reference of terms, acronyms, and prominent figures in the...
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...
Challenges in RFID Enabled Supply Chain Management
Supply chain management is the fastest growing application of radio frequency identification devices (RFID), but few organizations are equipped to deal with the accompanying flood of information. Most definitions of RFID emphasize the technological...
3.4 per Million: Control Charting at the 30,000-Foot-Level
In my "3.4 per Million" columns past, I first described a traditional and a 30,000-foot-level procedure for creating control charts and making process capability/performance assessments for a continuous response with multiple sampled subgroupings....
Linking the Supply Chain to TQM
In today's environment of global outsourcing, supplier quality management must transform itself from simply measuring supplier compliance to gathering knowledge, managing risk, and executing project management. Total quality management (TQM) ensures...
Quality in the First Person: The Right Place at the Right Time
When I was working on my master's degree at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in the late 1940s, it was an exciting time to be associated with quality control....
Beyond PDCA - A New Process Management
The ISO 9001 quality management standard calls for the use of the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) model for managing processes. The author questions why check is included in the cycle when the goal is to reduce the need for verification activities. Current...
One Size Does Not Fit All
It has been said that academia has lagged behind practice in the development of quality management methods and philosophies, yet academia has done a good job of propagating these concepts. Now academic research has developed two new concepts that will...
Use SPC for Everyday Work Processes
Despite the advantages of statistical process control (SPC), many organizational implementation efforts have not been successful or self-sustaining. This has nothing to do with the methodology, but is a case of using the right toolbox but the wrong...
Career Corner: How To Become an Internal Consultant
This article is not about how to become an external consultant - it is about enriching your quality job by assuming a role of internal consultant....
Detect Financial Problems With Six Sigma
An organization's financial decline is often impossible to detect from the few financial measures investors or creditors typically examine. While the Sarbanes-Oxley Act should help improve the quality of data available to the public, it has drawbacks...
Back to Basics: That's So Random - or Is It?
Assignable cause, random variation, process stability, process capability—these terms can easily confuse those new to process management. Does random variation in a process automatically require process improvement?...
TRIZ: A Creative Breeze for Quality Professionals
TRIZ, a systematic approach to creative thinking originating in Russia, can help quality professionals develop new approaches and solutions to quality problems. Its creator, Genrich Altshuller, wanted a systematic approach based on the rules of...
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....
Use Distribution Analysis To Understand Your Data Source
Distribution analysis - the process of examining a data set to understand its characteristics - uses a variety of tools that are often not used to their fullest extent. A procedure is presented as a guide to performing distribution analysis while...
Control Charting at the 30,000-Foot-Level, Part 3
In my November 2003 "3.4 per Million" column (p. 67), I described a traditional and a 30,000-foot-level procedure for creating control charts and making process capability/performance metric assessments for a continuous response....
Quality Pros Break Through the Healthcare Barrier
Many quality professionals have been denied access to quality jobs in the healthcare sector because they lack medical backgrounds. One exception is Wisconsin's Marshfield Clinic, which has established a central department dedicated to helping the clinic...
Lead To Succeed
It seems at times that the quality profession is not as valued as it once was. The solution is to offer a unique service the corporation and its managers are willing to pay for. To sell yourself and your product, people must notice that you are...
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...
Our Place-Kicker Is Out of Control
In most business, reducing variation is essential. The same is true for football and other sports. In a parable about place kicking, the author explains how statistical process control and basic quality improvement tools can be used to better understand...
Ghosts in Your Process? Who Ya Gonna Call?
Even when using the DMAIC process, root causes of poorly performing processes can be extremely difficult to find and eliminate. In his book Manufacturing Solutions for Consistent Quality and Reliability, Robert Traver proposes a nine-step process for...
E-Learning: The Future of Quality Training
E-learning, an extension of multimedia technology, provides quality managers with an effective means of gaining the commitment and involvement of employees. Unlike other media forms, e-learning offers interactivity that transforms passive audiences into...
Rules, Tools and Good Judgement
We all rely on an ensemble of tools, such as analytical statistics and decision rules, to ensure the quality of our work. But more often than not, when a problem does occur, good judgment is required to resolve it....
Control Charting at the 30,000-Foot-Level, Part 2
In my November 2003 "3.4 per Million" column (p. 67), I described a traditional and a 30,000-foot-level procedure for creating control charts and making process capability/performance assessments for a continuous response....
Quality in the First Person
Five authors provide personal accounts of their quality experiences. In A Hunger for Quality, Robert Nix tells how a temporary job organizing files for a quality control manager turned into a permanent career in quality management. Certified Quality...
Can the Gurus' Concepts Cure Healthcare?
Representatives of the movement for quality in healthcare present the views of four quality gurus as they apply to managing cost and improving the quality of healthcare. Don M. Nielsen says Philip Crosby's emphasis on prevention and zero defects has led...
Two Hospitals Prescribe Performance Excellence
Florida's Baptist Hospital Inc. (BHI) and Saint Luke's Hospital (SLH) in Kansas City, Missouri were recipients of the 2003 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the healthcare category. In addition to its new mission to provide world-class patient...
Quality in the First Person
Four quality professionals discuss how they used quality principles and tools to improve their personal lives. In Control Charts and Your Real Hourly Wage, Jonathan...
Stop Depending On Inspection
In today’s global marketplace, “better, cheaper, and faster” has become the mantra for manufacturers. Obviously, it would be better to build a product correctly in the first place, but making the transition from a traditional...
Why Buy Accredited?
Using an accredited lab may help you rest assured your results are correct....
Tips for Automotive Auditors
ISO 9000 has taken more than its fair share of criticism, largely due to the variation in international third-party conformity assessment....
The Legacy of Ishikawa
Kaoru Ishikawa was a prime mover of quality in Japan who believed in quality through leadership. His six quality concepts form the basis for a holistic approach that is the unique Japanese approach to quality improvement. Ishikawa’s focus on...
Multivariate Thinking
Statistical thinking has helped industry become more aware of the benefits of using statistical procedures....
Flip the Clip
In all the discussion and debate about what Six Sigma means, one thing remains clear: Six Sigma is a broad subject. It is daunting for us trainers to try and produce experts called Black Belts (BBs)....
The Right Place At the Right Time
My first exposure to quality came as a U.S. Navy submarine officer. As it holds a nuclear reactor and submerges under a lot of seawater pressure, a submarine has many quality issues....
Measurement Capability
Measurements are made all the time: in processes, to see how well work is progressing and in commerce. Most of the time, we trust these measurements are adequate for the task....
Faster Test Results
Southside Hospital used Six Sigma to reduce test turnaround times from 68 hours to an average of 32 hours. The use of quality tools helped the hospital improve the sigma level for stress test turnaround....
Eight Essential Tools
The broad use of Six Sigma since its introduction in the 1980s has taught us much about how to make the best use of Six Sigma tools. Now we need to take a look back and reflect on what we’ve learned...
Control Charting at the 30,000-Foot-Level
For a given process, do you think everyone would create a similar looking control chart and make a similar statement relative to process control and predictability? This type of data traditionally leads to an and R control chart, as shown in Figure 1 (p. ...
Top 10 Tips for Shop Floor Audit Readiness
Wendy, a shift supervisor at fictitious Skyko Industries, was notified her manufacturing area was going to be added to the scope of Skyko’s ISO 9001 registration....
Best Practices in Process Management
Process improvement tools have been used to evaluate business processes ranging from employee satisfaction to customer help desk support....
ISO 9000 Makes Integrated Systems User Friendly
Organizations need management systems that are based on processes or activities that help personnel understand what is essential to achieving continual improvement on a consistent basis....
Capability Analysis of Complex Parts
Several years ago, Military Aircraft and Missile Systems Group (A&M), a division of the Boeing Company in St. Louis, made a strategic decision to focus on its main business—aircraft and missile assembly....
Lean and Six Sigma – Synergy Made in Heaven
The combination of Six Sigma and lean enterprise work can enhance the production experience. Workers have the empowerment and skill to recognize a problem and, if it cannot be resolved, shut down the line to eliminate the root cause. Six Sigma and lean...
SPC: From Chaos to Wiping the Floor
Physicist Walter Shewhart, in tackling the problem of process control, began with the definition of control and went on to distinguish chance causes from assignable causes of variation. He believed that assignable causes could be found and eliminated....
An Integrated Approach System
What’s the best quality system? How would you answer this question? How would your colleagues?...
Baldrige: It’s Easy, Free and It Works
While many people consider the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria to be difficult, a harder task is learning how to manage opportunities for improvements instead of managing known strengths. While Baldrige may not have the answers, it...
Systems Thinking – An Uncommon Answer
Some of the common problems to be found in many business failures include too much focus on short-term gains, too much focus on quarterly profit statements, and a prevalence of long-term losses. One possible solution to these problems is systems...
Complexity Theory Simplifies Choices
Many business management and improvement methodologies provide finite structures for achieving success. Examples include the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award; the ISO 9001 standard; W. Edward Deming, who provided 14 points; and Six Sigma....
Quality Management Multiple Choice: What’s the best quality system?
Monitoring and recording the extent of transition experienced within a designated area assure Procedure ( general) Priority Reviewed Completed Record control Document control Internal audits Management review Corrective action Preventive action Monitorin...
QOS – A Simple Method for Big or Small
Although there are many quality initiatives in the marketplace, many of them involve a degree of hype. Ford Motor Company’s quality operating system (QOS) is recommended as one offering the most value for the money. A QOS assessment looks at...
Running Like a Bottled Tornado
Many experts have extolled the benefits of transforming hierarchical, autocratic organizations into adaptive, self-organizing learning organizations. Their descriptions of these organizations are often complex and confusing, calling for a new analogy...
Column: Measure for Measure: Keeping Your Charts Under Control
Little known ways to use control charts are a valuable resource
Small or not, process variation that is consistent and random - what we usually call common cause variation - cannot be reduced by feedback. Feedback is appropriate, though, to address special cause variation - changes that have...
Column: Standards Outlook: Purchaser and Supplier Quality
Going beyond ISO 9001, QS-9000 and TS 16949
For quality to happen, quality control from the supplier's perspective is necessary. But evidence indicates suppliers do not always pursue the actions needed for quality improvement. Quality practitioners...
The Status Quo's Failure in Problem Solving
The Status Quo's Failure In Problem Solving The best thing top management can do is design a problem solving process for all types of problems by Paul Palady and Nikki Olyai Q U A L I T Y A N D T O P M A N A G E M E N T 34 I A U G U S T 2 0 0 2 I W W W ....
Quality Glossary
A handy reference is provided of quality terms, acronyms, and key people in the history of quality. Information is derived from a variety of sources and compiled by the editorial staff of the American Society for...
Column: One Good Idea: Can You Trust Your Data?
Use control charts to find manual data entry...
Column: Frontiers of Quality: Control Charts and Administration
Extend the use of traditional quality tools to all areas of your organization
How to use control charts in an administrative...
Mooooving Toward Six Sigma
This supports the hypothesis that variation in ingredients, feeder accuracy and the resulting mix must be controlled to lower costs, decrease excretion Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 2 I 35 Dairy Farm Systems FIGURE 1 Feed storage ...
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...
Column: Measure for Measure: Give Us Your Best
Best measurement capability is important and controversial--or is it?
Clause 6.1.4(c) of ISO/IEC Guide 58, the worldwide standard governing the operation of calibration and testing laboratory accreditation systems, states in part that an applicant calibration laboratory...
Widgetcraft for One Small Paint Company
One tool we found useful during these meetings was an accountability sheet, where we kept track of our progress in relationship to our Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 1 I 73 Marcus Paint Co. Quality Policy Marcus Paint Co. is comm...
Quality Makes a Splash
Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 1 I 43 Quality Makes a Splash How using quality as a business strategy helped one company win the Baldrige Award by Lloyd P. Provost and Roger B. Quayle OR THE FIRST TIME, a water company has won th...
Column: Emerging Sectors: Cleaning Up With SPC
Statistical process control is playing a role in a huge environmental project at a nuclear weapon production site
The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Hanford Nuclear Site played a pivotal role in the nation's defense beginning in the 1940s when it was created as part of the Manhattan Project. The current environmental clean-up...
Teaching the Role of SPC in Industrial Statistics
Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I J U L Y 2 0 0 1 I 89 Teaching the Role of SPC In Industrial Statistics Base the future of a process on statistical investigations of the past by Ralph L. Liberatore S T A T I S T I C S ISCUSSIONS CONCERNING STATIStical pro...
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...
Help Wanted: One Statistician Consultant
Hospital needed analysis of performance indicators
As the relationship between the committee and the consultant developed, the consultant took on special projects first from the committee and then from hospital administration. Expanded role Porter Memorial Hospital expanded the consultant's educational ro...
Column: Emerging Sectors: Help Wanted: One Statistician Consultant
Porter Memorial Hospital is a mid-size hospital in Northwest Indiana, operating at about 275 beds. In 1996, the Board of Trustees found a need for statistical advice, particularly in the analysis of performance indicators measured over time. Its search...
The Problems with Managing by Objectives and Results
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 I 39 The Problems With Managing By Objectives and Results What your employees may not be telling you by Joseph F. Castellano and Harper A. Roehm Q U A L I T Y M A N A G E M E N T HILE MOST PEOPLE WOULD ag...
10 Requirements for Effective Process Control: A Case Study
To see the variation pattern more clearly, she conducted a blanket study of 10 wafers Performance summary Performance summary units Target 30.00 um USL 37.00 um LSL 23.00 um Tolerance 14.00 um Process . 3.2 um Process gage capability: s2 gage error/ s2pr...
Continuous Improvement at an Agency For the Developmentally Disabled
Program is consumer focused, measurement oriented and team based
Today, our quality program, specifically the measurement element, has been identified as one of the two best consumer focused programs in the state system. These totals can then be summarized by category, survey, staff, consumer, program, agency and so fo...
