- Cost of Quality
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Engineering
- Global Quality
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrics
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Capability
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Safety
- Six Sigma
- Small Business
- Social Responsibility
- Standards
- Statistical Process Control (SPC)
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Total Quality Management
- Compliance
- Career Development
- Risk Management
- Information Management
- Customer Experience Management
- Customer Requirements
- Food Safety
- Economic Case for Quality
- Change Management
- Continuous Improvement
Career Corner: Where Have All the CQOs Gone?
Two weeks ago, I got a call from an acquaintance who said he’d have to find a new job during the next six months or so. He is the chief quality officer (CQO) of a major company. He’s getting a great severance package, but it was still unexpected...
Change That Sticks
Process improvement is gaining more attention as organizations face budget cuts, competition from developing markets overseas and a challenging economy....
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....
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...
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 Lead
To become successful innovators, you need leading indicators focused on the people and process aspects of your organization....
Keeping Current Online Table
Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award: National Institute of Standards and Technology ( NIST) in partnership with ASQ Award criteria are built on seven core values: leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, information analysis, human ...
Blurred Vision
Many quality professionals have noticed that business leaders still consider quality and business improvement to be separate topics. While this isn’t the case everywhere, it appears to have become more common....
Standards Outlook: Hazardous to Your Health
One hospital chain in my area has a snappy ad saying your selection of a hospital could be the most important choice you will ever make. This might be true—going into the hospital these days can be hazardous to your health....
Career Corner: Adapt to Today's Risk Based Environment
Not long ago, during a discussion about innovation, a nontraditional student of mine told me that if my ideas were more than 18 months old, they were probably out of date....
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 Quality Diet: Building a Healthy Business
Quality is not always an easy sell. As a result, the challenges facing a quality professional trying to help a company are a lot like those facing a dietitian trying to help a client succeed with a diet. Quality professionals could even be called...
Reaching Out to CEOs
Interested in promoting quality as an agent of profit and prosperity, ASQ asked the Pittsburgh section to participate in a pilot run of the Economic Case for Quality by surveying local business leaders to determine how they perceived the impact of...
Switching From Improvement to Innovation on the Fly
Proceeding with an improvement methodology when it becomes obvious the process lacks the potential to achieve the desired capability can be damaging to an organization's continuous improvement initiatives. Goals will not be reached, and the resulting...
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...
International Outsourcing: Value vs. Economics
International outsourcing has become the easy way out for many organizations seeking to stay competitive in a global economy, whereas establishing a lean Six Sigma organization requires sustained and consistent hard work. Proponents say outsourcing is...
Annual Quality Awards
The Annual Quality Awards Listing is a guide to automotive, government, international, national, and state quality related awards. The list is organized by type, the award's name and sponsor, criteria, contact information, and notes. To be included in...
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...
Making It Look Over Easy
Sunny Fresh Foods was the first food company to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in 1999. The manufacturer of egg based products won the award again in 2005, this time applying in the manufacturing category, having outgrown the small...
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...
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...
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...
Crosby's 14 Steps to Improvement
In order to be successful, a company quality improvement effort must be well thought out and implemented according to plan over a long period of time. It requires management to stay at it constantly. Philip Crosby's 14-step quality improvement program...
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....
Feigenbaum's Enduring Influence
Armand V. Feigenbaum was one of the first engineers to recognize financial performance as an indicator of poor quality. Together with W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran, he established the intellectual framework for quality as a discipline worthy of...
Calibration: Why It's Important
In my July 2005 installment in this series of articles on calibration, I talked about the trilogy of fast service, high quality and low price....
Timeless Wisdom From Crosby
Philip Crosby's book, Quality Is Free, changed the way managers looked at the cost of poor quality. Written 25 years ago, Crosby's management principles are as valid today as ever. Thirteen quotations from the book illustrate Crosby's deep insight into...
A Bare Bones Look at the Bottom Line
A basic premise of the quality revolution is that quality increases profits. While customers generate profit in the traditional way, quality focuses on money not spent as the result of improved practices. Quality alone, however, does not guarantee...
Developing Best in Class Processes at NASA
In addition to its well-known space activities, NASA performs many other engineering activities. Developing processes to ensure the quality and safety of systems is of paramount importance in achieving mission success. For this reason, NASA has created...
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...
Juran, Japan and the profession.
Celebration of Joseph Juran?s 100th birthday (Dec. 24, 2004) began in early May with an event sponsored by the Juran Institute. Quality Progress also ran a cover story profiling his contributions in its May 2004 issue....
Annual Quality Awards Listing
The annual Quality Awards guide to automotive, government, international, national, and state quality awards lists the type of award, award name and sponsor, criteria, contact information, and notes. To be listed, awards must be quality related, must...
Juran, Japan and the Profession
Celebration of Joseph Juran's 100th birthday (Dec. 24, 2004) began in early May with an event sponsored by the Juran Institute. Quality Progress also ran a cover story profiling his contributions in its May 2004 issue....
100 Years of Juran
An interview with Joseph M. Juran reveals an inspirational story of his struggle to overcome the challenges of emigration, childhood poverty, and the Great Depression to become one of quality’s leading gurus....
Make Work Cells Work for You
The standard practice of dispersing production processes among geographically separate shops creates a potential for quality problems. These problems and their root causes are lost between intra-shop inventories and the number of potential flow...
Offense and Defense
To improve its quality, an enterprise must fight two battles. It must prevent new problems, such as wear and tear on equipment, increasingly stringent customer requirements, new product introductions and employee turnover, from affecting its processes....
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....
The Seven Deadly Sins of Quality Management
Root cause analysis is the structured investigation of basic causal factors leading to quality failure. When the root cause resides in the fundamental values of an organization, eradication can be extremely challenging. Problems ascribed to...
How to Speak the Language of Senior Management
Quality professionals and senior management have a serious communication problem. To get around the “Fix it. Don’t bother me with the details” mindset of management, quality professionals need to align what they do with what’s...
Column: Career Corner: Resumes: Before and After
My friend Deming Juran Crosby (D.J. for short) and I go back a long way. He recently decided to look for a new job and wanted some feedback on his résumé. It looked all right to me, but I suggested D.J. get a more professional opinion....
Roadblocks to Quality
The automotive industry has developed state-of-the-art quality processes and procedures, yet many managers and engineers still do not understand or apply the concepts of variation reduction or trend analysis. This results in the poor quality that...
Do Performance Appraisals Work?
Since 1989 when Glenroy Inc., a small Wisconsin manufacturing firm, abandoned its performance appraisal and merit pay system in favor of market based pay grades and company-wide noncompetitive bonuses, few organizations have followed suit. Some quality...
How to Achieve Operational Excellence
Quality improvement systems can contribute to operational improvements, but they cannot eliminate operational costs arising from deviations and nonconformances caused by human error. In order to grow in today's competitive business environment,...
The Little Hot Dog Stand That Could
Pal's Sudden Service isn't a large, sophisticated corporation, but that didn't stop the Tennessee-based restaurant chain from winning the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA). Pal's two executives believe there is a process for everything...
Annual Quality Awards Listing
Quality Progress' Quality Awards Listing is a guide to automotive, government, international, national, regional, and state quality related awards and awards programs. Awards listed must be quality related, eligibility cannot be limited to members...
Column: Career Corner: Lessons for Leaders
[Abstract from article]
Among its instances of effectively distributed leadership, the Strategic Leadership Project report cites an organization where, "Employees at almost all levels are allowed -- and expected -- to act on good ideas without prior...
Organize Your Quality Tool Belt
Quality professionals adopt and adapt techniques from other fields to satisfy the need to apply their skills to a wide variety of processes and situations. To someone new to the profession, this array of tools may seem overwhelming, but upon closer...
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...
Developing a New Kind of Certification
One of ASQ's newest certification exams, the certified quality improvement associate (CQIA), is a unique example of process management and response to customer needs. While most certifications are geared toward quality practitioners, CQIA...
Russia's Journey Toward Performance Excellence
Industrial enterprises move from traditional quality control to a focus on organizational planning, process improvement and customer satisfaction
This move shifts the focus from quality control and inspection to organizationwide quality planning and improvement of all processes rather than only those that affect product quality. Planning for quality control of products and production processes, inc...
Column: World View: Russia's Journey Toward Performance Excellence
Russian industrial enterprises move from traditional quality control to a focus on organizational planning, process improvement and customer satisfaction....
Philip B. Crosby's Mark on Quality
Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I O C T O B E R 2 0 0 1 I 25 Philip B. Crosby's Mark on Quality His teachings will continue to touch lives for years to come by Kristen Johnson, assistant editor Q U A L I T Y G U R U S RECENT ARTICLE IN the Orlando Sentinel...
What Is Quality?
Pirsig defines quality In our opinion, you must go all the way back to Shewhart's pronouncements about quality to find an 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 57 Ishikawa's D E F I N I T I O N O F Q U A L I T Y In short, level one quality me...
Can Quality Concepts and Tools Fix the U.S. Election Process?
Five months after the presidential election the true impact of election process errors and the importance of continuous improvement to the process is still becoming apparent. While media attention focused on Florida, the problem is far more widespread....
Excellence in Our Communities
If the model is to succeed, it must be simple and based on 1. Forming 2. Growing 4. Maturing 3. Consolidating 5. Terminating Voluntary Sector Excellence Model FIGURE 1 Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I A P R I L 2 0 0 1 I 59 Excellence In Our Communities H...
Fire in the Hole
Quality professionals must be able to measure progress by creating a baseline to determine the effectiveness of their programs. The Japanese process known as kaizen refers to continuous improvement of quality to internal customers, which reduces costs....
The Branding of Six Sigma
Brand yourself the same way
So, back to Six Sigma branding: The wannabe quality gurus took their lead from the leading marketing books. To build Six Sigma brand equity, they did what marking experts advise. Wannabe gurus write Six Sigma books to create awareness and buzz....
Teach What You Preach
To assess the demands of business and industry in Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, and Great Britain, European researchers identified eight important quality concept and skill categories. These included customer orientation, the practical knowledge...
Creative Thinking For Surprising Quality
Understanding and exceeding the needs of customers is critical for quality management. By using customer surveys and focus groups, organizations are asking customers to be creative on their behalf, but customer research alone does not result in the...
"You Just Print Checks, Right?"
A payroll processor becomes registered to ISO 9001
Dominion Systems, with 20 employees, is currently the largest local payroll processor in Western Michigan, handling payroll for nearly 400 different companies. By looking at individual elements of the standard, you can see what Dominion Systems did to mak...
Column: Emerging Sectors: "You Just Print Checks, Right?"
Dominion Systems, with 20 employees, is currently the largest local payroll processor in Western Michigan, handling payroll for nearly 400 different companies. But the challenge was that Dominion was growing at a very steady rate and needed to do...
Quality for the Long Haul at Gerber
For the Gerber Products Co., quality has been a major part of the company's history of trust, commitment, and goodness. Even as early as the original efforts of Daniel and Dorothy Gerber in the 1920s, attention was paid to manufacturing processes and...
Project management--the next big thing.
Project software has been developed, and thousands of people are taking project management classes. Learn and use project management. I think ASQ and quality's next explosive growth will come from work visionaries who can integrate process management (qua...
Total Quality Requires Serious Training
Simultaneous training of line workers and their direct supervisors is a key to successful implementation of total quality (TQ). A three-module training system is suggested. Module A covers a variety of topics that must be well integrated: an...
Our Work Future As Seen By Phil Crosby
Deming is gone and Juran less active, but Crosby remains, standing head and shoulders above most in the quality profession. Crosby: Quality and Me: Lessons from an Evolving Life [San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 1999] is my autobiography. Crosby: I've star...
To Be a Problem Solver, Be a Classicist
Intuitive individuals and teams form mental images of the activities involved in the problem, 48 I Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I J U N E 1 9 9 9 T O B E A P R O B L E M S O LV E R , B E A C L A S S I C I S T 1. Creative 2. Leader 3. Analytical 4. Struc...
Small Service Firms Face TQM Implementation Challenges
A survey questionnaire mailed to 1,000 small and medium-sized service firms in the United States plus 20 follow-up interviews examined the status, usefulness, and limitations of total quality management (TQM). Firms with 500 or fewer employees were...
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...
Sales Process Engineering: An Emerging Quality Application
Systematic exploration of events that precede and follow a sale can generate opportunities for improvement. This process orientation toward sales is the key to sales process engineering. For example, a business-to-business sales process can include...
Texas Nameplate Company: All You Need Is Trust
Improvements in nonconformance rates and cycle times at Texas Nameplate Company (TNC) rely on good measurements and an easy to understand gain-sharing plan. In 1992, TNC's total nonconformances as a percentage of billing was between 15% and 18%, the...
The Barriers to Total Quality Management
A survey of quality control managers and quality managers provided rankings for 25 potential impediments to TQM (total quality management). The 25 items were identified by interviewing managers and searching the literature. Then they were sent to 872...
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...
Improving the Quality of Family Life
Quality principles and tools have helped the parents and children in this family. Even though families differ from business organizations in how individuals become members and in the nature of leadership, many quality concepts are applicable to both...
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...
Keeping Neat Records of Noncompliance Is Not Quality
Quality management must be embedded into the operations of the organization. It requires a culture in which transactions and relationships are consistently successful. Leaders of successful organizations need the absolutes of leadership: agenda for...
Implementing Quality One Class at a Time
From the Deming philosophy, the following principles were derived as the basis for improving the Manufacturing Processes course: 1. Consumer satisfaction ( students as evaluators of the course) 2. Employee involvement ( students as participants in the co...
COQ Systems: The Right Stuff
Cost of quality (COQ) is a performance measurement system that supports the implementation of quality improvement programs. Developed by J. M. Juran and others in the early 1950s, these measurements of poor quality were promoted by the ASQC Quality...
TQM Within FORTUNE 500 Corporations
96.7% Yes 3.3% No ( n = 92) 10. If such quality teams exist, are they put together by: 17.0% Management 4.6% Employees with an interest in the area or problem 78.4% Both ( n = 88) 11. When quality teams are formed to address issues of concern within the ...
Renewing American Civilization, Pillar Five: Quality as Defined by Deming
Empowerment is a key to societal quality. W. Edwards Deming has encouraged this by codifying the decency, hard work, integrity, and sincerity found in America. Other communicators who have increased the awareness of quality include Philip B. Crosby,...
Implementing Deming's Fourth Point
Acceptable quality distribution (AQD) and quality-based incentive pricing (Q-pricing) should replace the acceptable quality level (AQL) approach in procurement. This is how to satisfy W. Edwards Deming's 4th point on avoiding price as the sole...
Power in Organizations: A Look Through the TQM Lens
Successful relationships between empowered employees and their supervisors depend on judicious use of organizational social powers. These powers can help elicit commitment from employees in the TQM (total quality management) environment. The three...
Quality Management Practices Worldwide: Convergence or Divergence?
This study compared U.S. and Pacific Rim electronics-industry managers' attitudes toward quality. A 33-item questionnaire was distributed to 285 individuals, most of whom were middle managers. The 68.8% response rate included 96 responses from 17...
What Do Managers Really Think of the ISO 9000 Registration Process?
Forty Colorado companies were surveyed about the ISO 9000 registration process. Each company was ISO-9000 registered, and the key ISO 9000 person at each firm answered the 22 open-ended survey questions. Results indicate that 85% of the firms sought...
Quality Quest: One Company's Successful Attempt at Implementing TQM
The facilitator training was an intense four- day program focusing on the following: � Quality, including Crosby's four absolutes and 14 steps ( day 1) � The customer- supplier process and the facilitator's role in it ( day 1) � Problem- solving methodol...
Overcoming the Real Issues of Implementation
Total quality management (TQM) initiatives encounter problems of language, measurement, focus, infrastructure, time, and cultural change. The language of TQM implementation at GEC Plessey Semiconductors (GPS) emphasizes customers, teamwork, and...
Quality Costs: A Report Card on Business
The steps are then categorized Prevention Market research Customer/ internal user surveys Training and education Account reconciliation Quality director, staff, and expenses Quality system audits Quality planning Supplier qualification program Preventive...
