- Cost of Quality
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Data Quality
- Engineering
- Environmental Manag. and Sustainability
- Global Quality
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrics
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
- Quality Function Deployment
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Six Sigma
- Small Business
- Social Responsibility
- Software Quality
- Standards
- Statistical Process Control (SPC)
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Total Quality Management
- Customer Experience Management
- Customer Requirements
- Food Safety
- Economic Case for Quality
The Right Move
Shortcomings in both measurement systems and traditional methods for assessing customer satisfaction affect the ability of most firms to directly link quality improvements to changes in financial performance....
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....
Standards Outlook: What's Really Important
By the end of this year, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is expected to issue a new version of ISO 9001....
The True Test of Loyalty
The customer loyalty field has experienced much technological innovation, such as automated reporting portals and integration of attitudinal and behavioral data in customer relationship management applications, over the past decade....
A Framework for Business Ethics
Profit maximization is, of course, the main and foremost objective for any commercial organization. Most modern organizations realize that to survive in today’s competitive arena, customers have to be satisfied....
Build Loyalty Through Experience Management
Connecting emotionally with customers requires an organization to create a total customer experience that differentiates the organization from the competition. This is important because customers’ overall experiences with the organization and 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 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...
Deliver Great Service By Listening and Adapting
The customer service systems of most companies worldwide are seldom adaptable enough to handle diverse situations. To avoid giving customers the impression that their contacts are a waste of time, an organization must have an actionable voice of the...
Employee and Patient Focus Earns the Baldrige
Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo, Michigan has a vision of becoming a national leader in healthcare quality. In the 1990s, it began using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria as a tool for improvement and self-evaluation, and in...
Your Customers Are Talking, But Are You Listening?
Few companies have a process to listen to their customers and act on the information. Without a method to measure how satisfied customers are, the door is left open to the competition. The listen, collect, analyze, learn, improve (LCALI) process can...
Link Satisfaction To Market Share and Profitability
Organizations seeking to link customer satisfaction data to profitability can choose from a variety of business outcome measures. However, the level of customer interaction varies among industries, making it difficult to link customer satisfaction to...
Manage Complaints To Enhance Loyalty
Every customer complaint represents a chance to correct a flawed process, educate a customer, and strengthen loyalty. But unless management can quantify the return on investment of complaint handling, they won't see the link between complaint handling...
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...
Next Level Leadership
Soon after the Texas Nameplate Co. (TNC) won its first Baldrige Award in 1998, president and CEO Dale Crownover was already discussing how to improve TNC in a Baldrige way so the company could reapply for the award as soon as it was eligible. Now, not...
Driving Organic Growth at Bank of America
The American Customer Satisfaction Index has shown that customers view banks and other financial institutions as a commodity, and consequently, they have no reason to establish a relationship with any one bank. In 2001 executives at Bank of America saw...
Are Your Hearing Voices?
For a company to succeed in today's marketplace, it must listen to the voice of the customer (VOC) so it can provide the products and services that inspire an enthusiastic customer response. One effective way to collect VOC input is through a customer...
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....
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....
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...
Stoner: Built on a Strong Foundation
Stoner Inc., a manufacturer of cleaning, lubrication, and coating products, was the 2003 winner of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the small business category. The company is run with only two operational levels: the leadership team that...
Twelve Ways to Add Value to Audits
Much has been said and done in the last couple of years related to organizational improvement and value added auditing....
What Do CEOs Think About Quality
Quality professionals can count on the support of the American Society for Quality when justifying the cost of quality to upper management. ASQ has conducted a survey of top executives in manufacturing, service, healthcare, and education to determine...
Qualitative vs. Quantitative Methods
Using statistical methods in quality management systems (QMSs) has been discussed ever since the advent of total quality management (TQM) and ISO 9000 certification. Yet statistics remain an often neglected component of quality management systems....
Move From Product to Customer Centric
Can a 50-year-old manufacturer of industrial products become a customer centric organization? How can a traditionally product centric company learn to listen systematically to its customers?...
Turn Your Customers Into Interns
You may have been here before: You just signed a contract to have a house built. You’re excited at the prospect and can’t wait to move in. Obviously, with the contract just signed, your move in date is far off....
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...
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....
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...
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...
Survey for Action, Not Satisfaction
Traditional customer satisfaction processes bring the voice of the customer back to management, but they fail to identify what to improve and how to take action. These failures can be addressed through a strategic customer driven action process (CAP)....
Hungary's Journey To Business Excellence
Hungary has emerged as a major European success story, its economy thriving despite the recent worldwide recession. Four Hungarian companies illustrate how quality has led to business success. Using total quality management techniques tailored to fit...
The Loyalty Elephant
There is an old parable about a group of blind men describing an elephant. Lacking vision, they must use their sense of touch to understand what an elephant looks like. Recent articles about the differences between customer satisfaction, customer value...
Boost Stock Performance, Nation's Economy
The concept of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) was first presented ten years ago by the author before the National Quality Roundtable. Data gathered from the experiences of actual customers had a strong economic imperative: Firms that...
Column: Standards Outlook: Quality Management System vs. Quality Improvement
What should we tell the CEO?
A column by James Harrington, a former company COO began, "All quality programs, whether TQM, Six Sigma or ISO 9000, require an organization to shift away from the status quo."
The article was about resistance to change, but the choice of words of a...
Mine Customer Experiences
Customer feedback is a valuable source of information that provides organizations with a sound basis for making product improvements. An affinity diagram permits organization of vast amounts of quantitative data to identify patterns or groupings to...
Peter F. Drucker: Delivering Value to Customers
Before Peter F. Drucker published his seminal book defining management as a formal discipline, there was no coherent body of knowledge addressing management issues. Drucker rejects the commonly held belief that the purpose of business is to make a...
Don't Measure Customer Satisfaction
Evaluation criteria for major quality awards and certificates require businesses to gather customer satisfaction feedback, yet few managers find much use for this information. Many fail to see a correlation between customer satisfaction scores and the...
It Might Not Be Your Product
Quality assurance managers respond to customer complaints with the assumption that the problem is product or service failure. Often, however, the cause isn't the fault of the product itself but is due to incorrect use or unreasonable expectation by the...
What Do Customers Value?
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 45 Market Perceived Performance Profile FIGURE 5 Performance attributes Importance weights (%) Accessibility Product availability Order accuracy Ontime delivery Delivery condition Billing accuracy...
A Quick, Accurate Way to Determine Customer Needs
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 85 The Project Process and Phases FIGURE 2 Workshop 1 Keep open, no assumptions Phase one Discovery Phase two Validation of findings Strategy development Recommendations for action Workshop 2 Workshop 4 W...
The Tip of the Iceberg
I have seen too many organizations reduce costs by eliminating essential product or service fea- 30 I Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I M A Y 2 0 0 1 T H E T I P O F T H E I C E B E R G Six Sigma and the Bottom Line FIGURE 1 Good price Market share Fast cy...
How To Make Surveys Simpler and More Focused
How To Make Surveys Simpler and More Focused Apply multivariate statistical procedures by Larry R. Vinson C U S T O M E R S A T I S F A C T I O N 58 I Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I M A Y 2 0 0 1 RGANIZATIONS ARE BECOMING increasingly focused on listeni...
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...
Measurements For Business
Measurements are the principle tool used to manage businesses. Quality professionals who support process improvement must understand the principles and processes behind the measurements they make. The popular Balanced Scorecard approach divides the need...
Market Research for Quality in Small Business
Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 1 I 31 Market Research for Quality In Small Business Methods can be reduced in scope and complexity by William L. Rhey and Frank M. Gryna S M A L L B U S I N E S S MALL BUSINESSES CAN NOT AFFORD the lux...
Quality Culture in Small Business: Four Case Studies
Companies of all sizes must focus on four elements in order to determine their quality standing. These include a firm's position relative to market competition, the cost of poor quality for the organization, the quality culture, and the effectiveness of...
The Power of Quality Thinking in Sales and Management
In many ways the customer's buying process is just as ( if not more) important to understand as the selling process, because customer behavior is the ultimate focus Conduct initial mutual review Generate invoice/ receive payment New View of Sales Process...
Turning CFOs into Quality Champions
For chief financial officers (CFOs) to support quality efforts, they must see that quality improvements have an impact on problems, complaint behavior, or customer satisfaction. Before studying the effect of enhanced quality on profits, the CFO should...
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...
Baldrige and the Human Equation In Health Care Mergers
This preliminary research was used to create a draft survey that was presented to an employee opinion survey team, which was responsible for the entire survey process. The ECI uses the results of multiple questions about employee loyalty to the organizati...
Quality in Banking Starts with Four Assessments
Assessments help banks learn how to improve customer and employee satisfaction, internal quality, company culture, and operating cost systems. One large assessment area covers the four components of the cost of poor quality. Internal failure costs...
Implementing the Six Sigma Solution
Six sigma initiatives rely on quantitative, root-cause analyses and the comparison of customer requirements to business performance. Any business can use this method to solve its process problems. To do so, it must have good information about its...
Customer-Value Analysis Helps Hone Strategy
Customer-value models include the customer-value hierarchy and the net present value of customers (NPVC). These illustrate the importance of high customer value to targeting long term, sustainable, and loyal customers, who help increase profitability...
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...
Are Your Surveys Only Suitable for Wrapping Fish?
Most surveys are ineffective because they ask the wrong questions; target the wrong people; are given at the wrong time; or do not provide the information needed for improvement. Ineffective surveys ask about factors that the organization assumes are...
Doing the Right Things Right
The 1997 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners were honored at a ceremony in which President Clinton noted that continuous improvement and the elevation of employees serve the bottom line and the general public. Solectron Corporation won its...
What Does Your Customer Really Want?
The voice of the customer can be linked to a company's internal quality improvement efforts by paying attention to customer loyalty and value, which are driven by quality, price, and company image. The five steps to management of customer loyalty and...
The Criteria: A Looking Glass to Americans' Understanding of Quality
Customer and Market Focus is Category 3 in the 1997 criteria of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. As the third of seven installments on the Baldrige criteria, this article describes the evolution of Category 3 and the need to understand...
Involve Employees at Every Level of Strategic Planning
The search conference allows all employees to participate in continuous organizational learning and active adaptation to turbulent change. A typical search conference involves 20 to 40 employees who work on planning tasks for two to three days....
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,...
Five Myths About Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction programs are harmed by misperceptions. Satisfaction is not objective. Instead, it is an attitude that requires indirect and careful analysis. Measuring it is not simple or one-dimensional. Instead, satisfaction is complex and...
Maximizing the Value of Customer Feedback
The voice of the customer (VOC) is vital, but too many companies analyze this information inefficiently. Studies of over 100 companies by Technical Assistance Research Programs, Inc. (TARP) show how to improve customer feedback programs. Measures of...
Something Old, Something New
Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) keeps the winning edge and avoids complacency by adhering to its business philosophy, the HP Way, and by improving itself through programs like Quality 1 on 1. An interview with HP president and chief executive officer...
Americans' Nostalgic Affair with Loyalty
To answer these questions, a loyalty archetype study was conducted by Archetype Discoveries during the fall of 1995 for Canada Trust, Chrysler Corp., Delphi Packard, Kellogg Co., Kennedy Space Center, Lockheed Martin Space Operations Co., McDonnell Dougl...
Customer Loyalty: Playing for Keeps
Going beyond customer satisfaction means paying attention to lifetime customers, finding out what customers want, solving their problems, managing their moments of truth, rewarding them, and encouraging involvement from both customers and frontline...
The Continuing Quest for Excellence
Panel member Patrick Mene, vice president of quality, Ritz- Carlton Hotel Company, a 1992 Baldrige Award winner, said, " Even after receiving the Baldrige Award, the examiners' feedback and the criteria have played major roles in cutting cycle time by 50...
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 Is Helping Canadian Airlines International Get Off the Ground
Employee involvement and customer focus has enabled Canadian Airlines International to improve its customer service ranking from last to first in five years. An interview with chief executive officer (CEO) Kevin J. Jenkins highlights the company's...
Maintaining Focus Within Your Organization
When a company decides to apply for the Baldrige Award and all divisions are told to prepare for the award application process, the organization becomes consumed with winning the contest: The quality specialists and managers are trained in the award crit...
But It Takes Too Long . . .
Quality improvement projects can consume too much time. The Juran Institute studied twenty projects of 10 clients in 5 industries. The average project took 68.1 weeks; 62.8% of that time could have been eliminated. Inadequate management preparation...
Preparing the Front Line
Companies that value customer service make it a part of the organizational culture. In particular, customer service employees are the target of a three-part strategy of hiring, development, and motivation. These are the findings of a survey of five...
The Dual Role of AT&T's Self-Assessment Process
Evaluations of business performance allow units of a company to share strengths and opportunities for improvement. Eighty percent of the organizations within AT&T have used the Chairman's Quality Award (CQA) to assess each other. Based on the Malcolm...
