- Auditing
- 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 Capability
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Project Management
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Safety
- Six Sigma
- Social Responsibility
- Standards
- Statistical Process Control (SPC)
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Theory of Constraints
- Total Quality Management
- AS9000
- Career Development
- Risk Management
- Economic Case for Quality
- err
- err
- Continuous Improvement
3.4 per Million: The Right Decision
As the Six Sigma Academy led large deployments at Allied Signal, GE and other organizations in the 1990s, one of the great benefits realized was linking define, measure, analyze, improve and control-based project improvement to financial performance....
Standards Outlook: Trust, but Verify
Grouping product, service and process audits together is somewhat natural, because a process audit may include a product or service audit. I’ve dubbed the combination a verification audit....
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...
Statistics Roundtable: Divide and Conquer in Reliability Analyses
All product is not created equal. Some units are more likely to fail in service than others. Thus, in reliability evaluations, you need to identify subpopulations with different failure susceptibility....
Attitude Shift
In a used-car dealership group based in Richmond, VA, a lean culture change took place that started with a redesign of its process for reconditioning used cars and ended with numerous benefits, some of which it didn't expect....
Spring Into Action
Last year, I was presented the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. It was a great honor for all of us at General Systems Co.—and for all of us in the quality profession—to be recognized for our efforts related to total quality and innovation....
Building a Consensus
A new tool, the consensus chart, can drive improvement activities identified during the development or operation of a quality system process....
Career Corner: Changing Times
In consulting and planning with not-for-profits—especially universities, unaccustomed to market turbulence—I often use the phrase “glacial change.” The phrase implies change that is large but so gradual that human beings don’t see...
Think Again
If we stop and contemplate why we think of audit results as pass or fail, we may become more aware of how our mentality affects the way we behave during an audit and how that mind-set influences others....
Ask, and Ye Shall Receive
Journalists are experts in managing conversational flow and encouraging people to open up and provide vital information. Their techniques can serve auditors well as they navigate the frustrating quagmire of audit and assessment interviews....
Quality in the First Person: Make a Pit Stop
With each passing day, it seems as though the economy get a little worse. The stock market, unemployment rates and layoffs all paint a grim picture of the current state of the nation. While everyone is looking for an end to the economic crisis...
Measure for Measure: Conscientious Calibrations
There are compelling reasons for an organization to get certified to a standard, but one that gets overlooked is the impact on the environment....
Career Corner: Out of Quality, Out of Business
Being lean used to be associated with poverty and starvation. Today, being lean refers to profitability and fitness, especially in business. Cutting corporate fat, or non-essentials, has become as important for organizational health as slimming down is...
Volviendo a los Fundamentos: Probando, Probando, 1, 2, 3
Así como es importante que un producto funcione correctamente, el manual del producto también debe funcionar. Propietarios o usuarios de productos deben ser capaces de encontrar fácilmente la información que necesitan para utilizar...
Back to Basics: Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3
Just as it is important that a product function properly, the product manual must also work. Owners or product users must be able to easily find the information they need to use an item effectively. To achieve this objective, the content and organization...
Quality in the First Person: Call to Order
In summer 2001, I was working as a quality engineering manager in New Hampshire. While living there, I became involved in local government—much to the chagrin of my patient wife. Among other positions, I was serving as a member of the town’s budget...
Gimme Five
By integrating 5S into the culture of your lab, you will see landmark improvements in the performance of those who work there, while setting an example of excellence for your entire organization to follow....
Progress Report
Six Sigma has been a hot topic discussed and implemented globally in the business world, nonprofit organizations and even governments. There is comparatively less research, however, into how to assess the maturity of Six Sigma implementation....
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....
Expert Answers: July 2009
Setting up a corrective action document ... Dock-to-stock for medical devices ... Questions about confidence intervals....
All Ears
Imagine you are presenting the analysis and findings of a critical operational issue or proposed improvement project to senior management. You feel confident because you’ve thoroughly measured and analyzed the data....
Quality in the First Person: Quality Isn't a 9-to-5 Job
As a quality professional, I often think about how quality is embedded in people’s everyday lives. Looking back at my own life, I was shocked to learn how long and how much of an impact quality has had on me—especially outside of work....
Standards Outlook: Revised AS&D Standards Take Flight
The International Aerospace Quality Group has released the IAQG 9100:2009 aviation, space and defense standards in all three of its sectors....
Expert Answers: June 2009
Auditing management systems ... ISO 9001 trouble ... Crunching the numbers for product specifications....
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....
Riding the Storm Out
Virtually everyone and every organization has been touched in some way by today’s turbulent economy. Smaller budgets, unexpected layoffs and workplace shake-ups have become commonplace....
Standards Outlook: Effective Audit Programs
Today's organizations need to be agile and responsive to the changing requirements in private and public business sectors. Properly directed, internal audit program resources can help an organization stay focused and uncover improvement opportunities....
Online Sidebar Creasy
The evolution to 6TOC includes its predecessors, Six Sigma, lean manufacturing, lean Six Sigma and the theory of constraints...
Expert Answers: May 2009
Design deviation ... Choosing your chart ... Studying sigma shift...
A Lean Six Sigma Breakthrough
The relationship between lean and Six Sigma may appear to be simple, but in practice it may be more challenging because there are so many ways to piece the two together....
Career Corner: Survive and Thrive
No sector is immune. Manufacturing, IT, finance, healthcare, education, publishing and retail are being affected by conditions that range from slowdown to slow-motion collapse....
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....
One Good Idea: Beyond Sensors and Scopes
Technicians in a testing lab had access to some of the most powerful microscopes and analytical technology available. But, until they employed lean tools, they couldn’t see the solution to a problem that had challenged them for years....
Statistics Roundtable: A Correlation Encounter
In a recent visit to the control room for a processing unit, a new process engineer asks the question: “Why doesn’t the correlation between the two process variables, x1 and x2, match the correlation as suggested by the theory?”...
FMEA Minus the Pain
Failure mode effects analysis has stood the test of time as a powerful risk assessment tool for products, processes and systems....
Back in Circulation
As the applications for lean expand, organizations must realize lean’s usefulness goes beyond environmental efforts. But first, we must look at the history of lean and to understand how its future fully complements social responsibility....
Statistics Roundtable: In a Certain Way
Whenever we estimate a population parameter from a sample, in addition to providing a point estimate, we should also include an interval to characterize the associated uncertainty....
Standards Outlook: Dynamic Duo
Lean and Six Sigma are two methods aimed at improving the quality of an organization’s operations and its financial results. Both concentrate on customer satisfaction and improved business performance....
Career Corner: Make Your Own Luck
A colleague mentioned that he thought of me as the most successful person he knew and asked for advice. Ironically, I don’t ever feel successful and am always trying to improve, but I told my friend I was probably just lucky....
Human Touch
“No job is so important, nor service so urgent, that we cannot take the time to perform our work safely.” Those familiar with the old Bell System will remember this safety creed. It helped guide many decisions in potentially dangerous situations....
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....
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....
A Simple Plan
For more than 100 years, U.S. manufacturers have advanced equipment and manufacturing technologies to constantly monitor progress and drive process improvement....
Cause and Effect
Cause and effect tree analysis—also known as fault tree analysis—begins with a known event, referred to as the top event, and describes possible combinations of events and conditions that can lead to this event....
The Power of Balance
Many organizations face tremendous challenges in calculating trade-off relationships and the point of balance when determining their cost of quality. Experts don’t always agree, compounding the difficulty....
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....
Standards Outlook: Risk and Quality Management
The media has made all of us aware of the global financial crisis caused by the assumption of risk by banks and speculators in stocks and commodities....
Back to Basics: Improve a Nonconforming System
When we think of nonconforming material, we think about scrapped and reworked material or products that directly cut into a company’s bottom line. But a closer look shows that a nonconforming material system can provide a wealth of information....
Quality in the First Person: From Class to Career
“Stauffer, on Monday morning, you will either be in that total quality leadership (TQL) class, or in front of the captain, explaining why you were not there!” With these words, my division officer inadvertently put my life on a different course....
Measure for Measure: In No Uncertain Terms
Because ISO/IEC Guide 99:2007 harmonizes terms for many different industries, it is important to take a closer look at all the terms. In this column, I will examine measurement uncertainty and metrological (measurement) traceability....
One Good Idea: A Tasty Comparison
The objective in this article is to test the hypothesis that the actual distribution matches the hypothesized distribution provided by Mars. The underlying distribution, called the multinomial distribution, is an extension of the binomial distribution. Be...
Salary Survey 2008: Part 1, Section 12: Salary by Industry
U.S. and Canadian survey respondents are a lot alike when it comes to the industries in which they work....
Salary Survey 2008: Part 2, Section 22: Base Earnings by Consulting Experience and RABQSA International Certification
Section 8 in the regular employee results reveals that the number of years spent in a position has little impact on regular employees’ salaries. What about self-employed consultants?...
Salary Survey 2008: Looking at the Numbers
Mean salary: The mean salary is the average salary for that particular group. Manager: Ensures the administration of the company’s quality, process and business improvement efforts within a defined segment of the organization. Quality engineer: Designs, i...
Perspectives: In Crisis, Give Credit to Quality
The financial industry needs a quality framework for manufacturing and controlling complex mathematical models, technological systems and financial data. Therefore, if Congress enacted strict quality standards for financial data and its distribution, the ...
Salary Survey 2008: The Complete Report
51 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 in Current Position Online Section 9 Salary by Number of Years in Current Position and in the Quality Field Onli...
Total Quality, Total Commitment
An innovative approach to quality helped A.V. Feigenbaum create the concept of total quality management. Indeed, Feigenbaum’s quality contributions have been praised by U.S. business leaders and quality professionals around the globe. Armand V. Feigenbaum...
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...
Statistics Roundtable: The Pros of Proactive Product Servicing
Just like athletes can experience an injury that takes them out of a game, systems can experience component failures that require downtime and repair....
Quality in the First Person: Street Smarts
When I was 18, I started my career on a production line at my father’s place of employment. Up to that point, my father, an engineer, had always shown me how things were made and how they could be better....
Expert Answers: October 2008
Sample size of 30 ... DFMEA dilemma....
Statistics Roundtable: More is Not Always Better
All other things being equal, if offered a choice between small or large sample sizes, the larger sample size is preferred. Or is it?...
Flip the Switch
Have you found the root cause yet? We frequently ask or hear others ask that question. Root cause analysis is a familiar subject. You might assume that quality professionals would have a clear understanding of the technique. But many don't....
Career Corner: A Portable Career
Technical abilities—accounting, law or engineering—get a job done but don’t necessarily support entrepreneurship. I’ve also founded a number of businesses including Greg’s Outrageous Cookie Co., a publishing business and loads of others. Greg Hutchins is...
Geared Toward Innovation
The role of innovation is being vigorously debated among quality professionals and in society at large. It is therefore appropriate that innovation has been elevated to one of the most important strategic issues for the quality profession....
Newer Better Faster
The Small Business Administration has indicated that the majority of innovations are consistent with the continuous improvement commonly used in the define, measure, analyze, improve and control (DMAIC) Six Sigma method....
Expert Answers: September 2008
Information management systems ... The benefits of binomial probability plotting....
Starting From Scratch
Graduate students studying quality developed the Quality Systems Development Roadmap to help organizations do this, using application templates from the Lean Six Sigma Quality Transformation Toolkit. However, new companies, organizations without an enterp...
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 ...
One Good Idea: Find the Answers You Seek
Incidental differences—those with no impact on the component's performance—are often resolved by modifying the product print to match the samples. Microsoft Excel has a powerful tool called "Goal Seek" that makes this resolution a breeze....
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....
In the Know
More and more organizations are choosing outsourcing as a necessary means of remaining competitive in the global economy. Quality professionals must consider building a body of knowledge completely dedicated to the subject of quality in outsourcing....
Online Figure 1 Ramu
Outsourcing BoK Expected cognition Perceived weight CMQ/ OE CQE CQA CSQE ( New) CRE CSSBB CSSGB CCT CBA CHA CQT CQPA CQIA CQI Project management 10 Project charter Create Create Apply Project estimation and tracking Analyze Apply Apply Apply Understand C...
3.4 per Million: After the Low-Hanging Fruit
There are four major approaches for organization-wide improvement efforts that fall under the label “lean Six Sigma,” as evidenced by current practices at many industrial organizations, service organizations and consulting firms....
Career Corner: Laugh It Off
Assuring quality, and laughter, might seem at diametrically opposite sides of the human behavior spectrum. Many studies and articles have been published about the benefits of laughter and humor when managing people or projects, or when trying to overcome ...
The Road to Improvement
Registration of public organizations to the ISO 9001 quality management standard can be difficult because of their complex operations and extensive documentation....
Raising the Bar
Now more than ever, companies must measure and manage their quality costs to compete at a high level in today’s global marketplace....
Strength in Numbers
Finding resources to pursue quality improvement and organizational excellence is the greatest challenge confronting most organizations today, including universities and professional organizations....
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: Ready for Takeoff
The International Aerospace Quality Group (IAQG) is putting finishing touches on the next revision of AS9100, the quality management system (QMS) standard for the aviation, space and defense (AS&D) industries....
Quality in the First Person: Traffic Jam
This audit led me in a direction that I would never have dreamed of—and left me with a spectacular story to tell....
Customer Servicemen
Customer Feedback is a key component of improvement. The challenge has always been finding the most effective way of procuring it....
One Good Idea: High Probability of Success
Normal is the most frequently occurring type of distribution, but to use the statistics relating to normal distribution, it is necessary to prove the data are, in fact, normally distributed....
Quality in the First Person: All Roads Lead to Quality
At 17, most high school students are trying to decide what they want to do with their lives. At graduation, I never would have thought that in 10 years I would work in quality assurance....
3.4 per Million: Data Dependability
As quality or Six Sigma professionals, we have been taught to address the issue of data accuracy and integrity from the statistical viewpoint....
Better Safe Than Sorry
Last year’s record number of product recalls, especially recalls of children’s toys, drew worldwide attention to product safety and defective products. The recall stories topped newscasts and made headlines in newspapers coast to coast....
Back to Basics: A Call for Improvement
It’s a common perception that customer phone support is a resource-draining operation. This misconception results in many call center cost reduction projects but few process improvement initiatives. Basic tools can be used to improve a call center....
Quality in the First Person: Uniquely Prepared
Being the quality manager of a plastics extrusion and fabrication company for the last eight years has required large shares of technical savvy, people skills and hard work. The experience and skills I’ve gained in the trenches have been invaluable....
The Architect of Quality
Joseph M. Juran 1904 - 2008
Pioneer. Teacher. Consultant. Guru. Each of these words describes Joseph M. Juran, the man who became a giant in the world of quality management and changed how companies do business....
One Good Idea: Upon Further Review...
Often, a product release occurs without the company taking a crucial step—performing a product release readiness review to determine whether the product is ready for release and whether the company is prepared to lend its full support to the product....
Sharp HealthCare Gets to the Point in Managing Diabetes
With literature from the last five years demonstrating that poor control of blood sugar in acute healthcare settings equates to negative outcomes in diabetics, Sharp HealthCare in San Diego decided to control it everywhere....
Quality in the First Person: Lapses in Quality
This past year marked my 10th year in industry. It seemed an opportune time to look back at how the various companies I have worked for approached quality....
Testing the Limits of Team Development
The stages of team development are well known. Not as defined are practical techniques for moving through the process quickly without sacrificing performance. There are examples of how this can be done, including ASQ’s exam review workshops....
Career Corner: Don't Settle for Shortcuts
Although they have been around for years, diploma mills are increasingly gaining exposure in the internet age, using technology to bombard us with offers for quick degrees that can be obtained with little or no academic effort. People who obtain degrees f...
Volviendo a los Fundamentos: Una Reconocimiento a la Documentacion
¿No es más importante completar la tarea que completar el papeleo? ¿Por qué las organizaciones gastan tiempo y valiosos recursos en generar y mantener el papeleo de sus sistemas?...
Career Corner: Company of One
The authors offer practical tips for career and life management success. Then, I learned job success was based on project success—mastering the cost and quality sides of work. Harry Beckwith and Christine Beckwith, You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself, ...
A Gold Medal Solution
By using quality tools, a team from Boeing came up with solutions that eliminated the unsafe conditions that occurred during installation of the details in aircrafts' tailcones....
Back to Basics: An Appreciation for Documentation
Isn’t completing the task more important than completing the paperwork? Why do organizations spend valuable time and resources generating and maintaining paperwork systems?...
