- Cost of Quality
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Data Quality
- Design of Experiments
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Capability
- Process Management
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Safety
- Six Sigma
- Software Quality
- Standards
- Statistical Process Control (SPC)
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Total Quality Management
- Software and Technology (for statistics, measurement, analysis)
- Information Management
- Customer Requirements
- Economic Case for Quality
- Change Management
Expert Answers: September 2008
Information management systems ... The benefits of binomial probability plotting....
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....
ASQ Certification Board Puts Quality Tools to Work
Recognizing the importance of customer satisfaction in strategic planning, the ASQ certification board recently used quality tools to develop customer requirements. To begin the process, a SIPOC (suppliers, inputs, outputs, and customers) diagram was...
The International Growth of Quality
Human, economic, and technological changes in the international arena require that businesses deliver high quality value to customers. Fundamental to any business's competitive strength is its ability to understand and implement the language of quality....
Apply Six Sigma To Sales and Marketing
A common misconception regarding Six Sigma is that it applies only to manufacturing processes and that its fact-based problem solving methodology doesn't transfer to business processes such as marketing and sales. These people believe that a...
New Frontiers in the Design of Experiments
Statistically designed experiments enable businesses to reduce time to market while achieving quality product performance that is critical to survival and success. R.A. Fisher first introduced them in the early 20th century to evaluate the results of...
Career Corner: Three R's for Quality Professionals
While talking with the president of a growing service company, I learned he had some painful connections to the concept of quality professionalism. The words he associated with those who had "quality" in their job titles were overwhelmingly negative....
Lean Lessons: Building Blocks
Is your organization wasting its valuable resources? Waste can directly impact your organization’s costs, quality and delivery, and may lead to excess inventory, unnecessary movement, unintentional waiting time, untapped......
What Do Online Customers Value?
Burgeoning e-commerce sales point to the pivotal role of the Internet as an effective marketing tool. An online survey was used to determine which website design features have the strongest consumer appeal. One section of the survey gathered background...
Quality Management's Role in Global Sourcing
Globalization and the evolution of quality management systems from a focus on controlling product conformity to a much broader focus on overall enterprise capability have resulted in the need to redefine the role of quality management in dealing with...
Compliance and Ethics Group Formed
Recently I learned about a new organization, the Open Compliance and Ethics Group (OCEG). I immediately found its website (www.oceg.org) and was impressed....
Senior Citizens Get It Done
Stop now! Enter this column only if you meet admission requirements. Those who fail to meet the standard of being a confirmed senior citizen need not apply. Discrimination against young people is in progress....
Healthcare Agreement Revision Nears Release
The first revision of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) International Workshop Agreement (IWA 1) should be released this month if all goes according to plan....
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...
The Quality of Learning
Quality in education can be difficult to measure because the educational process differs from manufacturing in certain intrinsic ways. The University of the Pacific’s school of dentistry uses a competency-based approach to education that assumes...
Quality, Not Quantity, of Management
This article is from the book The Power of Management Capital: Utilizing the New Drivers of Innovation, Profitability, and Growth in a Demanding Global Economy, available through Quality Press, item number
Create a Lean, Mean Machine
"Lean" has been defined as a systematic approach to identifying and eliminating waste through continuous improvement. Lean focuses on value added flow of resources from the customer’s point of view. To compete in today’s economy a company must...
Become a Baldrige Examiner
Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 1 I 49 Become a Baldrige Examiner The benefits for you, your organization and the quality community are worth the long hours and hard work by Steve Hoisington M A L C O L M B A L D R I G E N A T I O N...
Measure for Six Sigma Success
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 1 I 35 Measure for Six Sigma Success Combining measurement science with Six Sigma builds organization wisdom, big business advantages by Thomas A. Pearson M E A S U R E M E N T , I N S P E C T I O N A...
Six Sigma, E-Commerce Pose New Challenges
Companies feel a need to become more flexible and ready to respond to rapid changes due to the growth of e-commerce. Corporate systems for responding to such changes have the same role as that of the central nervous system in the human body. The...
Benchmarking the Home Pages of 'Fortune' 500 Companies
The Internet has made dramatic changes in how goods and services are purchased and sold. The sophistication levels of Web presences vary from company to company, and different kinds of Web sites serve different types of audiences. Most Fortune 500...
A Trio for Quality
Health care organizations can use quality approaches developed for other industries. Accreditation standards developed by the Joint Commission on Accreditations of Healthcare Organizations can be used in combination with criteria of the Malcolm...
21 Voices for the 21st Century
The interplay of quality, e-quality, and equality in the comments of 21 individuals provide a preview of the future of quality in the new century. The editors of Quality Progress, with input from many sources, have selected 21 original thinkers...
New Quality for the 21st Century
The worldwide marketplace demands a redefinition of quality in the relentless pursuit of improvement. The 1990s have provided six drivers of this new vitality for quality: fundamental changes in how people think about and act on the need for quality;...
Measurements and the Knowledge Revolution
Real-time delivery of valued knowledge provides strong support for enterprise operations. In the knowledge revolution, organizations can improve knowledge delivery with the right measurement and information systems. Successful organizations must use...
ISO 9000 Revisions Are Key to Knowledge Age Excellence
36 I Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I J U L Y 1 9 9 9 I S O 9 0 0 0 R E V I S I O N S A R E K E Y T O K N O W L E D G E A G E E X C E L L E N C E Steps to Gain Added Value From ISO 9000 Because many companies would flunk ISO 9000 basics, let alone know ho...
Making the Pitch in the Executive Suite
Quality practitioners at six Baldrige Award winning companies have advice on helping senior executives buy into quality initiatives. At Texas Nameplate Company, Dale Crownover suggests documentation on monetary losses in areas like absenteeism,...
The Emancipation of Quality: Building Bridges and Closing Gaps
The recent name change of the American Society for Quality (ASQ) is indicative of the future of the quality profession. Quality goes beyond quality control in manufacturing. It extends to all organizations and to all work. Quality is not only for...
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...
Is the World Ready for Knowledge Management?
promises, companies must: 1. Understand the impact that technology makes in their corporate culture and in work flow 2. Create an information flow and work flow system based on human style that acts as a support ( or infrastructure) to technology 3. Trai...
Technology and Performance Improvement: Intellectual Partners?
The intellectual capital of an organization's people can increase in usefulness and value when there are computerized tools that manage and streamline performance. This technology supports improvement initiatives while building an organizational...
Can U.S. Schools Be Managed for Improvement?
Systems thinking and the principles of quality management can improve education. "System" can be operationally defined so that it applies to public schools. The public school system must become stable enough to bring its processes into control while...
Trends and Key Forces Shaping the Future of Quality
The American Society for Quality Control Futures Team and Alternative Futures Associates identified nine key forces for the 1995-2010 era. Globilization may lead to demands for multicultural quality training and assistance for countries like China and...
Obstacles vs. Obsolescence
There are challenges to the development of the quality profession in the business environment. The lack of a consistent knowledge base with a scientific foundation is an obstacle to clearly identifying the quality professional's role. Multiple...
Xerox 2000: From Survival to Opportunity
At Xerox, a new Management Model and a Managing for Results process are helping to transform its Leadership Through Quality program into the Xerox 2000 Leadership Through Quality program. The updated initiative integrates the organization's many...
People: The Imperfect Communicators
Employees should have free and ready access to the information their jobs require. However, people and their organization can be barriers to this communication. Employees need information about: the values of their organization; the needs and...
