- Cost of Quality
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Data Quality
- Engineering
- Environmental Manag. and Sustainability
- Global Quality
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- ISO 14000
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrics
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Project Management
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
- Quality Function Deployment
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Six Sigma
- Small Business
- Social Responsibility
- Standards
- Statistical Process Control (SPC)
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Total Quality Management
- AS9000
- TL 9000
- Compliance
- Certification/Registration (management system Standards)
- Information Management
- Customer Requirements
- Economic Case for Quality
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....
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....
Dare to Care
Healthcare is the third-largest area in the Standard & Poor’s 500, behind only financial services and IT. Considering the amount of knowledge, labor and materials devoted to the industry, there's no doubt healthcare is a major economic force in society....
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....
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....
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....
Volviendo a los Fundamentos: Una Llamada Para Mejorar
Es una percepción común de que la asistencia telefónica al cliente es un gasto de recursos de la operación. Esta idea errónea resulta en muchos proyectos de reducción de costos en Centros de Atención Telefónica....
Standards Outlook: TL 9000 Measurements Handbook Release 4.0
The Quality Excellence for Suppliers of Telecommunications (QuEST) Forum is the global society dedicated to the quality of telecom products and services. The forum has developed and maintained a single common set of telecom...
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...
Conformity or Sustainability? That Is the Question
Sustainability is an enterprise’s ability to survive and prosper in a rapidly evolving environment, and the essence of sustainability is performance results. Any expenditure of resources that does not generate value produces a net loss and impaired...
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...
Benchmarking Goes to School
In 2004, Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, started a benchmarking project to improve the quality of its housing allocation services. A multi-functional team began its work by mapping existing residence application processes to establish a baseline,...
Financial Control and Quality
The case for quality should be easy to make, but it is not always obvious to top management who must be aware of and control the corporation’s finances in order to comply with federal regulations. There are two aspects to measuring financial control -...
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...
Caring Culture and Results Focus Lead to Baldrige Award
For many years Mississippi ranked near the bottom of health status rankings, but now the North Mississippi Medical Center (NMMC), the largest rural medical center in the country, is the recipient of the 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in...
Internal Customer Service: Has It Improved?
A recent survey of organizations conducted by the Metrus Group shows a dramatic improvement in internal customer service (ICS) since a similar survey conducted in 1993. Respondents to the survey believe that high levels of ICS are important to their...
Getting Credit for Service
Experian Marketing Services (EMS) considers quality management a critical part of its commitment to its clients. Last year EMS looked to ISO 9001 certification as a way to extend its established project management program. EMS identified more than 100...
Emotional Intelligence and Six Sigma
Emotional intelligence (EI), the ability to perceive, assess, and manage one's own emotions and the emotions of others, is vital to a project team environment and fits well with Six Sigma methodology. When time is limited, Six Sigma Black Belts must...
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...
Promoting Quality In Your Organization
A 2004 survey of industry executives showed that while nearly all agreed that quality favorably influences profits, few had actually used quality methods. Quality professionals can play a significant role in supporting performance management initiatives...
Six Sigma Delivers On-Time Service
Six Sigma success isn't limited to manufacturing organizations alone. ServiceMaster's American Residential Services (ARS) Service Express improved customer satisfaction by a unique application of Six Sigma techniques. After an initial learning period,...
Change Healthcare Organizations From Good to Great
The Institute of Medicine estimates that the cost of the medical errors resulting in thousands of deaths each year and injury to thousands more is over $20 billion annually. While these figures are unacceptable, the good news is that the application of...
Six Ways To Benefit From Customer Complaints
Customer service is one of the few areas where service organizations can achieve an advantage in a competitive marketplace. Six ideas are presented to help organizations improve business performance through the handling of customer complaints....
Does Six Sigma Work in Service Industries?
Service and manufacturing organizations have much to learn from one another when it comes to serving customers. While in manufacturing the focus on product quality distracts employees from customer service quality requirements, in the service sector the...
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...
Take Action on Customer Satisfaction
Quality managers use customer satisfaction research to determine their company's level of performance and to guide decisions about where to make improvements. The four commonly used models discussed not only provide a measure of customer satisfaction,...
Service + Quality: A Formula for Growth
Have you assessed your career goals and skills in relation to the job market lately?...
Sarbanes-Oxley and ISO 9000
Critics say ISO 9000 doesn't measure up to robust quality programs such as Baldrige Award criteria, lean and Six Sigma, and they complain about the law's excessive documentation requirements. Yet by providing records and internal controls, the...
PetroChina's Strategic Planning Focused on Quality
PetroChina is a consortium of numerous previously state-owned small- to medium-sized oil companies. Despite modernization efforts taken to reposition itself in the global market, PetroChina faced strong competition from both foreign and domestic sources...
Improving Service Quality at Honda
Spotting defects in problem solving, decision making, or project management are fundamental to providing high quality service and support. As a provider of financial services, leasing support, and various sales and marketing-related services to Honda...
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...
A PDCA Approach to TL 9000 Measurement
An approach based on the plan-do-check-act (PDCA) improvement loop can be used to develop a process for complying with the measurement requirements of TL 9000, the ISO 9001 based quality management standard for the telecommunications industry....
The Growth of Risk Management
The quality profession and ASQ were very successful during the l980s and '90s. ASQ surged ahead in membership, national prominence and public policy influence....
Quality From Scratch: A Model for Small Business
Whether a company is large or small, quality programs are vital to assure customer, stakeholder, and employee satisfaction. Many small businesses, however, may find limited resources and conflicting priorities make the quest for organizational...
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....
The Triple Top Line
Quality and sustainability are intertwined and provide win/win/win solutions for both the short-term and long-term effects of design on social responsibility, environmental performance and business results. These elements comprise a triple bottom line....
Can TL 9000 Contribute to Telecom's Turnaround?
Since TL 9000’s inception near the end of the 20th century, managers and executives have harbored significant skepticism toward the quality management standard for the telecommunications industry....
Get Staff Involved in Quality Initiatives
A case study in which a company in the public transportation services industry took on the issue of how a lean quality improvement staff could help the CEO aspire to new levels of business performance without a typical Six Sigma level budget....
Handling the Human Side of Change
Quality efforts and their accompanying flurry of training activities continue unabated in many organizations. Many have morphed to adapt to the current crazes of Six Sigma and lean....
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...
Improve Service And Administration
Variation in business activities is unacceptable and undermines quality. Statistical methods can be applied to all types of business processes to understand relationships between processes, then document and reduce variation. The several strategies...
What I Learned On My Business Trip
Thanks in part to technological advancements and expectations that have been raised in part by companies, customers of all types of services are becoming more demanding. Customers also expect to be cared about as individuals and can harbor deep...
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...
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...
Understand Customer Behavior and Complaints
In order to maximize the value of customer complaint data to solve quality assurance, service, and marketing problems, there must be an understanding of customer complaint and market behavior. This will provide a framework allowing organizations to...
An Integrated Operations Performance Metric
A case study demonstrates that a firm can improve customer satisfaction and increase its market share by initiating both quality and productivity improvements. The firm manufactures gift shop items in a major metropolitan area in the Southwest and...
A Thing of the Past?
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA), the most widely adopted framework for an interdisciplinary approach to total quality management and organizational performance, has evolved from the original model in 1988 to the 1992 model and the...
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,...
College and University Programs in Quality
A list is provided of more than 100 colleges and universities offering courses, programs, and degrees in quality related fields. The list is both alphabetical and geographical and indicates the type of institution and certificates or degrees offered....
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...
Customers: A Love/Hate Relationship?
Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I J U L Y 2 0 0 2 I 37 12 Ways To Determine What Customers Want Insofar as is feasible for you and tolerable for the customer: 1 Probe for the reasons specific parameters and product or service characteristics are important ...
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...
Column: Standards Outlook: Add Value to ISO 9001:2000 Audits
The standard's revision provides the opportunity to help organizations improve the way they do business
Quality auditors have been criticized for not adding value to what they do for clients. The ISO 9001:2000 revision provides an opportunity to change...
First to the Top
A small, scattered school district in a remote part of Alaska, a suburban school district near New York City, and a mid-sized public university have become the first winners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in the education category. The...
Column: Emerging Sectors: ISO 9000:2000 Gives Competitive Edge
Security division of business services provider implements standards to get things right the first time
Wackenhut's security services division has taken the initial steps toward becoming ISO 9000:2000 certified. Along the way, the division derived an unanticipated benefit--boosted credibility in the internal competition for...
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...
Column: World View: Excellence Ireland's National Symbol of Quality
The redeveloped Q-Mark is both a symbol of quality and a brand recognition tool
Ireland's Q-Mark has been designed with the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) excellence model in mind and goes a long way in successfully satisfying the processes element of that model.
While the Q-Mark is...
Column: World View: Quality Movement Continues Growth in Brazil
Future expansion expected in small organizations and nonindustrial sector
Since the 1980s, Brazil has gone through profound social, economic and political change. To meet product and service quality demands and to compete globally, both private and public sector Brazilian companies had to make quality a top priority. ISO 9000...
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...
Expect the Unexpected
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 49 Expect the Unexpected Enterprise information system at water resource department improves process, quality and customer service by Bruce Kissinger and S. Thomas Foster Jr. E N T E R P R I S E R E...
Annual Quality Awards Listing
Annual Quality Awards Listing compiled by Corinne N. Johnson, Editorial Assistant he annual Quality Awards Listing is Quality Progress' resource guide to automotive, government, international, national, regional and state quality related awards and award...
A Quality Swing With Ping
Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I A U G U S T 2 0 0 1 I 37 A Quality Swing With Ping ISO 9000 and 14000 certifications continue a customer focused, environmentally aware legacy at a family owned golf equipment manufacturer by Robert T. Driescher HEN JOHN A...
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...
The challenges of auditing TL 9000 requirements.
New interpretations, lack of objective evidence can cause difficulties
Adding requirements related to metrics, including defining targets, tracking data, reporting data to a central database and using data to foster continual quality improvement. SANDFORD LIEBESMAN is ISO manager for corporate quality and customer satisfacti...
Implementing Quality Programs in the Not-for-Profit Sector
I M P L E M E N T I N G Q U A L I T Y I N T H E N O T- F O R - P R O F I T S E C T O R 78 I 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 Improved quality of life in northwest Indiana Long- term resolution of community problems 1. Legislative cha...
Quality Professionals Around the World Share Similar Concerns, Experiences
The International Chapter of ASQ has grown from about 25 members in 1956 to more than 5,000 members in about 90 countries by 2000. Quality professionals worldwide want to hold on to a core set of principles, and similar challenges face the quality...
Hustle, That's All
The Earle M. Jorgensen Company has always focused on service quality. The company, which distributes steel and aluminum bar, tube, and plate products in the U.S. and Canada, has found its commitment to service quality to be both a blessing and a...
Service Quality and Higher Education Do Mix
In 1996, Indiana University Southeast recognized that it would have to begin competing for students and needed to establish a reputation for providing high-quality experiences for all of its students. The university's first step toward its goal was to...
TL 9000--An Update on the Metrics Process.
Validation of training, registration and metrics completed
3. Software only: four metrics including quality of emergency fixes between software releases (corrective patches), quality of emergency feature improvements (feature patches), quality of software updates and failures of scheduled new software releases (a...
President's Quality Program Honors Government Organizations
The President's Quality Award Program recognizes federal organizations for their accomplishments in continuous improvement via quality management principles and practices. The award was created in 1989 and is administered by the Office of Personnel...
Quality Awards Listing
The list includes national, international, state and regional quality awards and award programs and industry-specific quality awards programs. The listed awards are related to the practice of quality, do not limit eligibility to members of the...
The past, present and future direction of aerospace quality standards.
Designed to solve problem of duplication and contradiction
Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers in the aerospace community are very concerned about the proliferation of standards used to define quality system requirements. These requirements were translated into company specific documents and sen...
New Skills Needed in Medical Leadership
Three leadership processes can aid improvement efforts in the health care field. These are supporting front-line efforts to reduce defects and improve outcomes, aggregating the effects of quality improvement activities, and integrating quality...
Beyond Compliance
Most quality auditors perform compliance audits to verify the implementation of written procedures. Compliance audits can be second party audits used to review the activities of suppliers, or they can be third party audits performed by independent...
Different Roads to Auto Quality: The Experts Speak Out
Product quality has become increasingly important in the automotive industry, but the definition of the term and the best ways to achieve product quality remain subjects of debate. Quality has been defined in a number of ways in the rapidly changing...
Quality Management Hits the Road
The future for quality practitioners may lie with General Systems Theory. GST was developed by researchers who observed how living organisms interacted within an environment, but it has since been applied to concepts including systems thinking. GST...
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 Management Principles: Foundation of ISO 9000:2000 Family
Practical application came first
This article describes the relationship of the first four quality management principles to the requirements document (ISO 9001:2000) and to the guidelines of ISO 9004:2000. Organizations depend on their customers and therefore should understand current an...
Call Resolution: The Wrong Focus for Service Quality?
For the enlightened help desk or call center, first-time call resolution and closure has become a measure of productivity and customer service. This nontraditional measure could replace more traditional measures like call duration and time to answer...
India's Quality Movement
Awards and standards lead the way to significant achievements
To meet the product and service quality challenges of multinational companies operating in India and to realize export potential, both private and public sector Indian companies must resolve quality and quality management issues. The CMM model has been de...
Complacency - the Enemy of Quality
Continuous improvement is necessary even for the best of organizations. Interviews by ASQ and Quality Progress demonstrate how three successful companies do not give into complacency. Manpower Inc. is the leader in the staffing services industry. To...
Quality in Nonprofits: No Longer Uncharted Territory
Anixter Center is a nonprofit human-service organization that has experienced the 11 challenges faced by nonprofits. As a large rehabilitation agency serving people with disabilities through more than fifty programs, Anixter Center received a...
Use Customer Input for Improvement and Corrective Action Plans
Satisfaction measures improve quality and help meet ISO 9000 requirements
Since Kenmar's product is the development and management of service, customer assessment can be subjective; however, the organization believed customer satisfaction would be the best measure of the quality of its performance. To obtain satisfaction data a...
Total Quality Management in Higher Education
A continuous quality improvement (CQI) team in the Admissions Office at Lamar University is using the plan-do-study-act (PDSA) cycle for improving its services. Total quality management (TQM) initiatives had been needed at Lamar, because of declining...
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...
The Critical Role of Quality in the Tourism System
A systems approach to understanding the tourism industry reveals four components: output, feedback, input, and throughput. Inputs to the tourism system are those found in the typical Ishikawa diagram: methods, money, materials, and manpower....
TL 9000 Performance Metrics to Drive Improvement
The Metrics Repository System is a defining characteristic of TL 9000, as compared to other sector-specific implementations of ISO 9000. Mandatory performance and product metrics will facilitate benchmarking and improvement in the telecommunications...
Quality and Nonprofit Organizations
Focus on service delivery means doing good things
They both have markets, business processes that produce (we hope) value-added products and services, and individuals or organizations that provide the funds necessary for the organization to operate. The quality of our internal processes and the service p...
Applying QFD to Internal Service System Design
Listening to the voice of the internal customer leads to the meeting of customer needs. A QFD (quality function deployment) project at the RRC (Research Resources Center) of the Tennessee Technological University College of Business Administration...
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...
The Case for Student as Customer
A change in attitude at Southern Polytechnic State University has come from thinking about students as customers and realizing that: this concept needs an operational definition; customer-students have choices; customers usually have responsibilities;...
Putting Quality in Knowledge Management
Rapid access to expertise within an organization is a purpose of knowledge management. Quality professionals have critical leadership and educational roles in the harvesting of that knowledge and in the management of corporate memory. Knowledge is...
Measuring People and Performance: Closing the Gaps
Quality Progress and Metrus Group surveyed a sample of ASQ members about people metrics and management at their companies. Findings from more than 800 respondents indicate that even though people measures are used in many companies, only about 30% of...
