- Cost of Quality
- Customer Satisfaction and Value
- Data Quality
- Design of Experiments
- Environmental Manag. and Sustainability
- Global Quality
- Human Resources
- Innovation
- Inspection
- ISO 14000
- ISO 9000
- Leadership
- Lean
- Metrology
- Problem Solving
- Process Management
- Product Development and Recall
- Project Management
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
- Quality Management
- Quality Tools
- Reliability
- Safety
- Six Sigma
- Small Business
- Social Responsibility
- Software Quality
- Standards
- Statistics
- Supplier Quality
- Teams
- Theory of Constraints
- Total Quality Management
- AS9000
- Compliance
- Risk Management
- Information Management
- Customer Requirements
- Economic Case for Quality
- Continuous Improvement
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....
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....
Prepared for Battle
Organizations need to remember that while the impact of a recession may be significant from a psychological perspective, the application of sound quality management principles has a much more significant effect on an organization’s success....
Statistics Roundtable: Grab the Brass Ring
Remember going to the amusement park and riding the carousel or merry-go-round? During the ride, there was sometimes a brass ring you could grab from a dispenser.It took some dexterity to snatch the ring from the dispenser as the carousel rotated....
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....
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....
Expert Answers: March 2009
Return policy ... restructuring activities ... sample size....
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....
What's Up?
Study participants outlined the forces, four scenarios in which they might play out, and the implications to quality, organizations and the profession. Study participants were asked to envision the implications of the key forces and scenarios for quality ...
Expert Answers: October 2008
Sample size of 30 ... DFMEA dilemma....
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...
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....
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 ...
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....
Part 1 Section 16 Salary by Highest Level of Education
PART 1. REGULAR EMPLOYEE RESULTS Section 16. Salary by Highest Level of Education FIGURE 1 Highest Level of Education Percentage of respondents 0% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0.1 Below high school 6.9 High school diploma 4.5 Vocational/ technical certificate 1.8...
Salary Survey-Regular Employee and Self-Employed Consultants Results
45 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 of Quality Experience and Highest Level of Education Online Section 9 Salary by Number of Years in Current Posit...
Achieve Compliance Through CI
Using Six Sigma tools for continuous improvement (CI) is a proven method for meeting or exceeding FDA requirements for medical devices. Optical Integrity Inc., a manufacturer of medical devices, used the Six Sigma define, measure, analyze, improve...
Avoid Random Acts of Improvement With Baldrige
Organizations can use the best project execution methods, such as Six Sigma and lean, but be disappointed with the results if key strategic goals are not addressed. Improvement efforts should begin by first considering the characteristics of the...
Career Corner: The New Job Security
Security is an international issue that crosses borders. In today's asymmetric war on terrorism, everyone and everything are possible targets....
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....
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...
Statistics Roundtable: Reliability Assessment by Use-Rate Acceleration
Statistical evidence is often needed to show that a proposed product meets or exceeds its reliability goals. Many times, such evidence must be obtained in a compressed time period....
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...
You Can Go Home Again
Jamie Houghton's love for Corning brought him out of retirement and back to the company when it was fighting for survival, due to the decline of the telecommunications industry and decreased demand for Corning's fiber optics. When Houghton returned to...
Career Corner: Career Management for Engineers
Engineers - particularly electrical and electronic engineers - were once insulated from outsourcing. In fact, it could almost be said electrical engineers were recession and outsourcing proof. That's no longer true....
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....
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...
What Are Quality Reputations Worth?
The practical successes of Six Sigma have shown that quality initiatives have a substantial effect on an organization's bottom line. Yet quality professionals may experience difficulty convincing managers to keep up the efforts once a quality objective...
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...
TRIZ: A Creative Breeze for Quality Professionals
TRIZ, a systematic approach to creative thinking originating in Russia, can help quality professionals develop new approaches and solutions to quality problems. Its creator, Genrich Altshuller, wanted a systematic approach based on the rules of...
Environmental Communication Standard on the Horizon
Is your organization holding an open house, issuing an environmental or sustainability report or responding to requests for information on environmental risks?...
How To Handle Rough Spots On Your Resume
When I first met Mike, I could tell he was in the right job. He had been a recruiter for more than 35 years. His enthusiastic, friendly but straightforward approach was perfect for introducing potential employees to potential employers....
Sustainable Growth in a Standardized World
Many believe an organization is either growing or dying and that growth includes more than just size....
Opportunities Are Everywhere
As the distinction between quality management and business management fades, an unprecedented confluence of trends and forces offers unique opportunities for quality professionals. Sporadic cost cutting campaigns are being replaced by business...
A Deming Inspired Management Code of Ethics
In today's business environment, executive management's narrow focus on productivity can produce ethical, moral and legal consequences. While there are codes to prohibit discrimination based on race or gender, they fail to address conduct that is legal....
Try Some Introspection
Don't just look for a job that fits what you have always been doing - especially if you are frustrated in your search for a job in the same field or particular geographic area....
Watergate's Deep Throat – A Systems Thinker
The White House insider dubbed Deep Throat used systems thinking to link the events leading to the Watergate scandal. System thinkers transcend the tunnel vision of most thinkers to encompass the linear and tangible aspects of the big picture. History...
Stop Depending On Inspection
In today’s global marketplace, “better, cheaper, and faster” has become the mantra for manufacturers. Obviously, it would be better to build a product correctly in the first place, but making the transition from a traditional...
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....
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....
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....
Applying an Excellence Model to Schools
Students, parents and society are demanding much more of schools as education becomes more and more important for national economic competitiveness, growth and even survival....
Column: Career Corner: Lessons From Prairie Dogs
Like prairie dogs, some organizations are excellent at identifying and responding defensively to external threats. However, a response that works in the animal kingdom can be counterproductive in...
Column: Career Corner: Be a Change Agent
The quality profession is no longer static but is in a state of unprecedented transition. Practitioners must begin to see themselves as change agents facilitating an ongoing organizational quality improvement process....
The Shift to Customer Focus
Understanding what complaints really mean is an important aspect of leadership
Quality requires complaints not merely be tolerated but be actively encouraged--embraced for their value in getting at the roots of problems in production and service. 1 He contrasts the language of complaint with the language of commitment. Who better to...
Running Like a Bottled Tornado
Many experts have extolled the benefits of transforming hierarchical, autocratic organizations into adaptive, self-organizing learning organizations. Their descriptions of these organizations are often complex and confusing, calling for a new analogy...
The Changing Role of Quality Professionals
In the spring of 2002 a survey ASQ Fellow Members was conducted asking opinions and comments on the changing role of the quality professional. A brief compilation of survey results is presented, along with some predictions of expected directions...
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...
Strive to Win the Game
Many companies successfully certified in quality standards are having difficulty getting the most from their new product development (NPD) process. Automotive companies, in particular, are struggling to improve their bottom-line results. College sports...
Reliability Analysis by Failure Mode
Reliability improvement should be a major consideration when conducting product life data analysis. One method of determining the failure mode responsible for failure is to perform separate analyses for each mode and combine the results, as opposed to...
The Role of Repair Stations
In order to ensure quality, safety, and security, aviation repair stations rely on a manual detailing regulations and guidelines encompassing quality, operations, materials management, and human resources. Aviation Product Support (APS) has internal...
From Quality to Business Success
Quality professionals have made little progress in communicating how to convert quality tools and methods into a foundation for sound business management. The model "quality as a profit center (QPC)" makes the case that every facet of a quality...
Quality From the Inside Out
Organizations know that improving quality of life (QOL) on the job relates to organizational success. Current literature, lacking any information on group behavior, fails to identify the two key factors of self-challenge and relationship building as...
ISO 9001 and 9004: A Framework for Disaster Preparedness
The terrorist attacks of September 11 forced many to examine their personal and professional preparedness for catastrophe. Those businesses that were able to pull their employees, equipment, and data together after the tragedies had highly...
Implementation and Institutionalization
Learn how to properly handle a large amount of change in your organization
Just as change needs the infrastructure of a change policy, a change policy needs the infrastructure of a business operating system. A standalone change policy, which is not an integral part of a business operating system, is as likely to fail as no chang...
Column: Frontiers of Quality: Implementation and Institutionalization
[abstract from article]
Effectively managing the overwhelming volume of change is the only option for today's leadership teams. Some basic things to help enable other change efforts are:
- Create a change program.
- Create an...
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...
Saving the Internet Survivors
In the relentless battle for market share, profitability, and survival in today's fiercely competitive e-business environment, the winners will be those with a deep understanding of customer relationship management (CRM) and those with a commitment to...
Who is responsible for your career?
Two perspectives on professional development
Concurrently, employers stopped emphasizing employee loyalty when it became evident that they themselves failed the loyalty test with their employees. Employees move from employer to employer (some with portable benefits, most without) as they struggle to...
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...
Column: Career Corner: Who is responsible for your career?
Plans and actions that distinguish the quality professional of the future:Environmental scanningVision and mission statementsGoals and objectivesAction plansImplement plans, monitor progress and reward accomplishment....
The Problems with Managing by Objectives and Results
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 I 39 The Problems With Managing By Objectives and Results What your employees may not be telling you by Joseph F. Castellano and Harper A. Roehm Q U A L I T Y M A N A G E M E N T HILE MOST PEOPLE WOULD ag...
ISO 9000 at the Front Line: A Book Excerpt
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 I 33 ISO 9000 at the Front Line: A Book Excerpt Training and empowering workers on the standard leads to continuous improvements by William A. Levinson S T A N D A R D S LL TOO OFTEN MANAGERS AND EXECUTIV...
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....
Product life data analysis: a case study.
Device H Failure Data TABLE 1 Failed devices* K cycles 6 ( 1) 12 ( 1) 26 ( 1) 28 ( 1) 30 ( 1) 50 ( 1) 64 ( 1) Unfailed devices* K cycles K cycles 2 ( 3) 34 ( 2) 4 ( 3) 36 ( 2) 6 ( 2) 38 ( 2) 8 ( 3) 40 ( 2) 10 ( 1) 42 ( 1) 12 ( 9) 44 ( 6) 14 ( 5) 46 ( 2) ...
Planning for Knowledge Management
Knowledge management (KM) can improve access to and use of information for decision making and fulfilling organization goals. Development and implementation of KM includes the following steps. First, create a culture that has long-term commitment to:...
A context for ISO 9001 and ISO 9004.
The Big Picture
* ISO 9001 quality management systems (including ISO 9002 and ISO 9003), which focus on process management. ISO 9000 in the listing of criticisms refers collectively to the requirement standards ISO 9001:1994, ISO 9002:1994 and ISO 9003:1994. ISO 9001 thr...
Column: Standards Outlook: The Big Picture: A Context for ISO 9001 and ISO 9004
[Abstract from article]
This is part four of a series of articles on the year 2000 revision of the ISO 9000 series. The first three articles explained changes in requirements, format, presentation, and terminology and in the processes and approaches...
A Road Map for Quality Beyond Control
This final installment in the "Quality in the 21st Century" helps quality professionals deal with seven problems noted earlier. First, to avoid imposing the one best way, hierarchies and control systems like the ISO 9000 series should give way to...
ISO 14000 and the Bottom Line
A proactive environmental policy linked to ISO 14000 must be based on strategic planning and implementation. Key elements are commitment to prevention and to continual improvement as well as an assurance of compliance with regulations and laws....
On Leaders and Leadership
Systemic leadership is based on core values and competencies as well as on more tangible elements of business excellence. Systemic leadership requires that everyone be responsible for leadership. However, the models embedded in international quality...
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...
The Call of Quality: Doing Right Things Right
Models of excellence and doing the right thing are found in codes of ethics, certification programs, and award criteria. In this era of competitiveness and complexity, people and their organizations are challenged to understand the multiple aspects of...
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....
What They're Saying about Standards
Fourteen quality experts, including J. M. Juran, discuss strengths, weaknesses, future, and other issues related to standards, especially ISO standards. Strengths include: a positive influence on customer focus; the emergence of ISO 9000 as a global...
QS-9000 Customer Satisfaction Monitoring Isn't Working
Why customer satisfaction monitoring won't work Problems that small and midsize suppliers have monitoring customer satisfaction occur in four areas: � Transaction distance from the customer and the end product � The relationship with important customers ...
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...
Quality in the 21st Century: Quality Profession Must Learn to Heed Its Own Advice
The quality profession has met many challenges in the 20th century. But it is time to think about improvement. Quality has its roots in the early 20th century growth of the middle class and the need for mass produced goods. The General Motors of...
Using a Process Control Maturity Matrix
A tool to develop a world-class quality process
A good way to measure how a company's methodology for process development compares to world-class industries is to place development endeavors on a process control maturity matrix (PCMM). To use the matrix, identify what process development techniques are...
When Teams Go to War - Against Each Other!
Unproductive intergroup conflict stems from four factors in team-to-team relations: interdependence; differences in goals; perception discrepancy; and an increasing need for specialists or consultants. Strategies for managing these factors are:...
Reliability Improvement Issues and Tools
Weibull distributions can also represent products with either a decreasing hazard rate ( less than 1) or increasing hazard rate ( greater than 1). When equals 1 the Q U A L I T Y P R O G R E S S I M A Y 1 9 9 9 I 135 Selling Reliability to Upper Manageme...
Explosion of New Products Creates Challenges
New product development in the Innovation Age needs new quality tools and techniques to meet customer expectations and fast-paced change. Rapid innovation is evident in the explosive growth of patent applications, led by companies like Eastman Kodak,...
Age of Agile Manufacturing Puts Quality to the Test
Ongoing and unpredictable change should be met by quick reactions to customer demands. There are profit opportunities for those who apply agile manufacturing to the customization of products and services. Technological support for these changes is...
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...
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,...
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...
Motivating Knowledge Workers: The Role of the Workplace
Five categories of needs established by Abraham Maslow provide insight into the needs of knowledge workers. Though there is disagreement on whether Maslow's levels of needs form a hierarchy, the categories do suggest how workplace and organizational...
The Ups and Downs of Customer-Driven Quality
Strategic quality planning (SQP) is a requirement for improvement via customer-driven quality. Also called strategic planning in Baldrige Award criteria, SQP supports the proactive, anticipatory nature of planned customer-driven quality. Another type...
Results: Monstrous. Want Some?
A commitment to quality and business results helps companies meet their market and competitive demands. Three such companies are described in a 1998 National Quality Month special report. Texas Nameplate Company, UPS, and the Overlook Hospital...
Beyond Vision: Creating and Analyzing Your Organization's Quality Future
To establish a strategic quality future for an organization, there are seven futuring tools. The tools facilitate creation of a vision and critical examination of forecasts into the next five to ten years. The goal is to close the gap between present...
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...
Intelligence Everywhere: How Technology Can Enlighten and Empower
Automation linked with human insight enhances quality deployment. Information technology and quality are means to pursuing organizational goals. They support evolution of the workplace toward the ideal of a paperless environment in which wisdom and...
Lawyers Find a Partner in Quality
The quality-in-law project initiated by Samuel Welch seeks to identify the needs of legal services clients and to use these data to redesign law school programs. One phase of the project analyzed surveys from 151 clients of nine lawyers and small...
Are You Listening?
Successful communication depends on listening well to others. Typical listening skills include active listening, paraphrasing, questioning, and overcoming barriers. These skills are applied at all four levels of communication. At the first level is...
Select Leaders Using a Quality Management Process
Assessment of managerial characteristics like leadership is amenable to nominal group techniques (NGP). The selection of a new leader for an organization involves identification of leadership elements, such as integrity, vision, and skills in...
