Quality Management 2.0 Blog

Title: Corrective Action – The Heart of Continuous Quality

Once a new company initiative has been launched, it is often felt that all the hard work has been done.  The reality is that it is only just beginning.

As we near Thanksgiving, a proud American holiday of tradition, we thought it appropriate to examine the philosophies of some of the great "Founding Fathers" of quality management systems. While we already covered the great Deming 14 Point System in a previous post, the following are great additional core quality assurance and quality control philosophies of Juran and Crosby to help you to brush up on your "quality" history!

You understand what quality is, and you understand how important it is to the life of your organization. It’s your responsibility as a quality assurance management professional to assure quality in the goods and services provided by your company, as well as acting as an advocate for quality to upper management. As you may know, this isn’t always easy: convincing C-Level executives of quality value can be daunting, especially when you don’t know where to start.

The need for a working understanding of basic quality management system statistical principles is at the heart of Deming's teaching. While accepting the ASQ's Shewhart Medal in 1955, he commented that "Statistical theory has changed practice in almost everything. Statistical techniques, in their ability to aid the discovery of causes, are creating a science of management and a science of administration." His quality process message, directed primarily at management, is stated succinctly in his famous 14 Points for Management:

Sherwin Williams Company has agreed to pay a $570k civil penalty to settle alleged violations of hazardous waste regulations at its paint manufacturing facility located in Baltimore, Md., the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced last month.

Title: ISO 50001 Energy & Environmental Management

With the economy in its current state, manufacturers may be cutting costs - but they know that it's not much of a long-term solution. According to a recent Huffington Post article by Bonnie Kavoussi, 90% of manufacturing executives say that innovation will be the key to long-term manufacturing industry growth, not cost-cutting.

Savvy professionals take a strategic, company-wide approach to enterprise risk management, minimizing all risks that can significantly undermine business value. By performing Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), companies protect the safety of all their resources, including governance, business processes, operations, and network infrastructure.

After reading the impressive guest post "An Analysis of Value vs. Investment When Evaluating Quality" published to this blog by Robert Reid this past September and going through the comments several times, I have found myself reflecting on my AIRSpeed training and experience and realize that we are fundamentally missing the point of quality and COPQ.

IBS America, Inc. queried some of our customers that have been using the CompliantPro  document control software to gain insight on our products and services. This month, customers were asked to respond with their top 5 features of the CompliantPro product. We've highlighted one of our customers' responses here.

Employee involvement is a vital aspect of total quality management solutions, and also in the success of any business. The need to both grow and succeed in an increasingly competitive marketplace has seen the implementation of various quality initiatives in different companies and organizations.