Category "10 Building Blocks for a Quality Culture"

Waiting until the end of your production cycle to do inspections is a recipe for disaster. By then, it's too late. You have time and money invested by this point and it's important to get a return on your investment. ...

Most of us like variety, but not everyone likes change. What I've discovered over the years is that if I decide that it's going to be different, I call it variety. If you tell me that it's going to be different, I ...

The short answer is, of course, "Never!". Unless we have a proprietary solution to a global problem and no competitors, we always need to be fine tuning our processes to survive in a world of razor thin margins. And we're ...

Errors or non-conformances cost us big time, but most organizations don't realize it. Not only are there hard costs, but there are many hidden costs that add up to reduced profits - logging the issue, containing it, deciding on a ...

If you look up the definition for 'communication' you'll see that it involves sending a message then having the sender ensure that the message was received and understood the way the sender intended. 'Sending an e-mail' is NOT 'communication'. It ...

  Building Block #10 You need to know for whose sake quality is being designed into your organization Here’s a quote from ISO 9000, clause 2.2.1 – the companion document to ISO 9001: Quality focused organizations embrace a culture that ...

Building Block #9 You need to be ready to trade off other values in favour of Quality There’s an anecdotal ‘constraint model’ in the world of Engineering: Quality – Price – Timing: pick any two. By staying focused on ‘errors ...

Building Block #8 You may need to break things down into smaller units We’ve seen the Process Approach – taking inputs, performing a number of activities and creating results that get passed on to the next stage. It’s much easier ...

Building Block #7 You need to use concepts We need to walk out of the trees and look at the forest. Details are important, but can stifle our ‘lateral’ or ‘out of the box’ thinking. We need to see the ...

Building Block #6 You need to be prepared to start over again Sometimes we just have to know when to quit, or admit that a ‘modification’ to an existing process is just not going to give us the best result. ...