Category "Improvement"

There are four major types of quality costs: 1. Prevention This category includes costs like statistical process control, supervision of prevention steps, quality improvement projects, technical support to suppliers, audits, analysis and reporting and other activities related to proactive activities to prevent problems. ...

Now that you're getting ready for Virtual Audits, it's time to look into the 'Cost of Quality' concept. All the ideas apply to Environmental, Health and Safety and all other management systems. How are we making sure our systems are ...

Ever since the first non-conformance was written, we've been looking for ways to find the cause, do a corrective action and bid farewell to the profit sucking problem. It's been a problem closing out non-conformances since I've been associated with ...

When making your non-conformance (problem) statement, be sure to choose words that will get the response that you're looking for. Stating a non-conformance as, "The operator did not follow the procedure" will set the root cause analysis back 30 years. ...

Root Cause Analysis is one of the best investments an organization can make in itself. Preventing a problem from recurring is like taking a wheelbarrow of money to the bank! As for the 'WIIFM?' let's start with this 'cost of ...

You may have heard these terms used interchangeably - I know I have. I thought I'd take a look into ISO 31000 to see if any light could be shed on this monumental question! It turns out that the answer ...

John Seddon has been promoting Systems Thinking for years - I've been following him for nearly 30 years now and I've used the Vanguard Method approach to management system design since the early 2000s. A number of Federal Departments in ...

John Seddon (vanguard-method.net Tactics for Getting Started) has been helping companies improve processes for decades. He has improved organizations with 'Systems Thinking' based on Deming's work and the Toyota Production System that Taiichi Ohno created in post WWII Japan. He ...

ISO Standards, for the most part have moved to 'Risk-based thinking' as one of their themes. It makes complete sense to include this as part of the fabric of our organizations in order to reduce the chaos of unexpected events, ...

ISO 19011:2018 has more guidance for remote auditing than the previous versions. There are a number of advantages to the client when a remote audit takes place: Lower expenses charged to the client - no travel time, mileage, accommodation costs ...