Category "Operation"

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. ...

As you all know, ISO certified organizations need to have surveillance audits at least annually to keep their certificate valid. Covid has made face-to-face encounters very dangerous, but the audits must be done to keep supplier organizations’ certificates valid. These ...

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 ...

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 ...

This is the 'Rubber Hits the Road' clause, especially for ISO 9001. The EMS and OHS standards both include the 'Emergency and Preparedness' in this section - Operations. By using a flowchart to illustrate your workflow you'll be able to ...

Tackling Clause 6.1 in ISO 9001 can be structured by using Ishikawa's fishbone diagram. You can 'reverse engineer' it to create a framework for a simple risk approach. Ishikawa discovered that most non-conformances typically have their 'root cause' in one or ...

  Without doubt, our customers need to be the focus of our efforts. You'll find that the word 'customer' appears 88 times in ISO 9001:2015. Some of the places it  appears are in the 'General' section, Quality Management Principles, the ...

For years we've had to demonstrate that we've improved the effectiveness of our management systems. It's a great money-maker for the Private Sector and improving a management system helps the Public Sector work within their budgets. Easy words to say; ...

In 1980, The American Council of Retailers did some research on why people stopped doing business with various organizations. Here's what they found in 1980: 64% left because they felt ignored 12% left because they were treated badly (that’s our ...