Corrective actions

Craig Cochran from qualitydigest.com gives us this good article
When I first got into quality, I really hated verifying the effectiveness of actions taken to correct a problem. After all, I was young and inexperienced. All of the people whose actions I was verifying were older, wiser, and more experienced than I was. Who was I to say that their actions were effective or ineffective? My assumptions were as follows:

• If they said they did something, then they certainly did it.
• Whatever they did was directly related to the problem causes, or they wouldn’t have done it.
• The action must have been effective; they would have told me otherwise.

All of these assumptions had to be correct, because I was working with seasoned professionals, right? Ha! Boy, did I learn a lesson.

People just want to get paperwork off their desks or out of their in-boxes as quickly as possible. Taking actions on problems is one of many responsibilities that people have and, unfortunately, it’s not always top priority. That’s why it’s crucial that action be carefully verified. Verification is not an act of suspicion or disrespect; it’s simply a necessary part of problem solving.



What exactly is being verified? You are seeking evidence that the causes of the problem have been removed or reduced. In a perfect world, each problem cause would be removed. Poof, it’s gone. This is not always possible, though. Sometimes the best you can hope for is a reduction of the causes. The cause is still there, but it manifests itself less frequently or less severely. So the best option is to remove the cause, but the next best option is to at least reduce the cause.

read full text on qualitydigest.com

Toyota

Prius: Not built by Dilberts.

* GM and Ford can’t design vehicles that Americans want to pay “Toyota money” for. And this is not a matter of bad bets on product concepts or dumb engineers. It’s a matter of Toyota’s better engineering system, using simple concepts like chief engineers with real responsibility for products, concurrent and simultaneous engineering practices, and sophisticated knowledge capture methods. The Prius is not the result of a hunch or luck but rather the likely result of a development system that tries out many approaches to every problem, then gets the winning concept to the customer very quickly with low engineering cost, low manufacturing cost, and near perfect quality. (That’s not to say that Toyota can’t produce a dud — the first-generation Previa minivan and Tundra pickup stand out — but the likelihood of producing winners is higher than with traditional development systems.)



* GM and Ford are clueless as to how to work with their suppliers. Sometimes they try to crush their bones — which only works when the suppliers have any profits to squeeze, and few currently do. Then they embrace contentless cooperation that makes everyone feel better briefly but fails to produce lower costs, higher quality, or new and better technology. Toyota, by contrast, is getting brilliant results and lower prices from American suppliers like Delphi while also giving suppliers adequate profit margins. How? By relentlessly analyzing every step in their shared design and production process to take out the waste and put in the quality.

read full text on WSJ.COM

Total quality made much sense to Jack McGavigan, just retired, in his 80s, as chairman of John McGavigan & Co, founded by his grandfather in 1860. The family firm was a traditional printer, but developed from the Sixties into specialists in ‘graphics related plastics technology.’ Touch switches and backlit fascia panels in cars are examples of the uses. McGavigan, rightly keen on innovation, has constantly expanded into new technologies and product lines. Consequently, the group’s car parts have a 12% world market share.

None of this might have happened if McGavigan hadn’t reacted to impending crisis in mid-1987. Costs were rising, the company was being squeezed between strong suppliers and stronger customers, and competition was intensifying. The firm had been using quality circles for years – with employees banding together to tackle quality issues, Japanese-style, in a voluntary, bottom-up effort to improve. But more was needed to avert disaster.



Quality was the answer, passionately advocated by Edward Smith, 47. Managing director of John McGavigan Automotive Products, he joined the company as a stripling in 1963. ‘Employees are the experts’, he says. ‘We wanted to exploit the potential of people,’ which demands ‘training, teams and communication.’
read full text Thinking Managers

Typically on the left vertical axis is frequency of occurrence, but it can alternatively represent cost or other important unit of measure. The right vertical axis is the cumulative percentage of the total number of occurrences, total cost, or total of the particular unit of measure. The purpose is to highlight the most important among a (typically large) set of factors. In quality control, the Pareto chart often represents the most common sources of defects, the highest occurring type of defect, or the most frequent reasons for customer complaints, etc. See this help file how to use our tool.

Online pareto chart

American Society for Quality

Milwaukee, Wis., June 5, 2009 — ASQ (American Society for Quality) announces the new Spencer Hutchens Jr. Medal for Social Responsibility. The medal recognizes the achievements of an individual who demonstrates outstanding leadership as an individual, business leader, and cause advocate for social responsibility—primarily focusing on the marketplace, environment, workplace and community.

“The medal will showcase how the recipient’s results have led to societal change,” said Roberto Saco, ASQ president. “Medal recipients will be instrumental in making the difference within today’s—and tomorrow’s—socially responsible world.”

The addition of the Social Responsibility Medal brings the number of global medals offered by ASQ each year, to 13.

The medal is named after Spencer Hutchens Jr., Los Angeles, Calif., an ASQ past president, whose personal and business life reflects and demonstrates the desired attributes in the definition and model of social responsibility.



“I am proud and humbled to have this medal named in my honor,” said Hutchens. “The development of this medal strengthens and reflects ASQ’s commitment to social responsibility, and to providing solutions that will help organizations meet their social responsibility goals.”

full press release here

Quality Control

Two small software vendors this week released business intelligence product upgrades that will allow manufacturers to more accurately and rapidly assess the cost and quality of their products.

SigmaQuest Inc., a provider of on-demand product quality analysis tools, released version 6.1 of its flagship SigmaSure product, which adds several new features, including support for identifying potentially costly, low-quality “maverick” products before they are shipped.



At the same time, aPriori, a provider of cost management analysis software, delivered version 5.5 of its self-named tool, which, among other things, allows manufacturers to compute the cost of a single component manufactured in multiple internal or supplier plants.

The most significant new feature in the 6.1 release of SigmaQuest’s SigmaSure is support for analysis of maverick parts and products, a capability that is increasingly important to manufacturers of electronics components, SigmaQuest’s largest customer base. A maverick part is defined by the JEDEC Solid State Technology Association as an “atypical product that exhibits anomalistic characteristics causing higher-than-normal levels of failure in the end-user application.”



Maverick parts, for example, may fall within prescribed functional test parameters but still fail often in the field, leading to costly product returns. Many electronic equipment OEMs, said SigmaQuest CEO Nader Fathi, have begun to require component suppliers to certify that they have analyzed part lots for their potential to exhibit maverick behavior.

“Just looking at product yields is not good enough to determine if products will behave correctly,” Fathi told Managing Automation today.

Read more

1. Certification to ISO 9001:2008 will only be issued after publication of ISO 9001:2008 and after a routine surveillance audit or re-certification audit against ISO 9001:2008.
2. One year after publication of ISO 9001:2008, all certifications issued (new certifications and re-certifications) must be to ISO 9001:2008.
3. Two years after publication of ISO 9001:2008, existing ISO 9001:2000 certifications will not be valid.

This transition plan is possible because ISO and IAF have agreed that ISO 9001:2008 introduces no new requirements. The revised quality standard only introduces clarifications to the existing requirements with minor revisions to improve consistency with ISO 14001:2004, the environmental standard.



The revisions to ISO 9001:2000 are described below – deleted text is indicated by strikethroughs – new text is underlined and shown in standard font – text from the standard is shown in italic font to distinguish them from our comments. Most of the text in ISO 9001:2000 has not been affected by ISO 9001:2008.

0.1 General

In this section of the Introduction, ISO 9001:2008 adds “business environment” to the list of factors that influence the design and implementation of a quality management system.

The design and implementation of an organization’s quality management system is influenced by

• its business environment, changes in that environment, or risks associated with that environment,
• its varying needs,
• its particular objectives,
• the products it provides provided, – the processes it employs employed, and
• its the size and organizational structure of the organization.

ISO 9001:2008 changes “regulatory” to “statutory and regulatory” and clarifies that the Customer, statutory and regulatory requirements are those applicable to the product.

This International Standard can be used by internal and external parties, including certification bodies, to assess the organization’s ability to meet customer, statutory, and regulatory requirements applicable to the product, and the organization’s own requirements.

0.2 Process Approach

ISO 9001:2008 focuses on “determine” linked activities rather than “identify” linked activities to clarify that a Process can be an activity or set of activities.

For an organization to function effectively, it has to identify determine and manage numerous linked activities. An activity or set of activities using resources, and managed in order to enable the transformation of inputs into outputs, can be considered as a process.



The definition of Process Approach has been clarified by adding text:

The application of a system of processes within an organization, together with the identification and interactions of these processes, and their management to produce the desired outcome, can be referred to as the “process approach“.

Read more here http://www.quality-control-plan.com/changes-to-iso-9001-2000.htm

American Society for Quality

MILWUKEE—The American Society for Quality (ASQ) has announced the following slate of officers for the 2009-10 term:

• President. Peter L. Andres, Boeing Company, Integrated Defense Systems, Huntington Beach, CA.
• Chairman. Roberto M. Saco, Aporia Advisors Inc., Coral Gables, FL.
• President-elect. E. David Spong, Boeing Company (retired), Rancho Palos Verdes, CA.
• Treasurer. Jim Rooney, ABSG Consulting, Knoxville, TN.
• Newly Elected Board Member. Lloyd Barker, Alcoa Inc., New York, NY.
• Reelected Board Member. Kay A. Kendall, Westford, MA.

The results were announced at ASQ’s Annual Business Meeting, held in conjunction with the World Conference on Quality and Improvement, May 18 to 20, in Minneapolis, MN. Current ASQ president Roberto M. Saco will assume the chairman’s duties July 1, 2009, and Peter L. Andres, who is currently president-elect, will move into the president position.

Read more here Quality Magazine