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www.qualityprogress.com | September 2016Putting Best Practices to Work
P
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ALITY PRO
GRESS | SEPTEM
BER 2016 BEN
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QUALITY PROGRESS
Plus:Quality tools ratchet up purchasing performance p. 30
Measuring UP Construction
company’s benchmarks to build on
p. 16
Aiming at long-termstability with ISO 9001 p. 53
Check out the NEW books available from ASQ Quality Press!
ISO Lesson Guide 2015: Pocket Guide to ISO 9001:2015This convenient pocket guide translates ISO 9001 into easy-to-understand words. Each element containing requirements is discussed and key concepts are highlighted at the beginning of each section. It’s ideal for handing out to existing and new employees.
Item: H1478
The ISO 9001:2015 Implementation Handbook: Using the Process Approach to Build a Quality Management System The handbook helps organizations new to ISO 9001 connect their current practices to the requirements of ISO 9001:2015. For organizations certified to ISO 9001, it advises how to use your upgrade to ISO 9001:2015 to rebuild your QMS.
Item: H1515
The Certified Six Sigma Yellow Belt HandbookThis reference manual is designed to help both those interested in passing the ASQ certification exam for the Six Sigma Yellow Belt and those who want a handy reference to the appropriate materials needed for successful Six Sigma projects. It is intended as a reference for both beginners in Six Sigma and those who are already knowledgeable about process improvement and variation reduction.
Item: H1493
CERTIFICATION MEMBERSHIP PUBLICATIONSTRAINING CONFERENCES
Learn more about these books through the Quality Press bookstore at asq.org/quality-press.
This Month’s Pick!
Your journey along the path for lifelong learning and career advancement starts with ASQ.It’s time to learn more and be more within your organization, your industry, and as a global continuous improvement professional. ASQ has the resources to help you take the next step!
Increase Your Salary Potential Add to your knowledge and credibility with one of 19 ASQ certifications and vast selection of flexible training options that can open doors to greater career opportunities.
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Contact ASQ
Speak with a Customer Care representative and learn how ASQ can help you take the next step as a quality and continuous improvement leader.
Get Heard and Get Ahead Discover links to more information about increasing your salary potential, expanding your network, and finding the perfect quality job.
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FEATURES
• Volviendo a los Fundamentos Back to Basics translated into Spanish.
• Free Advice Check out QP’s archive of the Expert Answers department.
• Read and Rate Rate and comment on this month’s four feature articles.
www.qualityprogress.comONLY @
BENCHMARKINGHome ImprovementBenchmarking the quality metrics of top homebuilders in the United States can open opportunities for others to learn best practices and save dollars.
by Glenn Cottrell and Denis Leonard
PROCESS IMPROVEMENTHandling HandoffsHow quality tools assisted one hospital in re-examining its patient transfer processes to avoid fumbles and simplify activities, which increased patient safety.
by Clark Carboneau and Susan Sanches
SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENTBuying Into Quality Learn to use quality tools to assess your organization’s purchasing performance, find and benchmark key performance indicators, and reveal opportunities for improvement.
by Ricardo Fierro
PROCESS CAPABILITYMeasuring MaturityUnderstanding the power of process maturity measurements allows you to predict results in any organizational system.
by Richard E. Mallory
16
22
30
ContentsPutting Best Practices to Work | September 2016 | www.qualityprogress.com
38
16
QUALITY
30
QP • www.qualityprogress.com4
LogOn• Questioning root casues.• ISO 9001’s language is not strong enough.
Expert Answers• Defining what is ‘reasonable.’
Keeping Current • Yahoo undone by unclear innovation strategy.
Mr. Pareto Head
QP Toolbox
QP Reviews
DEPARTMENTS
Up FrontBench press.
Innovation ImperativeWays to manage and benchmark an innovation process.
Measure for MeasureTreating your instrument resolution with more resolve.
Quality in the First PersonChange management requires individual focus.
Statistics RoundtableThe basics behind experimental design generation.
Standards OutlookGoing beyond requirements to ensure effectiveness.
One Good IdeaBalancing speed and competency when training.
BONUS Back to BasicsGetting reacquainted with some problem-solving methods.
Mail Quality Progress/ASQ600 N. Plankinton Ave.Milwaukee, WI 53203Telephone Fax 800-248-1946 414-272-1734414-272-8575
Email Follow protocol of first initial and full last name followed by @asq.org (for example, [email protected]).
Article Submissions Quality Progress is a peer-reviewed publica-tion with 85% of its feature articles written by quality professionals. For information about submitting an article, call Valerie Ellifson at 800-248-1946 x2139, or email [email protected].
Author GuidelinesTo learn more about the manuscript review process, helpful hints before submitting a manuscript and QP’s 2016 editorial planner, click on “Author Guidelines” at www. qualityprogress.com under “Tools and Resources.“
Photocopying Authorization Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use or the internal or personal use of specific clients is granted by Quality Progress provided the fee of $1 per copy is paid to ASQ or the Copyright Clear-ance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. Copying for other purposes requires the express permission of Quality Progress. For permission, write Quality Progress, PO Box 3005, Milwaukee, WI 53201-3005, call 414-272-8575 x7406, fax 414-272-1734 or email [email protected].
Photocopies, Reprints And MicroformArticle photocopies are available from ASQ at 800-248-1946. To purchase bulk reprints (more than 100), contact Barbara Mitrovic at ASQ, 800-248-1946. For microform, contact ProQuest Information and Learning, 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, 800-521-0600 x2888, international 734-761-4700, www.il.proquest.com.
Membership and Subscriptions For 70 years, ASQ has been the worldwide provider of information and learning oppor-tunities related to quality. In addition, ASQ membership offers information, networking, certification and educational opportunities to help quality professionals obtain practical solutions to the many problems they face each day. Subscriptions to Quality Progress are one of the many benefits of ASQ mem-bership. To join, call 800-248-1946.
List RentalsOrders for ASQ’s member and nonmember buyer lists can be purchased by contacting Michael Costantino at the Infogroup/Edith Roman List Management Co., 402-836-6626 or fax 845-620-1885.
COLUMNS
QUALITY PROGRESS
Quality Progress (ISSN 0033-524X) is published monthly by the American Society for Quality, 600 N. Plankinton Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53203. Editorial and advertising offices: 414-272-8575. Periodicals postage paid at Milwaukee, WI, and at additional mailing offices. Institutional subscriptions are held in the name of a company, corporation, government agency or library. Requests for back issues must be prepaid and are based on availability: ASQ members $17 per copy; nonmembers $25 per copy. Canadian GST #128717618, Canadian Publications Mail Agreement #40030175. Canada Post: Return undeliverables to 2835 Kew Drive, Windsor, ON N8T 3B7. Prices are subject to change without prior notification. © 2016 by ASQ. No claim for missing issues will be accepted after three months following the month of publication of the issue for domestic addresses and six months for Canadian and international addresses.Postmaster: Please send address changes to the American Society for Quality, PO Box 3005, Milwaukee, WI 53201-3005. Printed in USA.
ASQ’s Vision: By making quality a global priority, an organizational imperative and a personal ethic, the American Society for Quality becomes the community for everyone who seeks quality technology, concepts or tools to improve themselves and their world.
- PROPER ALIGNMENT Consolidating oversight activities.
- THE WHOLE PICTURE Lessons for effective auditing.
QP
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SPECIAL SECTION ASQ’S 2016 QUALITY RESOURCE GUIDE p. 55
12
UPFRONT
Bench PressGetting your arms around quality cost
INFORMAL BENCHMARKING happens all the time in your everyday choices. If you
are looking for a dentist, for example, you might ask friends what they like or dislike
about theirs. We search for potential dining venues on Yelp and let the number of stars re-
ceived from patrons influence our dining decisions. And you might choose your children’s
new school based on its performance against a set of academic criteria assembled from
various schools.
Formal benchmarking takes this kind of research to the next level, and this month’s
cover story, “Home Improvement,” p. 16, explains the outcomes of a project the authors
undertook to benchmark the processes and practices of a group of home builders. Their
approach logically examined some of the biggest influences on efficiency and profitability,
allowing the home builders to improve on their operations after having their eyes opened
to where improvements were needed.
The impetus for the project was to reduce the cost of quality, which can be high in the
construction industry, accounting for up to 15% of construction costs. Anything the build-
ers could do to hammer away at that number can drastically improve profitability.
Data collection on your particular industry, as well as developing metrics that allow
you to compare to others, is a good start in applying these learnings to your own situation.
“Buying Into Quality,” p. 30, seeks to help readers improve their purchasing processes
by providing a slate of tools to streamline processes and uncover non value-added steps.
If you consider that personnel and overhead account for more than 80% of purchasing-
process costs, it’s clear that quality tools can be a natural way to achieve savings.
“Measuring Maturity,” p. 38, outlines a proposed standard to measure process maturity,
allowing practitioners to be on the leading edge of measurement. The author worked with
the ASQ Government Division, which has adopted this as a professional standard for
government quality practices.
The author writes: “Through its systematic use, the tool can provide a process maturity
score from zero to 15 to every supervisor and manager in that organization and make the
extent of quality implementation a known performance attribute.”
Finally, “Handling Handoffs,” p. 22, details how one New Mexico hospital used flow
charts and voice of the customer, fine-tuned communications practices and instituted team
huddles, consequently making the patient hand-off process safer for patients and simpler
for staff. QP
Seiche Sanders
Editor
DIRECTOR OF KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTSSeiche Sanders
ASSOCIATE EDITORMark Edmund
ASSISTANT EDITORTyler Gaskill
CONTRIBUTING EDITORLynsey Hart
MANUSCRIPT COORDINATORValerie Ellifson
COPY EDITORSusan E. Daniels
ART DIRECTORMary Uttech
GRAPHIC DESIGNERSandy Wyss
PRODUCTION Cathy Milquet
ADVERTISING PRODUCTIONBarbara Mitrovic
DIGITAL PRODUCTION SPECIALISTSJulie StroikJulie Wagner
MEDIA SALESNaylor LLCLou BrandowKrys D’AntonioNicholas ManisNorbert MusialErin Pande
MEDIA SALES ADMINISTRATORKathy Thomas
MARKETING ADMINISTRATORMatt Meinholz
EDITORIAL OFFICESPhone: 414-272-8575Fax: 414-272-1734
ADVERTISING OFFICESPhone: 866-277-5666
ASQ ADMINISTRATIONCEO William J. Troy
Senior LeadershipAndrew BainesMichael BarryKalleen BruchLynelle KorteBrian J. LeHouillierDick Palmersheim Shontra Powell
To promote discussion of issues in the field of quality and ensure coverage of all responsible points of view, Quality Progress publishes articles representing conflicting and minor-ity views. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily of ASQ or Quality Progress. Use of the ASQ logo in advertisements does not necessarily constitute endorsement of that particular product or service by ASQ.
QUALITY PROGRESS
QP
September 2016 • QP 5
thats
QP • www.qualityprogress.com6
LOGONSound CAPA adviceThe five levels of corrective and preven-
tive actions (CAPA) explained by Andy
Barnett in “Expert
Answers: CAPA
effectiveness”
(August 2016, pp.
8-9) are great. I
also thought the
CAPA-effective-
ness measure-
ment was nicely
described for easy implementation.
Ramaswamy Ganesan
Pondicherry, India
Seeking a path“Clear Pathway” (July 2016, pp. 22-27) was
just what I was looking for to help me de-
cide the next certification I should pursue.
Thank you!
Andrea Julio
Cambridge, Ontario
Questioning root causesIn “How We Work” (June 2016, pp. 14-21),
I was puzzled by this quote: “By follow-
ing the DMAIC process, the root causes
were found to be unsafe walking surfaces,
weather and field staff characteristics, such
as gender or the accreditation program
being surveyed.”
The statement raises four questions:
1. What were the harmful conditions,
behaviors, actions and inactions that
resulted in each of the root causes?
2. Which of those harmful conditions, be-
haviors, actions and inactions have equal
or better claim to be called root causes?
Seen&Heard
StayConnectedFind the latest news, quips and targeted content from QP staff.
Director of Knowledge Products Seiche Sanders: @ASQ_Seiche
Associate Editor Mark Edmund:
@ASQ_Mark
Assistant Editor Tyler Gaskill: @ASQ_Tyler
Contributing Editor Lynsey Hart: @ASQ_Lynsey
www.facebook.com/
groups/43461176682
www.linkedin.com/groups/quality-progress-magazine-asq-1878386
3. Which other harmful conditions,
behaviors, actions and inactions
were necessary to cause the harms
incurred?
4. Which of those other harmful condi-
tions, behaviors, actions and inac-
tions have equal or better claim to be
called root causes?
William R. Corcoran
Windsor, CT
Attitude adjustmentAfter reading “Standards Outlook: Small
Change, Big Impact” (February 2016,
pp. 62-63), I don’t see how ISO 9001
has strong enough language to change
current attitudes toward the qual-
ity assurance department in small to
medium-sized organizations. The roles
will not change unless it states that pur-
chasing, manufacturing, engineering and
production control are part of the team,
and these departments are named as
a quality counsel and are given some
specific duties.
Frank F. Feher Jr.
Laguna Niguel, CA
Tune In
The latest episode of ASQ TV
covers the growing connection
between quality and sports. Learn
about a method that
measures your abil-
ity to adjust to failure
and how it can lead
to better perfor-
mances in athletics
and your career.
Visit http://videos.asq.org
to access the full video library.
Join the conversationSubmit comments, questions or
opinions about articles in QP by
sending them to [email protected]
or by commenting on the article
pages at www.qualityprogress.com.
Your comments could appear in an
upcoming edition of LogOn.
September 2016 • QP 7
QPQUALITY PROGRESS
PAST CHAIRCecilia Kimberlin, Kimberlin LLC (retired – Abbott)
CHAIRPatricia La Londe, CareFusion
CHAIR-ELECTEric Hayler, BMW Manufacturing
TREASURERG. Geoffrey Vining, Virginia Tech, Department of
Statistics
SECRETARYWilliam J. Troy, ASQ
DIRECTORSDonald Brecken, Ferris State UniversityHeather L. Crawford, Apollo EndosurgeryRaymond R. Crawford, Parsons BrinckerhoffHa C. Dao, Emerson Climate Technologies Inc.Benito Flores, Universidad de MonterreyEdwin G. Landauer, Clackamas Community CollegeDavid B. Levy, Boyce Technologies Inc. Austin S. Lin, GoogleLuis G. Morales, Damiler Trucks North AmericaMark Moyer, CAMLSSylvester (Bud) M. Newton, Jr., AlcoaDaniella A. Picciotti, BechtelSteven J. Schuelka, SJS ConsultingJason Spiegler, Camstar Systems Inc.Sunil Thawani, Quality Indeed Consulting FZEAllen Wong, Abbott
QP EDITORIAL REVIEW BOARDRandy Brull, chair
Administrative Committee Brady Boggs, Randy Brull, Jane Campanizzi, Larry Haugh, Jim Jaquess, Gary MacLean,R. Dan Reid, Richard Stump
Technical ReviewersNaveen Agarwal, Suresh Anaganti, Andy Barnett, Matthew Barsalou, David Bonyuet, David Burger, Bernie Carpenter, L.N. Prabhu Chandrasekaran, Ken Cogan, Linda Cubalchini-Travis, Ahmad Elshen-nawy, Mark Gavoor, Kunita Gear, Daniel Gold, T. Gourishankar, Roberto Guzman, Ellen Hardy, Lynne Hare, Ray Klotz, T.M. Kubiak, William LaFol-lette, Pradip Mehta, Arind Parthasarathy, Larry Picciano, Gene Placzkowski, Tony Polito, Peter Pylipow, Imran Ahmad Rana, John Richards, James Rooney, Brian Scullin, Abhijit Sengupta, Amitava Sengupta, Mohit Sharma, A.V. Srinivas, Joe Tunner, Manu Vora, Keith Wagoner, Jack Westfall, Doron Zilbershtein
QUICK POLL RESULTS Each month at www.qualityprogress.com, visitors can take an informal survey. Here are the results from last month‘s Quick Poll:
What is greatest challenge organizations face in supply chain management?
Ensuring suppliers consistently meet quality, cost and delivery expectations.Weighing costs and risks during the supplier selection process.Investigating recurring issues while providing suggestions for improvement.Identifying a supplier’s issues that might interrupt service or delivery.
50%
28.1%
12.5%9.3%
Visit www.qualityprogress.com for the latest question:
What is the most significant benefit of benchmarking?• Helps organizations better understand how they compare with competitors.• Shows organizations what areas, systems or processes they should improve.• Allows organizations to see and share best practices.• Gathers data that can help create useful metrics.
QP
QualityNewsTODAYRecent headlines from ASQ’s global news serviceDelta System Failure Is a Wake-Up Call for AirlinesDelta Air Lines experienced a worldwide computer network failure last month that high-lights the vulnerability of the information systems sustaining the biggest U.S. carriers, each of which has contended with major disruptions this year. Experts say complex net-works cobbled together over the decades need major overhauls and require significant new investments. (http://tinyurl.com/airline-system-failure)
Methods Sought to Protect U.S. Voting System From HackersU.S. officials are weighing new steps to bolster the security of the country’s voting process against cyberthreats. After hackers infiltrated Democratic campaign computer systems, officials had high-level discussions about election cybersecurity, a vastly complex effort with 9,000 jurisdictions that help carry out the balloting process, many with different ways of collecting, tallying and reporting votes. (http://tinyurl.com/voting-cybersecurity)
Quality Answers to Quality QuestionsStruggling with a complicated quality question? Let our experts help. Send your questions to [email protected] or submit them at http://tinyurl.com/qpexpertanswers, and a subject matter expert will provide a solution.
Read QP’s Most Popular ArticlesCheck out last month’s most clicked-on articles by visiting www.qualityprogress.com.
The Digital Edition Is Just a Click AwayRead the latest open-access digital edition of QP anytime on your computer, tablet or mobile device by visiting www.qualityprogress.com.
www.qualityprogress.com
ONLINE EXTRAS@
WANT THE LATEST QUALITY-RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS? The QNT Weekly enewsletter, available exclusively to ASQ members, delivers it every Friday.
Subscribe now at http://email.asq.org/subscribe/qntwk.
QP • www.qualityprogress.com8
Reasonable package guidanceQ: I need clarification on regulatory require-
ments for net content of packaging goods.
How is weight loss considered when
evaluating whether the fill weight meets a
label claim?
The National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) Handbook 133 (NIST,
2016) allows for some loss due to “ordinary
and customary exposure to conditions that
normally occur in good distribution practice”
and defines those allowances for products
such as flour, pet food or pasta. For prod-
ucts not listed there, the handbook states:
“Inspectors should follow their jurisdiction’s
guidance for making their determination
on an acceptable moisture allowance.” This
may be clear enough for an inspector within
his or her jurisdiction, but it’s vague for a
producer that supplies to different regions.
Other international regulations show a
similar lack of precision in the requirement.
For example, the International Organization
of Legal Metrology (OIML) Recommenda-
tions 87—Quantity of Product in Prepackag-
es (OIML, 2004) states: “Legal metrology of-
ficials may permit reasonable deviations in
the quantity of product (that is, hygroscopic
products) caused by ordinary and custom-
ary exposure to environmental conditions
that occur in storage and distribution.” At
no point, however, does it quantify what is
meant by “reasonable.”
I also couldn’t find any reference to
timing. Is it acceptable if the content meets
the label claim at the time it leaves the
factory? How is the evaluation made six
months, one year or even two years later?
To comply with the regulations while
avoiding unnecessary overfilling costs, these
requirements and evaluation processes
must be clearly understood. No one I asked
was able to answer these questions. My
organization operates globally, and I would
appreciate it if you could extend your com-
ments to other international requirements.
Carlos Liberatori
Brantford, Ontario
A: Defining what is “reasonable” is one of
the most complex technical issues we deal
with when providing technical advice to
weights and measures officials and packers
on moisture-loss allowances. The 1977
Supreme Court decision on Jones v. Rath
(430 U.S. 519) ruled that federal packaging
laws preempted state laws or regulations
that did not recognize allowances for rea-
sonable moisture loss or gain in packaged
goods.
Prior to that case, most states enforced
what were sometimes called “net weight at
time of sale” requirements. Today, “reason-
able” variations for moisture loss are found
in state and federal laws, which govern
the net-weight requirements for packaged
commodities.
These laws allow for reasonable varia-
tions from the net quantity of contents
when they are caused by two factors:
1. Variations caused by the packaging pro-
cess and machinery, which occur if the
packer is following current good manu-
facturing practice.
2. Variations caused by
the loss or gain of
moisture from the
package, which occur if
the packer follows cur-
rent good distribution
practices.
The second requirement
helps prevent product tam-
pering or mishandling after
it leaves a packer’s plant,
such as instances in which
delivery workers were
caught removing product
from packages to illegally
sell it on the side. There
also are poor distribution
practices, such as trans-
porting perishable foods
in unrefrigerated trucks,
EXPERTANSWE RS
September 2016 • QP 9
which frequently accelerates moisture loss
beyond a packer’s expectations.
After weights and measures inspec-
tors find a sample of packages containing
less than the quantity represented on the
label, they usually contact the packer to
determine:
• Whether the variations are due to the
packing process.
• Whether the packer is following good
manufacturing practices. For example, an
inspector would ensure scales or filling
machines are calibrated and measure-
ment standards are traceable to NIST,
and there are statistical process controls
in place and supervision to ensure that
under-filled packages are reprocessed or
removed from sale.
After the variations are understood or
eliminated as the primary cause for the
shortages, a packer also can provide infor-
mation on the product and packaging, and
present moisture-loss studies conducted
on the product. The term “reasonable” is
used in law because the amount of mois-
ture loss that may occur, even if a packer
is following current good manufacturing
and distribution practices, will vary due to
a number of factors, including: the product,
packaging material, humidity levels, tem-
perature, airflow around the package, other
handling and storage practices, and shelf
life (time).
For these and other reasons, weights
and measures officials typically define
what is “reasonable” on a case-by-case
basis after consulting with a packer and
reviewing production data, moisture-
loss studies or by conducting a limited
moisture-loss study under controlled
conditions to validate a packer’s claims.
Because weights and measures inspec-
tions are law enforcement functions of
each state, their inspectors and attorneys
general or states’ attorneys who prosecute
these cases follow criminal procedures to
ensure due process is provided. As in any
criminal prosecution, it is ultimately a court
of law that decides whether the moisture
allowance is “reasonable.”
The moisture allowances currently in
NIST Handbook 133, “Checking the Net
Content of Packaged Goods,” for pasta,
dry pet food and flour were developed and
adopted only after years of studies and
negotiations and should not be interpreted
to mean that packages of those products
do not lose more than 3% of their weight
due to moisture loss. The studies support-
ing these negotiated moisture allowances
typically revealed much larger losses
among packages of these products in some
marketplaces around the country.
Developing a single value for the entire
nation, however, required regulators and
packers to compromise on these negotiat-
ed values. Flour was adopted in the 1980s,
and it has worked effectively to help both
parties provide good consumer protection
and fair competition in the marketplace.
Note that if an official has sufficient
evidence to suspect a packer is taking ad-
vantage of one of the moisture allowances
in NIST Handbook 133, the official can take
legal action against the packer in spite of
the 3% moisture allowance. Likewise, if a
packer believes the 3% moisture allowance
in NIST Handbook 133 is not “reasonable,”
the packer also is not prohibited from
challenging the action in an administrative
hearing or courtroom.
Defining reasonable moisture allowances
is a challenge for weights and measures
officials and packers around the world.
For more than 25 years, while serving as
the U.S. representative to OIML Technical
Committee 6, which is responsible for OIML
Recommendation 87—Quantity of Product
in Prepackage, I can affirm that officials
and packers from every country face these
same questions and challenges about what
is a “reasonable” moisture loss.
Kenneth S. Butcher
Program leader
Laws and Metric Program
National Institute of
Standards and Technology,
Office of Weights and Measures
Gaithersburg, MD
EXPERTANSWE RSDefining what is ‘reasonable’ is one of the most complex technical issues we deal with when providing technical advice.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCESFor a formal explanation of package requirements and
moisture loss, read section 1.2 “Package Requirements” in chapter one of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Handbook 133, “Checking the Net Contents of Packaged Goods” (NIST, 2016), at http://tinyurl.com/nist-hb-133.
For information on how the moisture allowances were developed, read section 2.5.6 (p. 247) of NIST Handbook 130, “Uniform Laws and Regulations in the Areas of Legal Metrology and Engine Fuel Quality” (NIST, 2016), at http://tinyurl.com/nist-hb-130.
For examples of some of the good manufacturing prac-tices that weights and measures inspectors look for in packaging facilities, read NIST Handbook 130, sections 2.6.11 “Good Quantity Control Practices,” and 2.6.12 “Point-of-Pack Inspection Guidelines” at http://tinyurl.com/nist-hb-130.
SOLUTION TEXTS
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KEEPINGCURRE NTINNOVATION
A Silicon Valley Giant Falls Once an internet pioneer, Yahoo stumbled in strategy and innovation Ask a group of people, “What comes to mind when you hear
the company name Yahoo?” and you will get a mix of answers
such as email, news, search or maybe that insidious yodel from
the commercial 10 years ago. Unfortunately, Yahoo’s inability to
translate the nature of its focus to consumers is a result of years-
long internal conflicts regarding the organization’s vision and
strategy.
Originally named “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide
Web,” Yahoo was created in 1994 by Stanford students Jerry Yang
and David Filo as a directory for their favorite websites, so their fo-
cus was on content.1 As technology progressed, the world outgrew
the need for a single place to find useful websites, but one after
another, Yahoo’s leaders failed to articulate an alternate, enduring
mission statement.
In 2006, an internal memo—nick-
named the “peanut butter mani-
festo”—was leaked to The Washington
Post. Authored by former Yahoo senior
vice president Brad Garlinghouse, it
addressed the organization’s lack of
vision. “We’ve known this for years, talk
about it incessantly, but do nothing to
fundamentally address it,” Garlinghouse
wrote. “We are scared to be left out.
We are reactive instead of charting an
unwavering course.2
“I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter
across the myriad of [sic] opportunities that continue to evolve
in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread
across everything we do, and thus, we focus on nothing in particu-
lar. I hate peanut butter. We all should.”
Yahoo couldn’t decide if it was a media company or a technol-
ogy company, each of which require a different business strategy.
According to Paul Graham, who joined Yahoo in 2008 after his
start-up was acquired, “The worst consequence of trying to be a
media company was that [Yahoo] didn’t take programming seri-
ously enough.”3
After Yahoo positioned itself as a media company, it inherently
created a work culture in which programmers came last—simply
there to bring the products developed by managers to fruition.
This is the opposite strategy of some of Silicon Valley’s biggest
names, such as Google and Facebook, where product develop-
ment begins with programmers and engineers.4
Until recently, Google had a 20% policy that allowed employees
to work on an approved side project one day per week, and many
of Google’s current features and applications, such as Google
News, have been products of this strategy.5 In contrast, some Ya-
hoo engineering departments didn’t seem to have enough staff to
handle their initial responsibilities, let alone innovate.
Marissa Mayer, who became Yahoo’s CEO in July 2012, was
dumbfounded when she heard from a mobile engineer that Yahoo’s
mobile team only had 60 engineers.6 At that point, Yahoo Mail, ar-
guably the organization’s most important product, had yet to build
a smartphone app. Instead, the small team had simply made the
Yahoo Mail website responsive, which
makes it was easier to use on smaller
screens.7
Mayer said that to survive, “Yahoo
will have to be a predominately mobile
company.”8 A major reason Yahoo didn’t
achieved this goal, according to Shashi
Seth, Yahoo’s senior executive from
2010 to 2013, was because Yahoo never
developed a mobile operating system or
widely used a browser of its own, unlike
Google and Apple.9
In 2006, two years before Android
phones were released with pre-downloaded Google apps, Google
outspent Yahoo in R&D investments by an average of $100 million
per quarter.10-12 Since then, the disparity in innovation investment
between the two organizations has grown exponentially, and Yahoo
has steadily fallen behind the rest of technology sector.13, 14, 15
“[Yahoo] has been mining its existing customer base and not nec-
essarily providing new value to attract new customers,” said Jo-Ellen
Pozner, business professor at University of California-Berkley.16
Recruitment versus cultureGarlinghouse, who is now president and COO at Ripple, a financial
technology company, followed up on his “peanut butter manifesto”
in January 2013. He said that time and experience had taught him
that the lack of focus, accountability and decisiveness he saw at
Yahoo were only symptoms of a deeper problem. “Yahoo’s strength
September 2016 • QP 13
KEEPINGCURRE NTNAME: Kristin L. Case.
RESIDENCE: Tulsa, OK.
EDUCATION: Master’s degree in applied mathematics from the Univer-sity of Tulsa and an MBA from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.
INTRODUCTION TO QUALITY: Case is a second-generation quality pro-fessional. Her father was an industrial engineering professor and taught classes in statistical process control, quality control, reliability, engineer-ing economics and total quality management. She grew up assuming everyone understood process variation and how to assess Baldrige style because that was what was discussed at the dinner table.
CURRENT JOB: Case is self-employed and operates CaseConsults, a consulting firm specializing in developing or improving quality manage-
ment systems based on ISO 9001 or an industry-specific standard. Most of her clients are small businesses or in the aerospace industry.
PREVIOUS JOBS: Before starting a career in quality, Case taught seventh-grade math at a public school. She held various teaching positions at the Tulsa Technology Center, Tulsa Community College, the University of Tulsa and Oklahoma State University. She spent almost nine years as a senior quality engineer (then quality manager) for Federal Aviation Administration-certificated repair stations and has held quality-related positions in several manufacturing organizations.
ASQ ACTIVITIES: Case serves as the regional director of Region 14B (Oklahoma, Arizona and the northern part of Texas) and is a member of the Crosby Medal Committee. She has been an ASQ member since 1994 and has held several local, regional and national positions during the last 15 years. She holds six ASQ certifications.
OTHER ACTIVITIES: Served five years on the Industrial Engineering and Management Advisory Board at Oklahoma State University; volunteered for the Baldrige Performance Ex-cellence Program from 2007 to 2011, eventually as a senior examiner and team leader; held various volunteer positions for the Oklahoma Quality Award Foundation from 1998 to 2002; and has been a professional engineer licensed by the state of Oklahoma since 2000.
RECENT HONORS: Member of 2016 class of ASQ fellows; named full academician of the International Academy for Quality (IAQ) in 2015; presented at the International Conference of ISO 9000 five times and received the Best Speaker Award in 2012; earned the Iron Butt Association National Parks Tour Master Traveler Gold Award for having visited on her motor-cycle at least 50 national parks, monuments, historic sites, recreation areas or other parks designated by the National Parks Service.
PUBLISHED WORKS: Co-authored a paper for the European Organization for Quality Con-gress that earned IAQ’s Best Paper Award in 2015.
PERSONAL: Wife, Nancy; daughter, Kaelyn.
FAVORITE WAYS TO RELAX: Case enjoys endurance motorcycling and traveling.
QUALITY QUOTE: Quality is the integral to the value of interested parties’ net-positive per-ception based on key factors such as reliability, consistency, ease of use and aesthetics.
QWho’s Who inhad emanated from the passion and
entrepreneurial zeal of its employees,”
Garlinghouse said. “But these muscles
had atrophied.”17
Even before January 2013, Yahoo
had lost most of its appeal to young
programmers. It wasn’t as enticing
as the tech companies that were
constantly producing new applica-
tions or platforms, and it didn’t have
the potential to make them into the
next Mark Zuckerburg—like start-ups
did. This made it difficult to recruit top
talent.
A recruiting strategy called
“acqui-hiring” involves acquiring a
start-up for its technology and, often
more importantly, its staff. Mayer
told Bloomberg in a 2015 interview,
“People would say, ‘I’d love to work
for you, I’d love to work at Yahoo—but
I’m not coming alone. They wanted
to bring their teams with them as a
way of ensuring the Yahoo experience
wouldn’t be too crazy. So, acquiring
whole companies was one way to
bring in talented people, along with
their teams.”18
In total, Mayer spent at least
$2.3 billion acquiring 53 start-ups to
improve Yahoo’s talent pool.19 At the
same time, however, she implemented
a controversial employee performance
metric that further stifled innovation
and weakened any sort of culture
that promoted teamwork between
long-term employees and the new
acqui-hires.20
Mayer’s immediate predecessor,
Scott Thompson, had sought to reduce
Yahoo’s workforce by cutting whole di-
visions instead of conducting individual
evaluations. The board of directors told
Mayer that she should be prepared to
cut 35 to 50% of Yahoo’s workforce.21
(continues on p. 15)
QP • www.qualityprogress.com14
KEEPINGCURRENTSHORTRUNS THE TOP TWO graduate degrees in terms
of career investment are master’s degrees
in biostatistics and statistics, according to
a recent Fortune magazine article. Fortune
editors worked with PayScale, a Seattle-
based company that analyzes salary
databases, to rank doctorates and master’s
degrees. The rankings were based on
factors such as long-term outlook for job
growth, median pay, job satisfaction and
stress. To see the complete list, visit http://
tinyurl.com/fortune-best-degrees.
FOUR PEOPLE have been appointed to
three-year terms on the Malcolm Baldrige
National Quality Award judges panel. Two
of the new judges are ASQ members:
Lawrence D. Ramunno, M.D., chief medical
officer at Sibley Memorial Hospital in
Washington, DC, and Diane Springer, director
of Eaton business excellence assessment
at Eaton Corp. in Marysville, WA. The other
new judges are Tammy Dye, vice president
of clinical services and chief quality officer
for Schneck Medical Center in Seymour,
IN, and John C. Harris Jr., assistant adjutant
general for the U.S. Army and commander
of the Ohio Army National Guard. For more
information about the appointments, visit
http://tinyurl.com/bald-new-judges.
THE AMERICAN BOARD of Quality
Assurance and Utilization Review Physicians
has formed a pact with the American
College of Physician Advisors to offer the
first physician advisor subspecialty for
the healthcare quality and management
certification exam. For more details, visit
http://tinyurl.com/phys-adv-cert.
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION with
e-business has increased, despite big drops
for social media superstars Facebook and
Twitter, according to new data from the
American Customer Satisfaction Index
(ACSI). The e-business segment, which
includes social media, search engines, and
information, news and opinion websites,
improved for a third consecutive year,
edging up 0.7% to 74.9 on ACSI’s 100-point
scale. ACSI data show advertising is the
most important factor weighing down
e-business customer satisfaction. For more
details, visit http://tinyurl.com/e-biz-satisf.
MOST SENIOR MANAGERS at professional
organizations are concerned about the
role relevance of training and assessing,
according to a new survey by the
testing company Pearson VUE and the
Professional Associations Research
Network, a London-based membership
organization for professional bodies.
The survey showed 59% of the 68 senior
managers from the United Kingdom and
Australia who responded believe newly
certified professionals are prepared for
their job roles after completing training
and assessment programs, but 81% are
concerned about ensuring that the learning
and program content remains relevant. For
more from the survey, visit http://tinyurl.
com/pearsonvue-survey.
ASQ
DATE IN QUALITY HISTORYQP looks back on a person or event that made a difference in the history of quality.
Sept. 26, 1914Dorian Shainin, an influential quality consultant, aeronautics engineer and
author, was born on this date in San Francisco.
Shainin is best known for practical tools called the “Shainin techniques” that
help manufacturers solve problems, including those that previously had been
considered unsolvable.
Shainin also is remembered for developing statistical engineering. He
specialized in creating strategies to enable engineers to “talk to the parts.” The
discipline has been used successfully in areas such as product development
and reliability, quality improvement and analytical problem solving.
Shainin, an honorary member of ASQ, wrote more than 100 articles and was
the author or co-author of several books. ASQ established the Shainin medal in his
honor to recognize an individual for developing and applying creative or unique
statistical problem-solving approaches related to the quality of a product or service.
RESOURCEASQ, “Dorian Shainin: A professional approach to problem solving,” http://tinyurl.com/asq-who-shainin.
ASQNEWS NEW BOOKS RELEASED ASQ Quality Press will
release three new books in September. Cracking
the Case of ISO 9001:2015 for Manufacturing
and Cracking the Case of ISO 9001:2015 for
Service, both authored by Charlie Cianfrani
and John E. “Jack“ West, are now in their third
editions and will be released in early September.
Milton P. Dentch’s The ISO 9001:2015
Implementation Handbook also will be available
in early September. For more information, visit
http://asq.org/quality-press.
CASE STUDY ADDED ASQ released a new
case study about how an organization applied
supply chain management techniques to Six
Sigma to reduce major inventory stockouts.
The organization, in turn, saved money and
improved its on-time delivery. To access the
case study, visit http://tinyurl.com/case-study-
seadek.
September 2016 • QP 15
KEEPINGCURRENTMr. Pareto Head BY MIKE CROSSEN
Mayer pushed back saying, “Yahoo’s
basic infrastructure was so byzantine and
jerry-built that it would be unwise to blindly
rip whole teams of people out,” accord-
ing to Nicholas Carlson, editor of Business
Insider.22
Her strategy was to have managers give
employees a score of one to five every
quarter. A one meant an employee “con-
sistently misses” established goals while a
five meant an employee “greatly succeeds”
these goals.23
The controversial aspect was that
managers were given target distribu-
tions for employees. According to Mayer’s
strategy—which she called a “bucket sort”
in an attempt to distance it from stacked
ranking—certain percentages of employees
had to go into each of the score categories.
Because of this, middle managers had a
difficult time getting talented employees to
work together and workers would prioritize
tasks related to their personal goals over
other potential innovations.24
It also was extremely difficult to earn
raises under this evaluation system. To do
so, an employee had to have an average
score of three for the past four quarters.
When Mayer came to Yahoo, the organiza-
tion had some of the highest salaries in the
industry, and many employees understood
that changes had to be made. It did not go
unnoticed, however, that Mayer was spend-
ing big money to bring in outside help. It
was rumored that the mobile engineering
acqui-hires, who typically stay the least
amount of time that they can with the
company, were receiving three-year deals
worth $1 million.25, 26
In the end, Mayer spent a lot of money
in an unsuccessful attempt to catchup in a
race that Yahoo started losing in 2006, and
the company reported a $4.4 billion loss
in 2015.27 Shareholders began suggesting
that Yahoo sell off the core of its business
in order to avoid paying more than $10 bil-
lion in taxes to spin off Alibaba, a Chinese
online marketplace that Yahoo had bought
a 40% stake in for $1 billion in 2005—The
stock was worth $33 billion at the time of
the suggestion.28
In July 2016, Yahoo’s board approved the
sale of Yahoo’s core business to Verizon
for $4.8 billion. At the time of print, Yahoo’s
shareholders and federal regulators had
not yet approved the deal, which is ex-
pected to close in early 2017.29 —compiled
by Lynsey Hart, contributing editor
EDITOR’S NOTEThe references listed in this article can be found on the Keeping Current webpage at www.qualityprogress.com.
Yahoo’s innovation woes (continued from p. 13)ASQ
SECTION, DIVISION EVENTS SCHEDULED Several section and division events
are scheduled in the coming
months. They include:
• The 60th annual Fall Technical
Conference will be held Oct. 6-7
in Minneapolis. Visit http://asq.
org/conferences/fall-technical for
more information.
• The fourth annual Innovation
Division and San Diego section
conference will be Oct. 14-15
in San Diego. Find specifics at
http://tinyurl.com/innovation-
conf.
• The Audit Division’s 25th annual
conference will be Oct. 20 in
Memphis, TN. Find out more
about the event by visiting www.
asqauditconference.org.
• The Reliability Division’s annual
Reliability and Maintainability
Symposium will be Jan. 23-26,
2017, in Orlando, FL. Visit www.
rams.org for more details about
the event.
Home Improvem entBenchmarking U.S. homebuilder quality metrics
ACROSS INDUSTRIES AND organizations, regardless of their
size, the cost of quality (COQ) is 2.6 to 4% of sales revenue.1 For the construc-
tion industry, COQ can account for eight to 15% of total construction costs.2
Within COQ, the cost of rework in commercial construction is 12.4% of total
contract cost, and it’s 4.1% in residential construction.3
Researchers found the cost of correcting deviations from
a specification was 12% of a construction project’s total cost,
while the cost of providing quality management was one to 5%
of the total construction project cost.4
While there is a significant opportunity for cost savings
using the COQ concept, a key challenge for builders is obtain-
ing detailed metrics—not just a broad percentage from the
residential construction industry. There simply isn’t much
data available.5, 6 After these metrics are known, however,
an organizationwide approach to quality could be
devised to create cost savings.7
In 50 Words Or Less • By studying key qual-
ity metrics of 21 U.S. residential builders, the authors discovered most industry-leading builders used quality management methods.
• They also found a significant opportu-nity for cost savings in residential construction, identified benchmark leaders and created best practice sharing opportunities that could speed builders’ learning and cost savings.
BENCHMARKING
September 2016 • QP 17
Home Improvem ent
by Glenn Cottrell and Denis Leonard
QP • www.qualityprogress.com18
A key starting point for an organization to drive im-
provement is to know how it benchmarks within its
industry. This means establishing and gathering key in-
ternal metrics and comparing these against “apples-to-
apples” metrics across the industry.
By doing so, an organization can compare itself to
best-in-class organizations to identify where it must im-
prove and ultimately become the leading benchmark.
Conducting such benchmarks is a value to any industry,
and that’s what this study sought to create.
The benchmarking studyIn 2014, Integrated Building and Construction Solutions
(IBACOS), a business that promotes innovation in the
building industry, conducted its initial research on COQ
in the homebuilding industry. We focused on eight busi-
ness metrics: value engineering, jobsite waste, construc-
tion oversight, cost variance, cycle time, employee satis-
faction, customer satisfaction and warranty.
Several leading builders and industry experts were
interviewed to determine what factors should be con-
sidered when looking at these aspects of a business. We
also conducted a literature review to fill in gaps and sug-
gest potential savings that could be achieved in each area
through proactive quality management.
We found it is far cheaper to invest in ensuring good
quality than it is to respond to poor quality, and it’s pos-
sible to realize a $6 return on a $1 investment by shifting
dollars away from failure response to prevention and ap-
praisal efforts.
In 2015, we drafted a 21-question survey, vetted the
approach with three builder allies, and invited builder
members of the IBACOS Housing Innovation Alliance, a
collaboration of builders, and others to participate in an
online survey. After launching the survey in July 2015, 21
homebuilders participated. The survey remains live, and
we continue to promote it to further expand our reach
and richness of data.
All participating builders consider single-family, de-
tached homes to be the primary product they build—al-
though several also build single-family attached (town-
homes) and multifamily homes.
The size of participating builders represents a strong
cross-section of the industry (based on 2014 home clos-
ings):
• Four builders delivered fewer than 200 homes.
• Six builders delivered 200 to 500 homes.
• Six builders delivered 501 to 1,000 homes.
• Five builders delivered more than 1,000 homes.
When combined, the 21 builder participants accounted
for approximately 42,000 home closings in 2014, or 9.6%
of new home closings for the year based on the National
Association of Homebuilders Housing Economics’ Feb-
ruary 2015 forecast,8 which reported 439,000 new, single-
family home closings in 2014. The participants also were
geographically diverse (see Figure 1).
The findingsThe homes’ selling prices in this study (question one)
ranged from $196,000 to $475,000, with an average of
$330,000 and mode of $320,000. This price-point spread
is tight, indicating this group of builders were extremely
similar. (See Figure 2, p. 20, for the complete list of sur-
vey questions and results.)
When looking at the number of homes each
site supervisor (construction manager) oversaw
at any time (question two), there was a greater
range, which reflected participating builders’
differing approaches and practices. The number
of homes supervised ranged from five to 45 per
supervisor.
Interestingly, we would have assumed more
supervisor turnover (question three) would be
directly correlated to a high number of homes
supervised, but a builder with 45 homes per su-
pervisor actually had the lowest turnover rate,
while a builder with 5.7 homes per supervisor
had the highest.
So, you can’t simply relate workload to turn-
over. It’s a more complex issue that will be ex-
One builder
Two builders
Three builders
Four builders
Five builders
Six builders
Seven builders
Geographic distribution of builder participants / FIGURE 1
September 2016 • QP 19
BENCHMARKING
amined through interviews in future stages of
this study.
A key metric for measuring a builder’s efficien-
cy is the target construction cycle time per home
in working days (question four)—which ranged
from 55 to 135 days for participating builders—
while actual construction cycle time per home
in working days (question five) ranged from 55
to 152. Not only was there a significant range in
cycle time, but there also was a significant differ-
ence between planned and actual cycle time.
These metrics provide opportunities for dis-
cussion and improvement: Only three of the par-
ticipating builders achieved the same target and
actual construction cycle time. These also were
three of the best cycle times, and they were ob-
viously benchmark leaders with key stories and
lessons to be shared and learned.
Days built into the construction schedule for
rework and slippage (question six) ranged from
zero to 20 days. Wasted time (question seven)—
such as work being delayed due to other un-
finished work—ranged from one to five or more days.
High-performing builders were again identified here,
representing key learning opportunities. There also were
significant opportunities for improvement (OFI) and
cost reductions by eliminating rework, multiple inten-
sive inspections and missed deadlines.
The amount spent per home on the cost-over-con-
struction budget (question eight) ranged from $50 to
$7,000, while the cost-variance percentage of hard con-
struction costs9 (question nine) ranged from 0.3 to 3.5%.
These were critical indicators of cost control and a
link between planning and execution. A builder that went
$7,000 over budget per home was losing $700,000 per 100
homes—a significant OFI.
In terms of waste during construction (question 10),
the range of dumpsters used during a single-home con-
struction spanned from one to five. Prices for hauling this
waste ranged from $100 to $735 per dumpster. There are
details within these numbers—such as production versus
custom home builders and regional cost differences—but
this related back to the amount of rework and over-bud-
get costs. If a builder that used five dumpsters per home
could reduce this to one per home, it would save $140,000
annually if it built 1,000 homes.
For warranty issues (question 11), the numbers ranged
from less than two to greater than 10 per home. This may
appear quite low, but when you’re delivering over 1,000
homes per year, it becomes significant. Costs that must
be set aside per home—such as those for staff, vehicles
and gas and to pay for anticipated warranty services,
repairs and replacements—become a serious cash-flow
issue. That’s not counting its effect on customer satisfac-
tion scores. This is another obvious area to focus on for
saving costs and improving customer satisfaction.
This study showed inspection was a significant source
of OFIs and a key area in which costs could be reduced.
By implementing a program that focuses on doing it right
the first time, using strong training and working closely
with trade contractors, builders can significantly reduce
issues associated with rework, inspections, warranties
and customer dissatisfaction.
With fewer inspectors and warranty field staff, build-
ers can devote more people to building homes and in-
creasing production volume. Additionally, they need less
money set aside per home to pay for factors such as an-
ticipated warranty service repairs.
Quality practitionersOf the 21 builders in the study, eight (38%) were prac-
titioners of quality management. In terms of averages
across the nine metrics, the quality practitioners had bet-
ter performances in seven of the nine metrics.
Question Performance metricQuality practitioner (averages)
Nonquality practitioner (averages)
2 Number of homes each site supervisor oversees at any time 12.1 17
3 Percentage of turnover of supervisors 10.25 11.75
4 Target cycle time per home working days 87 91
5 Actual cycle time per home working days 96 103
6 Days built into schedule for inspections, rework and slippage 10 10.4
7 Days within actual cycle time that are wasted on delays 2.5 3.4
8 Amount spent per home on cost over construction budget
$2,602 (with outlier
removed $935)$1,592
9 Cost variance as a percentage of hard construction costs
1.32% (with outlier
removed 0.73)0.97%
11 Number of warranty items reported per home following closing 3.9 5.7
Average metrics: Quality vs. nonquality practitioners / TABLE 1
QP • www.qualityprogress.com20
Benchmarking study survey results / FIGURE 2
Benchmark source: Rose Quint, What Home Buyers Want, National Association of Homebuilders Housing, 2013.
1. What was the average selling price of homes closed last year?
2. How many homes does each site supervisor oversee at any time?
3. What percentage of turnover did you experience with site supervisors last year?
5. What is your actual cycle time per home in working days?
6. How many days are built into your schedule for inspections, rework and slippage?
7. How many days within your actual cycle time are wasted on delays?
8. What is the amount spent per home on cost over construction budget?
10. How many dumpsters are used during construction of a single home?
11. How many legitimate service/warranty items are reported per home following closing?
9. What is your cost variance as a percentage of hard construction costs?
4. What is your target cycle time per home in working days?
Most common response—$320,000
Most common response—15
Most common response—5% or less
Most common response—105
Most common response—10
Most common response—1.5
Most common response—$1,500
Most common response—1
Most common response—3
Most common response—75
Minimum—$196,000
Minimum—5 or less
Minimum—5% or less
Minimum—55 or less
Minimum—0
Minimum—Less than 1 minimum
Minimum—$50 or less
Minimum—1 or less
Minimum—Less than 2
Minimum—0%
Minimum—55 or less
Average—$330,000
Average—15.1
Average—10.5%
Average—101
Average—9.5
Average—2.9
Average—$1,844
Average—2.29
Average—5.1
Average—1.06%
Average—89.5
Maximum—$475,000 or more
Maximum—45 or more
Maximum—20% or more
Maximum—152 or more
Maximum—20 or more
Maximum—5 or more
Maximum—$7,000 or more
Maximum—5 or more
Maximum—10 or more
Maximum—3.5% or more
Maximum—135 or more
Question Points of interest Benchmark data point
Benchmark source: National Association of Homebuilders, www.nahb.org.
Benchmark source: Avid Ratings, Avidratings.com.
Note: The triangles shown above and below the bars mark points of interest along the way, including the average of all builder responses and the mode (or most common response) to each question.
The diamond in the bar is a benchmark data point from our 2014 expert interviews and literature review findings.
With regard to questions eight and nine, areas in which
the nonquality practitioners performed better, it should be
noted that the performance of one builder (an outlier) in
the quality-practitioner group increased the group’s aver-
age scores. With this builder excluded, the averages would
have resulted in the quality practitioners performing bet-
ter in both metrics.
Looking beyond the averages, the performance metrics
show that of the nine key metrics shown in Table 1 (p. 19),
quality practitioners had seven of the best performances,
and two were by nonquality practitioners.
In other words, finding best practices isn’t as simple as
automatically looking to the quality practitioners. It also
should be noted that no one in the quality-practitioner
group had the lowest-performing metrics.
This is the value of gathering this benchmarking data:
It allows us to seek best practices, and it allows each best-
practice builder to share its stories and approaches. In re-
turn, we gain insights into their OFIs.
Using metrics and sharing best practicesBecause of this study, there are now benchmarking refer-
ence points for key metrics in residential construction.
The study allows builders to consider and compare their
construction cycle times or number of warranty issues to
the other participating builders. They can now determine
how they’re performing and focus on their lowest-scoring
metrics—that is, their biggest OFIs.
Builders also can prioritize their OFIs based on those
that represent easier challenges. This will allow them to
take on a project that’s achievable, providing them a good
solution before moving to the next OFI.
This study shows there are builders with opportunities
to realize cost savings of up to millions of dollars per year
by using quality management approaches and tools, and
by sharing best practices to speed the learning curve. The
next step is to use quality tools to address those oppor-
tunities, such as using improvement teams, quality tools
and a “do it right the first time” approach.
Builders can then move from a quality control approach
to using a system that ensures errors are identified and cor-
rected, such as corrective action and preventive action.
The benchmark leaders identified in this study pro-
vided an opportunity for fast tracking the learning pro-
cess by sharing their best practices. More importantly,
this ongoing benchmarking study allows participating
builders to regularly measure and monitor their prog-
ress as they identify and improve key metrics in their
operations to help drive profitability.
This is just the beginning of a long-term benchmarking
study on quality metrics in the homebuilding industry: The
next steps include another round of benchmarking and
sharing between the builders, which will begin soon and
be followed by establishing detailed prevention, appraisal
and failure metrics.
The research will be shared in individual reports with
participating builders. There also are opportunities to
conduct presentations at national industry conferences
to promote the top benchmark numbers—data that previ-
ously were unavailable. IBACOS will collect this bench-
marking data annually, which allows builders who imple-
mented changes to share their results and best practices.
The overall lessons of this study are about facilitating the
wide range of methods in which organizations gather data
to establish an agreed-on, apples-to-apples set of metrics. It
should encourage annual data collection to determine best-
in-class benchmarks as drivers for improvement. QP REFERENCES AND NOTE1. Suhansa Rodchua, “Comparative Analysis of Quality Costs and Organization
Size in the Manufacturing Environment,” Quality Management Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2009, p. 34-43.
2. Peter E.D. Love and Zahir Irani, “A Project Management Quality Cost Informa-tion System for the Construction Industry,” Information & Management, Vol. 40, No. 7, 2003, pp. 649-661.
3. A. Mills, P. Williams and D. Yu, “Benchmarking Construction Rework in Austra-lian Housing,” International Journal for Housing Science, Vol. 34, No. 3, 2010, pp. 207-220.
4. Hong Xiao and David Proverbs, “The Performance of Contractors in Japan, the UK and the USA,” International Journal of Quality and Reliability Management, Vol. 19, No. 6, 2002, pp. 672-687.
5. Denis Leonard, “Quality Management Practices in the U.S. Homebuilding Indus-try,” The TQM Journal, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2010, pp. 101-110.
6. Denis Leonard and Jeffrey Taggart, “Multi-Year Advanced Residential Building Systems Research,” Midwest Research Institute report, June 2010, http://tinyurl.com/building-systems-report.
7. Peter E.D. Love, David J. Edwards and Jim Smith, “Rework Causation: Emergent Theoretical Insights and Implications for Research,” Journal of Construction Engineering Management, Vol. 142, No. 6, 2016, pp. 1-9.
8. National Association of Home Builders, “Forecasts,” NAHB.org, http://tinyurl.com/ahb-housing-forecast.
9. The term “hard construction costs” generally refers to the labor and material required to construct the buildings—costs that can be easily be quantified and are directly attributable to the construction of a house. It does not include a builder’s overhead.
BENCHMARKING
September 2016 • QP 21
DENIS LEONARD is president of Business Excellence Con-sulting in Bozeman, MT. He is an ASQ fellow, Feigenbaum medalist and a vice chair of ASQ’s Design and Construc-tion Division. He holds a doctorate in quality management from the University of Ulster in Ireland, and is an ASQ-certified manager of quality/organizational excellence, quality auditor and Six Sigma Black Belt.
GLENN COTTRELL is managing director of the builder solutions team at Integrated Building and Construction Solutions in Pittsburgh. He has a bachelor’s degree in ar-chitecture from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. An ASQ member, Cottrell has spoken at many industry conferences about employee development and quantify-ing the true cost builders pay for quality.
Benchmark source: Rose Quint, What Home Buyers Want, National Association of Homebuilders Housing, 2013.
Handling Handoffs
PATIENT TRANSFERS between hospital de-
partments require a defined process that promotes good
communication among caregivers. Miscommunication
during patient handoffs has been associated with medi-
cal errors.1
In fact, poor communication during patient handoffs
leads to more than 80% of medical errors in hospitals, ac-
cording to one estimate.2 At one 450-bed hospital in New
Mexico, a proactive improvement team was formed to
enhance the patient-transfer process.
In 50 Words Or Less • Medical errors can
happen easily when pa-tients are moved within hospital settings.
• Using lean Six Sigma tools, a New Mexico hospital studied its pa-tient-transfer processes and designed new ones to simplify patient hand-offs among caregivers.
• The project resulted in better communication and information sharing.
September 2016 • QP 23
CASE STUDY
Hospital increases patient safety by simplifying its transfer processes
by Clark Carboneau and Susan Sanches
A patient handoff—also known as a patient transfer—is the pro-
cess of transferring patient-specific information from one caregiver
to another or from one team of caregivers to another to ensure the
continuity and safety of patient care.3
According to the Joint Commission, the nation’s oldest and largest
accrediting body in healthcare, the primary objective of a handoff is
to provide accurate information about a patient’s care, treatment and
services, current condition, and any recent or anticipated changes.
The information communicated during a handoff must be accurate
to meet patient-safety goals.4
QP • www.qualityprogress.com24
Preventing patient harmCompare manufacturing to healthcare. In manufactur-
ing, if poor communication occurs when an assembly
moves from one build station to the next, there may
be a need for rework and a delay in the schedule. In
healthcare, poor handoff communication also can re-
sult in rework. The bigger concern, however, is the po-
tential for patient harm.
The reliability and timeliness of this process can
have critical implications for patient outcomes. The
consequences of poor handoffs can vary from setting
to setting. In all transitions, however, poor handoffs
can contribute to delayed or missed treatments, near
misses, adverse events, increased or duplicated use of
resources, and a poor patient experience.
In an acute-care setting, a delayed or missed treatment
can significantly affect the patient’s recovery outcome,
length of stay and prognosis. This is most likely to oc-
cur in handoffs between outpatient and inpatient units in
which the workflows can be significantly different.
In the emergency department (ED), for example,
an attending physician writes admissions orders for
twice-daily antibiotic administration. The inpatient
unit routinely sets up antibiotics on a schedule, per-
haps every 12 hours. The emergency room (ER) nurse
prepares to transfer the patient to the floor but does
not take off the inpatient order, and the antibiotic is
not administered. When the patient arrives on the
floor, the inpatient orders are now taken off and the
antibiotic is scheduled for the next routine time.
A more appropriate handoff between the ER nurse
and the inpatient nurse would include a review of the
patient’s background and history, orders, responses to
diagnostics, treatments and recommendations for con-
tinuing care. It also would allow for a verbal exchange
between caregivers to provide time for questions and
clarification. Done correctly, the antibiotic timing
could be communicated and the routine administra-
tion times could be managed appropriately.
Without a complete handoff, treatment issues such
as this can be easily missed or duplicated. A delay or
doubling of therapy can have serious consequences for
patients. Without a proper handoff, the likelihood of
detection before harm occurs is extremely low. Using
a customary and regular handoff process would help
staff detect potential medication issues.
Another example of a handoff process is between
noncaregivers—that is, when a patient is transported
from the inpatient unit to a hospital-based diagnostic
area such as radiology. In this scenario, a stable patient
may be transferred by a clinician to nonclinical trans-
porters who move the patient from the inpatient unit
to the diagnostic area and transfer the patient to the
receiving clinician. Although the patient is stable, he or
she is still at risk for harm if critical information is not
shared between the sender and the receiver.
The patient’s recent medications and fall risk often
come into play in this scenario, for example. After the
handoff, the patient may be transferred from a wheel-
chair to a diagnostic table. If the caregiver is unaware
that the patient was given a pain medication before
the procedure, the caregiver may have the patient try
to stand. The patient may become dizzy, slip or fall,
and be injured. A failure modes and effects analysis
on this process would reveal high severity and occur-
rence risk numbers with a low probability for detec-
tion.
The potential for harm and frequency due to pa-
tient handoffs in hospitals is so high that the Joint
Commission made safe patient handoffs a national
patient safety goal for domestic hospitals in 2006.5
The goal was to advance safe communication strate-
Daily patient transfers by hour / FIGURE 1
Number oftransfers
Time of day
0
5
10
15
20
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23
All transportsSundayMondayTuesdayWednesdayThursdayFridaySaturday
September 2016 • QP 25
gies when a patient is transferred from one caregiver
to another.
Patient handoff projectOne of this article’s coauthors was tasked to design a
regular and customary patient transfer process for the
450-bed New Mexico hospital before a new system-
wide electronic health record (EHR) arrangement was
implemented. The data showed there were 175 patient
transfers in the hospital every day (see Figure 1).
Each transfer involved at least one handoff, and the
variation in handoffs from one setting to another was
quickly evident. It was determined the project scope
needed to exclude other types of handoffs—such as
physician-to-physician and shift-to-shift. Therefore,
the focus of this project involved only location-to-loca-
tion patient transfers.
Sampling the high-volume patient transfer areas in
the hospital resulted in the development of 16 separate
flowcharts. After analysis of these current-state flow-
charts, it was discovered the future state could be de-
fined by using only five distinct process flows.
Requirements for safe handoffsThe design process began by soliciting voice of the
customer (VOC) information from key stakehold-
ers. Ninety individual comments were grouped into
similar categories using an affinity diagram. Four cus-
tomer requirements—that is, critical-to-quality (CTQ)
parameters—were developed to guide the design pro-
cess:
1. The hospital uses the EHRs’ situation, back-
ground, assessment and recommendation (SBAR)
communication tool. This tool simplifies the commu-
nication process between caregivers: The nursing staff
sending the patient must document its portion of the
care provided in the EHR. The documentation must be
as current as possible. The nurse receiving the patient
CASE STUDY
Emergency to procedural area patient transfer / FIGURE 2
Emer
genc
y de
part
men
t nu
rsin
g
Tran
sfer
cen
ter
Emer
genc
y de
part
men
t st
aff
Tran
spor
tPr
oced
ural
nu
rsin
g
Ensure patient documentation is updated in the system.
Patient settled
into bed.
Confirm bed
assignment.
Pertinent information
reviewed and bed assignment made.
Print electronic health record ticket to ride for all
patients unless primary caregiver transfers patient.
Note: Include registered nurse’s name and
Spectra-link number on the ticket to ride.
Transporter arrives and reviews the
ticket to ride.
Transport patient to the floor.
Notify nursing station of
patient arrival.
Note: Discard paper ticket to ride after
patient transfer is complete.
Bed assignment is received.
Review the overview report within 15 minutes of bed assignment.
Contact emergency department’s registered nurse if there are questions.
Request transport (unless primary caregiver will
transport).
QP • www.qualityprogress.com26
will review the electronic patient information before
the patient arrives.
Pertinent background information, often obtained
by reviewing the patient’s history, is a critical piece of
information that must be documented and conveyed
when the patient moves from one setting to another.
A high-profile example of critical information not
being shared occurred Sept. 25, 2014, in Dallas. Infor-
mation that an ED patient had been in Africa before
his arrival to the United States was missed by the ap-
propriate clinicians. The information was entered into
the EHR system by a nurse, but apparently not viewed
by the ED physician.
Subsequently, the patient was not properly assessed
for risks and was discharged from the ED without ap-
propriate instructions. When he returned three days
later, the delay in his Ebola diagnosis affected his prog-
nosis and placed the people who had contact with him
in danger.6
2. The hospital uses an efficient handoff com-
munication process between caregivers. The
hospital defined “efficient” as completed within 15
minutes, providing the opportunity for discussion be-
tween caregivers and providing read-back for confir-
mation.
3. The hospital’s patient-transfer process in-
cludes a confirmed unit notification with an esti-
mated time of arrival. In addition, a “warm” patient
handoff is expected for all critically ill patients. The
hospital defines a warm handoff as either face-to-face
communication between caregivers or a phone conver-
sation about critically ill patients’ conditions.
In operational terms, this means the primary
caregiver—such as an ED nurse—must discuss the
patient’s condition with the receiving clinical staff.
This provides an opportunity for the receiving clini-
cian to ask questions or seek clarification and for the
providing clinician to ensure information has been
received.
This requirement ensures all essential information
Emergency to inpatient area patient transfer / FIGURE 3
Emer
genc
y de
part
men
t nu
rsin
g
Tran
sfer
cen
ter
Emer
genc
y de
part
men
t st
aff
Tran
spor
tIn
patie
nt
nurs
ing
Ensure patient documentation is updated in the system.
Patient settled
into bed.
Confirm bed
assignment.
Pertinent information
reviewed and bed assignment made.
Print electronic health record ticket to ride for all
patients unless primary caregiver transfers patient.
Note: Include registered nurse’s name and
Spectra-link number on the ticket to ride.
Transporter arrives and reviews the
ticket to ride.
Transport patient to the floor.
Notify nursing station of
patient arrival.
Note: Discard paper ticket to ride after
patient transfer is complete.
Note: Epic request made for confirm/transfer button for
patient receipt.
Note: Discontinued
use of Optivox in 2014.
Bed assignment is received.
Review the overview report within 15 minutes of bed assignment.
Contact emergency department’s registered nurse if there are questions.
Request transport (unless primary caregiver will
transport).
September 2016 • QP 27
will be received. It is never adequate to drop off a
critically ill patient at his or her assigned unit or room
without speaking with the receiving nurse about the
patient’s condition. Another example of this is when
a critically ill patient is transferred without a warm
handoff and his or her condition declines.
The EHR system is a great tool and assists health-
care communication in many ways. At present, how-
ever, this system does not and cannot replace the vital
face-to-face communication needed during a critical
situation.
In an emergency situation, the receiving caregiver
will not likely go to a computer to search for missing
information. Instead, the caregiver will assess the pa-
tient at the bedside, potentially missing pertinent facts
that could affect the patient.
4. The hospital uses the EHR ticket to ride
process between certain areas, such as a trans-
fer from radiology to an inpatient unit. “Ticket to
ride”—a phrase borrowed from the song of the same
name that appears in the Beatles’ 1965 “Help!” al-
bum—is used by some organizations to document the
key information needed for transferring patients by the
transport staff and managing a patient during a proce-
dure by ancillary staff.
The transferring nurse’s name and phone number
are provided on the ticket to ride document, for exam-
ple. This information is shared between the transport-
er and the receiving nurse—and back again—when
patients are temporarily removed from the unit.
Critical information might include infectious status,
recent medications, fall risks, and the presence of lines
or drains. For critically ill or unstable patients, the
ticket to ride process is not used because a licensed
clinician remains with the patient until the patient and
his or her information is appropriately handed off.
Location-to-location patient transfersAfter documenting the 16 current-state transfers at the
450-bed hospital, five process flows were developed to
represent patient transfers:
1. ED to procedural area—The patient arrives at
the ED with a medical condition that requires surgery.
The stable patient is admitted to the hospital and trans-
ferred to the appropriate surgical area for treatment
(see Figure 2, p. 25).
CASE STUDY
Inpatient area to inpatient area patient transfer / FIGURE 4
Tran
sfer
nur
sing
Tran
sfer
cen
ter
Tran
spor
ter
Rece
ivin
g nu
rsin
g
Bed request made to bed management
(obstetrics admitting for
women’s line).
Patient settled
into room.
Complete receiving
documentation in transfer navigator.
Patient bed assignment received.
Review pertinent information and bed assignment
made.
Page charge nurses with patient bed assignment.
Print electronic health record
ticket to ride for all patients unless primary caregiver transfers patient.
Note: Include registered
nurse’s name and Spectra-link number on the ticket to ride.
Transporter arrives and reviews the
ticket to ride.
Transport the
patient.
Notify nursing station of
patient arrival.
Note: Discard paper ticket to ride after
patient transfer is complete.
Assess patient.
Patient bed assignment received.
Participates in verbal report and reviews
overview report within 15 minutes of
bed assignment.
Ensure patient navigator
documentation updated.
Call with verbal
report and review
overview report.
Request transport (unless primary caregiver will
transport).
Inpa
tient
nu
rsin
gTr
ansp
orte
rH
oldi
ngPr
oced
ure
area
Reco
very
Inpa
tient
/ em
erge
ncy
depa
rtm
ent
nurs
ing
Tran
spor
ter
Radi
olog
y
Procedural area to inpatient area and return patient transfer / FIGURE 6
Inpatient and emergency to radiology and return patient transfer / FIGURE 5
Patient is ready to
transport.
Notify inpatient area of ETA so it is ready for
patient.
Exam order
received.
Patient settled
into room.
Patient settled
into room.
Request transport.
Note: If interventional radiology sedated patient,
there will be a nurse to nurse verbal report.
Ensure patient documentation
is complete.
Call radiology transport request.
Transporter arrives
to move patient.
Transporter arrives
to move patient.
Review ticket to ride and transport patient.
Note: Review major headings and then
additional information as needed within 15 minutes.
Review overview report when patient
arrives and call nurse with any questions.
Include registered nurse’s name and Spectra-link phone number in the
ticket to ride.
Note: See electronic health record
ticket to ride tip sheet for printing instructions.
Note: Include registered
nurse’s name and Spectra-link number on the ticket to ride.
Procedure complete.
Transporter arrives and
reviews the ticket
to ride.
Transporter arrives and
reviews the ticket
to ride.
Transport the
patient to inpatient
unit.
Transport the
patient to radiology.
Note: Discard paper ticket to ride after
patient transfer is complete.
Note: Discard paper ticket to ride
after patient transfer
is complete.
Note: Reports are not accurate until documentation
is complete.
Provide verbal report.
Exam complete.
Request transporter if necessary.
Patient is ready to
transport.
If transporter needed, print
electronic health record ticket to ride.
Ensure patient documentation
is complete.
Handwrite any additional pertinent
information on ticket to ride.
If transporter needed, print
electronic health record ticket to ride.
Print ticket to ride.
QP • www.qualityprogress.com28
2. ED to inpatient unit—The patient arrives at
the ED with a medical condition. The patient’s condi-
tion is stabilized and ongoing inpatient treatment is
necessary. The patient is admitted to the hospital and
transferred to an inpatient unit (see Figure 3, p. 26).
3. Inpatient unit to inpatient unit—A patient
must be transferred from one inpatient setting to an-
other when there is a change in the patient’s condition.
If the patient’s condition worsens, for example, the
patient could be transferred from the general medical
unit to the intensive care unit. If the patient’s condi-
tion improves, he or she could be transferred from the
cardiac critical care unit to the step-down cardiac pro-
gressive care unit (see Figure 4, p. 27).
4. Inpatient and ED to radiology and return—
Diagnostic testing and imaging require patients to be
transferred to the radiology department, and returned
to their inpatient unit after testing and imaging (see
Figure 5).
5. Procedural area to inpatient and inpatient
to procedural area—Patients scheduled for non-
emergency surgeries are transferred from their inpa-
tient units to the procedural areas, and returned to
their inpatient units after surgery (see Figure 6).
Larger hospitals may have more transfer locations
that will require more process flows.
Huddles to learn handoffsImplementing and improving patient handoffs during
transfers does not require extensive use of lean Six
Sigma tools. In this review of the operations within
this hospital, the five future-state process flows were
developed and deployed by:
• Gathering VOC data and information.
• Defining customer requirements through CTQ.
• Documenting 16 location-specific and current-state
process flows.
• Synthesizing the 16 current-state flows into five
future-state flows.
• Developing a patient handoff staff training packet
and computer-based training module.
• Developing a computer quick-start guide for nurses.
• Rolling out implementation with the help of clinical
educators and information system super-users.
Process effectiveness was monitored regularly after
go-live during daily staff huddles on the nursing units.
There were no significant issues identified with the
new handoff design.
Understandably, a number of staff members had a
learning curve while acclimating to the new informa-
tion system. These issues were overcome by discus-
sion and learning from one another at the daily staff
huddles. QP
REFERENCES1. Amy J. Starmer, M.D., Nancy D. Spector, M.D., et al., “Changes in Medical
Errors After Implementation of a Handoff Program,” New England Journal of Medicine, Nov. 6, 2014, Vol. 371, No. 19, pp. 1,803-1,812.
2. The Joint Commission, “Comprehensive Accreditation Manual for Hospi-tals,” National Patient Safety Goal 2E Rationale Statement, 2007.
3. The Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare, “Project Detail: Handoff Communications,” http://tinyurl.com/tjc-handoff-comm.
4. The Joint Commission, “Comprehensive Accreditation Manual for Hospi-tals,” see reference 2.
5. Ibid. 6. Erin McCann, “Missed Ebola Diagnosis Leads to Debate,” Healthcare IT
News, Oct. 9, 2014, http://tinyurl.com/missed-ebola-diagnosis.
SUSAN SANCHES is a registered nurse and a Juran Institute-certified lean Six Sigma Black Belt at a multihospital system in Albuquerque, NM. She holds a master’s degree in nursing/organizational manage-ment from the University of Phoenix.
CLARK CARBONEAU is a senior process engineer and a Juran Institute-certified lean Six Sigma Black Belt at a multihospital system in Albuquerque, NM. He earned a Deming Scholar MBA from Fordham University in New York. Carboneau is a senior member of ASQ and an ASQ-certified manager of quality/organizational excellence.
September 2016 • QP 29
CASE STUDY
It is never adequate to drop off a critically ill patient at his or her assigned unit or room without speaking with the receiving nurse about the patient’s condition.
QUALITY
ORGANIZATIONS USE A purchasing process to buy necessary
goods for their operations. Most have a purchasing department responsible for
the execution and performance of this process.
A typical purchasing process begins after an internal client sends a purchas-
ing department an approved requisition (see Figure 1, p. 32). This
usually contains a list of materials to buy, their budgeted value,
and a cost center or project that expenses will be assigned to.
With this input, and following guidelines in an organization’s
purchasing manual, a buyer selects a supplier, negotiates a price
and other terms, and issues an approved purchase order. The
process ends after the purchase order is sent to the supplier (for
a list of defined purchasing terms, read the sidebar “Purchasing
Glossary” on p. 33).
Purchasing processes are particularly suited for improvement
with quality tools because a significant part of their costs are
In 50 Words Or Less • Most organizations’ pur-
chasing processes have room for improvement, and using quality tools is an ideal way to make progress.
• Quality tools can ac-curately assess an or-ganization’s purchasing performance, find and benchmark key perfor-mance indicators, and reveal opportunities for improvement.
Using quality tools to study and improve purchasing processesby Ricardo Fierro
Buying IN TO Quality
QUALITY
Buying IN TO QualitySUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
September 2016 • QP 31
related to manual labor. In fact, for many organizations, personnel and
overhead account for more than 80% of purchasing-process costs.1 In this
context, quality tools can help reduce costs and improve efficiency. While
technology is a powerful enabler, it can’t improve a bad process by itself.
Only good process design can create the advantages from technology.
QP • www.qualityprogress.com32
This article will use examples based on real cases
from oil and utility companies to demonstrate how qual-
ity tools can help in the study and diagnosis of purchasing
processes. Though different organizations and industries
have unique characteristics, these ideas can be useful in
all settings.
Inbound supply chainsA purchasing process is part of a bigger, more complex
entity—an inbound supply chain. An inbound supply
chain is a set of interconnected processes that bring in
goods and services an organization needs for its opera-
tions. These processes interact with one another and
with a supplier’s processes.
Figure 2 illustrates a high-level view of an inbound
supply chain, with the organization’s internal processes
highlighted in the gray box. These processes regulate and
synchronize the flow to and from suppliers of three key
elements: information, products and services, and cash.
Core processes are those directly involved with these
three elements. They begin with demand management,
which is a process used by an organization to define the
strategy it will follow to source each product or service
category. Demand management involves decisions such as
whether to buy an item or manufacture it in-house, hold
an item in stock, commit to a long-term service contract
or negotiate individual commitments any time the service
is needed.
After these decisions are made, and depending on
whether you’re dealing with a product or service, the pro-
cess follows one of the two branches illustrated in Figure
2: materials management—such as purchasing, delivery
and inbound logistics, and warehouse and inventory man-
agement—or services management—such as contracting
and contract management. These branches come together
in the payments process.
While they are not directly involved with the three key
elements, support processes are required for the system to
work correctly. Quality tools and techniques can be used
to study the processes included in materials and services
management. Because suppliers often bundle products
and services, purchasing and contracting processes some-
times merge.
Depending on the industry, the inbound supply chain
can become increasingly complex. In some cases, it can in-
volve suppliers of assembled components, and the second
and third-tier suppliers that work with them.
All inbound supply chain processes can be studied and
improved using quality tools. The point to remember is
that a substandard purchasing process can produce un-
desired consequences in other points of the supply chain,
and problems in a purchasing process can have their root
cause in another part of the supply chain. Any improve-
ment effort, therefore, must not lose sight of the entire
system.2
Applying quality tools Quality tools are useful to study and diagnose purchas-
ing processes (read the sidebar article, “Supply Chain
Quality Tool Glossary,” p. 37, for a list of some of these
tools and their definitions). Some examples of how they
can be applied to these situations include:
Using process maps—Most organizations have a
purchasing manual that describes the rules and process-
es used for purchasing, but it often does not completely
represent the real situation. For example, I experienced
a situation in which the actual purchasing process used
was mapped and compared to the one in the purchasing
manual. This helped discover more than 10 unrecorded,
nonvalue-added process steps that were not included in
the purchasing manual, such as:
Typical purchasing process / FIGURE 1
Internal client SuppliersPurchasingdepartment
1. Internal client requests material
2. Buyer defines how to approach market
3. Buyer contacts market
4. Suppliers prepare bids
5. Technical bid analysisconducted
6. Bid cost-analysisnegotiation conducted
7. Award purchase order
Start
Stop
September 2016 • QP 33
SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
• The computer system didn’t allow users to see docu-
ment details, so a paper copy had to be printed for sign-
off and approval.
• Paper copies had to be taken from one desk to another.
• There were delays due to documents waiting for atten-
tion in trays (known as a work-in-process inventory).
• There were control-rework loops—for example, check-
ing whether a purchase order had the correct cost cen-
ter.
Finding nonvalue-added steps—It’s important to
determine whether these nonvalue-added process steps
are due to process design or are manual solutions used to
overcome technology limitations. IT issues are frequently
a root cause of purchasing process problems.
Reviewing the purchasing manual—It also is impor-
tant to review the purchasing manual. Depending on the
budgeted value of materials being bought, a manual com-
monly has different transaction requirements, such as a
minimum number of required bids, restrictions on the use
of phone or email to receive quotes, or guidelines for pur-
chase order approvals.
Comparing requirements—Compare these require-
ments with your organization’s spending profile, and see
whether there is a reasonable balance between process
controls and process agility—that is, ensure excessive
controls are not producing process bottlenecks. Histo-
grams, cumulative frequency distributions and Pareto
analysis can usually help analyze this.
Observing processes—Take time to watch people
work through a process. Direct observation can yield
leads for future work. I once went to a distant oilfield to
see how end users prepared a requisition. In theory, the
organization had an online catalog that allowed anyone to
Inbound supply chain / FIGURE 2
Market (suppliers)
Information Products and services Cash
Organization
Materials management
PurchasingDelivery and
inboundlogistics
Warehouse and inventorymanagement
Demandplanning
Contractmanagement
Payments
Services management
Supplier management
Core processes Support processes
Performance management and benchmarking
Materials and services catalog management
Contracting
DESPLAZAMIENTOFUNCION DE DEMANDA
Precio Demanda Demanda’(€) (Kg) (Kg) 25 40 60 50 20 40100 10 20
(€)
100
50
25
10 20 40 60
Kg cigalas
PURCHASING GLOSSARYBlanket order: A type of purchase order in which a purchasing department sets a framework—such as price, and delivery and payment terms—to use in all purchases of a given material from a supplier. After this framework is set and as long as the blanket order is valid, materials can be ordered directly from the selected supplier without going through a purchasing process.
Inbound supply chain: A set of intercon-nected processes that bring an organiza-tion the products and services it needs for its operations (see Figure 2). It manages and synchronizes three key flows between an organization and it suppliers: informa-tion, products and cash.
Internal client: An employee or function
that needs materials and services, and buys them through the purchasing department.
Lead time: The time it takes to complete the purchasing process (see step two in Figure 1).
Maverick purchases: Purchases carried out without following the processes and rules set in a purchasing manual.
Purchase order: A document used by an organization to purchase materials or services. It sets the terms and conditions for the transaction, such as price, delivery date, payment and terms.
Purchasing process: A process an organi-zation follows to buy goods and services. It
begins when an approved requisition is received by the purchasing department and ends after an approved purchase order is sent to a supplier (see steps two through seven in Figure 1). It’s de-scribed in the organization’s purchasing manual.
Requisition: Document used by an internal client to notify a purchasing department of the goods and services it needs, how much it is willing to spend on them, and the cost center or project to which expenses will be assigned.
Spending profile: Complete universe of goods and services bought by an or-ganization during a given period of time.
QP • www.qualityprogress.com34
easily find any material. Yet, direct observation
revealed that for some material categories, it
took 15 to 20 minutes for an internal client to
find one material code. Clearly, there was a
problem in the materials catalog that had not
come up in talks with process stakeholders,
and direct observation made this evident.
InterviewsAs you go through the purchasing process,
interview different stakeholders and hear
their opinions on how it’s working. Consider
contacting the following stakeholder groups:
• Internal clients. Ask who they are and
what parts of the total purchasing budget
each client group represents. See what they
think about the purchasing department’s
service, and uncover their complaints and
concerns. Find out whether they channel
their needs through the purchasing depart-
ment or manage them independently.
• Other key process stakeholders. This
category includes CEOs, CFOs, audit man-
agers and others who, though not directly in-
volved in the process, have something impor-
tant to say about it. Their views, complaints
and vision can reveal valuable insights
and point to improvement opportunities.
It’s critical that you understand what part
of the budget this group expects the purchas-
ing department to process. After improve-
ment processes begin, there typically is a
sizeable amount of materials being bought
directly by internal clients without following
applicable policies and procedures. Captur-
ing this maverick spending definitely is one
of the goals of the improvement process.
• Company buyers. Find out how many
buyers there are and where they are locat-
ed, and determine their qualifications and
skills. Try to gauge their motivation. Find
out whether it will be easy to engage them
in any improvement initiative and whether
they are happy with their IT systems. Buy-
ers suffer the consequences of a poor pro-
cess and can make valuable suggestions on
how to improve it.
• Suppliers. It also is important to talk to
Purchasing process KPIs / FIGURE 3
Lead time
Quality
Cost
Supplier basemanagement
Workloadmanagement
SIPOC stage KPIsSIPOC stage
SIPOC = suppliers, inputs, process, outputs and customersKPI = key performance indicator
• Internal customer service rating scores.• Internal customer comments and complaints.• Input from management reviews and performance
evaluations of purchasing department.• Buyer feedback and complaints.• Supplier comments and complaints.
• Percentage of targeted purchasing dollars that are processed through purchasing department.
• Purchasing department generated savings per dollar purchased.
• Number of delays in key projects due to missing or late materials.
• Number of cost overruns in key organization projects due to unexpected material costs.
• Percentage of on-time material deliveries.• Number of stockouts per year.• Supplier conformance with quality, cost, delivery and other
conditions set forth in purchase orders.• Number of quality problems reported in incoming materials.
• Number of requisitions received by purchaser every month.
• Number of purchase orders issued per buyer and per month.
• Percentage of dollar value purchased using blanket orders.
• Dollar value purchased per buyer and per month.
• Number of supplers that account for 80% of yearly expenses.
• Number of suppliers per full-time employee.
• Percentage of purchase orders that are rejected during approval process.
• Number of emergency purchases per month.
• Percentage of purchases that don't comply with company procedures manual.
• Number of negative purchasing process audit findings per year.
• Total cost of purchasing cycle per purchase order.
• Total cost of purchasing cycle per $1,000 purchased.
Lead time mean, standard deviation and histogram shape.
• Number of purchase requisitions received per month.• Percentage of purchase requisitons that are incomplete or
require clarifications.• Percentage of material requisitions that have incorrect or
incomplete material specifiations.• Number of urgent (emergency) material requisitions
received per month.
Supplier/internal client
InputDoes the processinput permit the
process towork correctly?
ProcessIs the process
working correctly inits key dimension?
Output/resultsIs the process
contributing to theorganization’s goals?
Clients/stakeholders
Are the processstakeholders happywith the process?
SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
key suppliers and learn about their experience with the
process. Be careful when selecting supplier employees
you will speak with to ensure you’re getting useful input
that isn’t biased in favor of a supplier’s interests.
Process measurement and benchmarking To understand a process, you must measure its perfor-
mance. Measurements give you clues that help find prob-
lems and set a baseline to gauge future improvements.
Figure 3 shows an example of key performance indi-
cators (KPI) for a purchasing process that are grouped
using a suppliers, inputs, process, outputs and customers
(SIPOC) framework. With minor adaptations, the SIPOC
framework is an important aid to ensure KPIs address all
relevant process aspects. Figure 3’s KPIs are a mix of hard
(numerical) and soft (based on perceptions) indicators,
and an assortment of ratios and absolute values.3 After
measuring your process, you can benchmark its perfor-
mance. This makes it a good idea to choose KPIs that have
benchmarks available.4
When defining KPIs, it also is helpful to define reference
parameters. Reference parameters are values that describe
your organization and set a context for benchmarking.
They provide an idea of which organizations it is reason-
able to compare with yours. Total annual dollar purchases,
total organizational revenue and purchasing-department
headcount are examples of reference parameters.
Regardless of the performance indicators you choose,
there are a few things you should consider:
• Look for KPIs that are relevant to your process and also
can be calculated with a reasonable effort using the tools
at your disposal. Remember, you will want to repeatedly
measure your KPIs, and you will have to find a balance
between relevance and feasibility. In some cases, you
might have to use samples to estimate KPIs, so look into
what can be considered a representative sample.
• Don’t settle for one performance indicator. It is better to
track a set of KPIs.
• On the other hand, don’t try to track all the KPIs you can
find. As a general rule, 20 is highest number of KPIs you
September 2016 • QP 35
Purchasing lead time analysis / FIGURE 4Purchasing lead time
Purchasing processes starting between Oct. 23 and Dec. 1, 2014
Lead time (buyer A) Lead time (buyer B)
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
0-10 11-20 21-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 morethan 60
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
0-10 11-20 21-30 31-40 41-50 51-60 morethan 60
Num
ber
of c
ases
obs
erve
d
Num
ber
of c
ases
obs
erve
d
Lead time intervals Lead time intervals
Data
Range Observations PercentageCumulative percentage
0-10 15 21% 21%11-20 33 46% 68%21-30 11 15% 83%31-40 6 8% 92%41-50 3 4% 96%51-60 3 4% 100%61 or more 0 0% 100%
Histogram descriptionUnimodalSkewed to right8% of cases more than 40 daysNo values more than 60 days
Histogram parametersNumber of observations 71 purchasesMean 20.3 days (benchmark: 19 days)Median 20 daysStandard deviation 13 days
Data
Range Observations PercentageCumulative percentage
0-10 9 28% 28%11-20 12 38% 66%21-30 0 0% 66%31-40 1 3% 69%41-50 5 16% 84%51-60 1 3% 88%61 or more 4 13% 100%
Histogram descriptionMore than 1 peak (multimodal)No definite shape32% of cases more than 40 days13% of cases more than 60 days
Histogram parametersNumber of observations 32 purchasesMean 27.6 days (benchmark: 19 days)Median 14 daysStandard deviation 27.4 days
can track efficiently at a given process level.
• When you benchmark, double check your KPI defini-
tions. In your numbers, ensure you’re including the same
cost categories and following the same process defini-
tions that are used to compute the reference values.
• Allow for differences between industries in benchmark-
ing efforts. It is better to use industry-specific values if
they’re available.
• If your organization has several purchasing offices, it
can be valuable to compare their performance (internal
benchmarking).
• Industry associations also can provide the names of oth-
er organizations to share benchmarking results.
Don’t be discouraged if your first measurements look
dismal. Putting a set of KPIs on paper for the first time of-
ten leads to a moment of truth, making it clear there’s a lot
of work ahead.
Descriptive statisticsLead time is the number of days it takes to complete steps
two through seven in Figure 1’s illustration of the pur-
chasing process. It is a critical variable in a purchasing
process, and there are several reasons for this:
• It’s a key variable internal clients consider when they
rate purchasing service quality.
• Purchasing departments are required to comply with
specific lead-time values as part of their service-level
agreements with internal clients.
• A variable or unpredictable lead time leads to higher
stock levels and, consequently, higher working capital.
• In projects such as wells, facilities and major equipment
overhauls, poor lead times affect startup dates, delay-
ing new production and hurting revenue. The delay of
one critical component can derail an entire project, so
lead time predictability for all products and services is
critical.
• A problem in lead time typically is the tip of the iceberg—
a visible symptom of deeper issues.
Try not to focus on only the lead-time mean. Study the
data more closely using tools of descriptive statistics. Fig-
ure 4 (p. 35) shows the results of applying basic descriptive
statistics to lead-time data for transactions carried out by
two buyers during a 37-day period.
Buyer A’s histogram corresponds to a purchasing proce-
dure that is working properly. It is unimodal, skewed to the
right and does not have a significant number of outliers: In
this case, there were no transactions that took longer than
60 days to complete. The mean and median will depend on
the mix of materials bought. Complex categories, such as
capital equipment, will take more time than items such as
office supplies, but the curve shape will be similar.
Buyer B’s histogram does not have a definite shape.
During this 37-day period, Buyer B completed only 32 pur-
chases while Buyer A completed 71. For Buyer B’s transac-
tions, 13% took longer than 60 days. With a curve like this,
a purchasing manager can’t guarantee what a reasonable
lead time is or what can be considered an outlier.
Many causes can lie behind Buyer B’s histogram. Maybe
Buyer B is simply giving its best effort to make a bad pro-
cess work.
To find answers, it’s helpful to draw histograms using
different selection criteria, such as buyer, buyer group, in-
ternal client, material category or process stage. If the lead-
time histogram has more than one peak, investigating the
data points in each peak might yield relevant information.
Root cause analysis After you draw a realistic process map, interview key
process stakeholders, make a baseline measurement of
process performance using KPIs and analyze process
lead time, you’re ready to identify the root causes of your
current situation.
Brainstorming, Ishikawa diagrams, tree structure dia-
grams, affinity diagrams and five whys are some of the
tools that can help you identify and classify root causes.
Abnormally high lead times for one commodity group, for
Ishikawa diagram for long lead times / FIGURE 5
Longlead times
Too many suppliers
Purchase orders requiretoo many approvals
Process design
Users can’t findcorrect material code in catalog
• No preselected suppliersfor repetitive purchases
• No prearranged termsand conditions
• Many suppliers forthe same item
• No preapproved suppliers fora material category
• No blanket orders• Too many handoffs
• Too many itemsin catalog
• Material specificationsnot clear or incomplete
• Catalog user interface
• Not intuitive• Users untrained
• Repeated items• Similar items with
the same function• Obsolete codes are
not deleted• Purchase order
approval guidelines aretoo restrictive
QP • www.qualityprogress.com36
RICARDO FIERRO is a purchasing manager at Madalena Energy Argentina in Buenos Aires. He earned a master’s degree in naval architecture and marine engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Fierro is an ASQ senior member.
example, can be caused by many different factors.
Figure 5 shows a simplified Ishikawa diagram de-
scribing root causes of long lead times. Different colors
are used to indicate root causes of various levels, going
from general to specific (red, green and gray).
You can see incorrect material codes are one of the
root causes of poor lead time. When this process was
measured, the resulting average lead time was 72 days
with a standard deviation of 24 days. When the specifica-
tion was correct from the start (that is, an end user found
the right material code), it was reduced to 42 days and
with a standard deviation of 10 days.
When conducting a root cause analysis in a purchas-
ing process, it’s helpful to group findings under catego-
ries such as internal clients, buyers, purchasing manual,
IT systems, suppliers or other processes of the inbound
supply chain. These headings help prepare an affinity di-
agram to organize findings for the solution-design phase.
At this stage, it’s important to identify KPIs that show
how a given root cause is affecting process performance.
After solutions are implemented, these KPIs can be used
to track their progress.
Findings cannot be neatly classified into one category.
As you advance, you will find that root causes in one cat-
egory are the result of other root causes that fall under
a different heading. This isn’t anything to worry about.
Just keep working, and a pattern will gradually emerge.
After you have assessed the process, choose the most
appropriate problem-solving method—such as kaizen,
lean Six Sigma or design for lean Six Sigma—and design
an integral solution that covers shortfalls in all relevant
process aspects, such as procedures, people or IT sys-
tems. This allows you to set up a control dashboard to
monitor the improvement.
Regardless of what you do, a correct and complete
assessment of the process and its problems will always
provide a solid foundation to build a more efficient pur-
chasing process that will contribute to your organiza-
tion’s success. QP REFERENCES AND NOTES1. Blueprint for Success: Procurement, second edition, American Productivity
and Quality Center, 2013. 2. For more information on supply chain management, read The ASQ Supply
Chain Management Primer (ASQ Quality Press, 2014) and David A. Taylor’s Supply Chains—A Manager’s Guide (Addison-Wesley Professional, 2003).
3. Brian K. Smith, Heather Nachtmann and Edward A. Pohl, “Quality Measure-ment in the Healthcare Supply Chain,” Quality Management Journal, Vol. 18, No. 4, 2011.
4. For examples of purchasing process key performance indicators, read Blueprint for Success: Procurement (see reference 1).
BIBLIOGRAPHYBoutros, Tristan, and Tim Purdie, The Process Improvement Handbook,
McGraw-Hill Education, 2013.Rooney, James J., T.M. Kubiak, Russ Westcott, R. Dan Reid, Keith Wagoner,
Peter E. Pylipow and Paul Plsek, “Building From the Basics,” Quality Progress, January 2009, pp. 19-29.
Scott, John, “One Good Idea: Process Optimization for Service Organizations Isn’t Rocket Science,” Quality Progress, October 2007, p. 72.
SUPPLY CHAIN QUALITY TOOL GLOSSARYFive whys: A technique for discovering the root causes of a problem and showing the relationship of causes by repeatedly asking the question, “Why?”
Affinity diagram: A management tool for organizing information (usually gathered during a brainstorming activity).
Cause and effect diagram: A tool for analyzing process dispersion. It is also referred to as an Ishikawa diagram, be-cause Kaoru Ishikawa developed it, and a fishbone diagram, because the complete diagram resembles a fish skeleton. The diagram illustrates the main causes and subcauses leading to an effect (symptom).
Descriptive statistics: These are used to describe features of data in a study. For more information, visit www.
socialresearchmethods.net/kb/statdesc.php.
Histogram: A graphic summary of varia-tion in a set of data. The pictorial nature of a histogram lets people see patterns that are difficult to detect in a simple table of numbers.
Interviews: Interviewing process stake-holders to gather their input on how a process is working.
Pareto chart: A graphical tool for ranking causes from most significant to least sig-nificant. It is based on the Pareto principle, which was first defined by Joseph M. Juran in 1950. The principle, named after 19th century economist Vilfredo Pareto, sug-gests most effects come from relatively few causes; that is, 80% of effects come from 20% of the possible causes.
Process map: A type of flowchart depict-ing the steps in a process and identify-ing responsibility for each step and key measures.
SIPOC diagram: A suppliers, inputs, process, outputs and customers (SIPOC) diagram is used by Six Sigma process improvement teams to identify all relevant elements of a process improvement proj-ect before work begins.
Tree structure diagram: A management tool that depicts the hierarchy of tasks and subtasks needed to complete an objective. The finished diagram bears a resemblance to a tree.
Source: ASQ, “Quality Glossary,” http://asq.org/glossary/index.html.
September 2016 • QP 37
SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT
PROCESS CAPABILITY can be defined in two ways: the “measured
inherent reproducibility of the product turned out by a process,”1 and the “inher-
ent precision of a process.”2 Many in the quality field recognize process capability
simply as the statistical likelihood a process will meet customer requirements.
Despite the importance of this concept, however, most quality practitioners
rely on lagging measurements—that is, measurements of
product or service outputs—as the primary point of
evaluation. A better practice is to focus on the certifi-
cation of process maturity as a leading measurement
of process capability, and that would depend on a
recognized auditable standard.
by Richard E. Mallory
Process maturity measurements can help predict results in an organizational system
In 50 Words Or Less • Process capability is
fundamental to quality, but quality practitio-ners often must rely on lagging measurements of product and service acceptability to deter-mine their quality.
• Certification to a stan-dard that measures process maturity can support the sustainabil-ity of quality efforts in all organizations.
Measuring
September 2016 • QP 39
PROCESS CAPABILITY
Measuring
QP • www.qualityprogress.com40
Such a proposed standard—summarized in Table
1—is based on three basic premises:
1. The process is standardized through a process flow-
chart or other means.
2. There are measurements of process outputs linked
to customer requirements.
3. There are records of systematic analysis and pro-
cess-improvement results.
The certification of process maturity is a way to de-
termine the extent to which key processes of any orga-
nization are first stable and then in control.
I researched and refined this uniform and auditable
measurement of process maturity in collaboration
with the ASQ Government Division (see sidebar “Au-
ditable Quality Standards Will Incentivize Quality in
Government,” p. 42).
The division has adopted it as a professional stan-
dard for government quality practices.
For-profit organizations, too, could benefit by
adopting this approach. Using it as a uniform profes-
sional standard has broad potential to support the
sustainability of quality practices everywhere. In other
words, the use of an auditable quality standard would
allow any organization to measure the extent of pro-
cess capability—both in its individual units and organi-
zationwide. It also could serve as a way to incentivize
management to standardize and control processes.
Scoring the processesOne of the ASQ Government Division’s business objec-
tives is to seek a uniform standard of quality in govern-
ment that is provided through an annual quality audit
and also can serve as a companion to its existing finan-
cial audit.
Such an annual audit could be performed in any
organization that adopted this standard. The power
of this process-certification tool could be profound.
Through its systematic use, the tool can provide a pro-
cess maturity score from zero to 15 to every supervisor
and manager in that organization and make the extent
of quality implementation a known performance attri-
bute.
As each component unit certifies its processes, it
follows that overall organizational performance also
will be greatly enhanced. In addition, a compilation of
results of all units provides a scorecard on the state of
quality in the entire organization, showing how many
key processes were certified and at what level.
The score provided to each manager will reflect his
or her practices of standardizing a best practice for
his or her primary work activities, developing corre-
sponding performance metrics, showing a pattern of
performance improvement and involving production
employees in those efforts.
Not only will this provide a grade on the state of the
management of any program, but it also will provide a
roadmap to opportunities for improvement. In short,
process certification may be the best new tool to revive
and enhance quality efforts everywhere.
Origins and influencesIn support of process certification as a primary strat-
egy is the fact that process management is the one fun-
damental prerequisite of all quality practices. This was
noted by W. Edwards Deming in Out of the Crisis:3
“The first step in any organization is to draw a flow
diagram to show how each component depends on
Standard process MeasurementsProcess improvement / employee empowerment
0: Process is not standardized.
0: Customer requirements are unknown.
0: Systematic improvement efforts and employee involvement do not exist.
1: A process flowchart or procedure document exists. May not be current or complete.
1: Some customer requirements have been established, but are often based on dissatisfaction, waste or error.
1: There are a few process improvements—all based on management initiatives.
2: Process flowchart or procedure document exists and is current and complete.
2: Customer requirements have been established and validated.
2: There are process improvements based on employee suggestions.
3: Process flow is regularly updated. Aim is clear and periodic feedback is obtained.
3: Key process measurements exist, and at least one is regularly updated.
3: A fact-based structure for analysis and problem solving is in place.
4: Flowchart or procedure document is regularly referenced and is used for training. Regular feedback is provided.
4: Several key process measurements are validated with customer requirements and regularly updated.
4: The workforce partici-pates in continuous improvement and follows an established problem-solving structure. Tools are used.
5: Flowchart is uniformly used as an auditable standard. It is linked to metrics and continuous improvement efforts.
5: The process is stable and performing within control limits. Measurements are linked to benchmarks.
5: There is evidence of continuous, systematic improvement and measurable, positive results.
Process certification standard / TABLE 1
September 2016 • QP 41
others. Then everyone may understand what his job
is,” Deming wrote.4
Clearly, Deming understood that using such meth-
ods should be undertaken by everyone in an organiza-
tion so collective efforts would define the entire orga-
nizational system.
ISO 9001 also holds process as fundamental. One of
the eight quality management principles that forms the
basis of the standard is: “A desired result is achieved
more efficiently when activities and related resources
are managed as a process.”5
This process certification method formally surfaced
as far back as 1982 in work done at IBM.6 The method
actually may have been an adaptation of the quality
maturity grid first popularized by Phillip B. Crosby in
Quality Is Free.7
The IBM Process Certification model was part of an
effort to create an environment in which all of IBM’s
operational managers looked to key processes as their
primary management responsibility and took measur-
able action to ensure these processes were stable, in
control and periodically reviewed to ensure continu-
ous simplification and improvement.
The IBM model (see Table 2) uses a five-point scale
to evaluate all processes and develop a report card for
management on the adoption of process management
and continuous quality improvement. Participation in
process management thus became visible, and could be
measured and used in individual performance reviews
and in rewards that recognize quality achievement.
H. James Harrington referred to the same concept
as “process qualification” and devoted an entire chap-
ter to the subject.8 Process qualification, he reasoned,
would not only ensure quality of output, but would
also give workers in those processes “intermediate
goals along the road to perfection,” motivating all man-
agers to participate in the effort.9
Both models used at IBM and developed by Har-
rington have one primary evaluative descriptor and re-
quire interpretation of results by an executive body ac-
cording to descriptive standards. Table 2 reflects these
respective models.
The Harrington model anticipated changes in pro-
cess maturity based on a petition from the process
owner to the executive team, and that petition would
address the following factors:
• End-customer-related measurements.
• Process measurements and performance.
• Supplier partnerships.
• Documentation.
• Training.
• Benchmarking.
• Process adaptability.
• Continuous improvement.
Others also have cited the necessity and ease of
measuring process maturity10—making it confusing as
to why there is no simple and easy-to-use process cer-
tification scale in widespread use today.
The process certification standard presented in Ta-
ble 1 should provide an excellent leading indicator of
process capability, along with sustaining and improv-
ing results throughout any organizations that use it.
Its use is entirely compatible and supportive of lean
Six Sigma, ISO 9001, the Baldrige Criteria for Perfor-
mance Excellence and other quality models. In short,
PROCESS CAPABILITY
Level IBM model H. James Harrington model
6 N/A Unknown. Process status has not been determined.
5 The process as currently practiced is ineffective. Major exposures exist, requiring expeditious corrective actions, or the basics of quality management are not in place.
Understood. Process design is understood and operates according to prescribed documentation.
4 The process as currently practiced may have some operational or control weaknesses that require corrective action, but the resulting exposures are containable and the weaknesses can be corrected in the near future. The basics of quality management are in place.
Effective. Process is systematically measured, streamlining has started and end-customer expectations are understood.
3 The process as currently practiced is effective (meets customer requirements) and no significant operational inefficiencies or control exposures exist.
Efficient. Process is stream-lined and more efficient.
2 In addition to the level three require-ments, major improvements have been made to the process with tangible and measurable results realized. Envi-ronmental change is assessed with resulting process changes anticipated and committed to meeting customer’s future requirements.
Error free. Process is highly effective (error free) and efficient.
1 In addition to level two requirements, the outputs of the process are as-sessed by the owner and the auditor from the customer’s viewpoint as being substantially defect free (that is, to the level the process can reason-ably deliver).
World class. Process is world class and continues to improve.
Process certification models / TABLE 2
QP • www.qualityprogress.com42
it presents a powerful new tool to enhance any quality
approach and its deployment. QP
REFERENCES AND NOTES1. Joseph M. Juran and A. Blanton Godfrey, Juran’s Quality Handbook, fifth
edition, McGraw Hill International Edition, 2000, pp. 22.11.2. Armand V. Feigenbaum, Total Quality Control, third edition revised, R.R.
Donnelley and Sons, 1991, p. 779.3. W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis, Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
ogy (MIT) Press, 2000.4. In his book, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (MIT
Press, 1993, p. 31), W. Edwards Deming attributed this statement to Paul Batalden, M.D., Dartmouth Medical School in Hanover, NH.
5. International Organization for Standardization, ISO 9001:2015—Quality management systems—Requirements.
6. Edward J. Kane, “IBM’s Quality Focus on the Business Process,” Quality Progress, April 1986, pp. 26-33.
7. Phillip B. Crosby, Quality Is Free, New American Library, 1979.
8. H. James Harrington, Business Process Improvement: The Breakthrough Strategy for Total Quality, Productivity and Competitiveness, McGraw-Hill Education, 1991.
9. Ibid.10. Cherian Varghese, “Resolving the Process Paradox,” Cost Engineering,
November 2004, Vol. 46, No. 11, pp. 13-19.
A recent survey of quality in state govern-
ments revealed that no more than 20% of
all state agencies have formal lean quality
improvement programs in place, and those
initiatives in place have short life cycles.1
Most programs do not survive more
than three to five years and depend on
one leader for their continuation. The big-
gest reason for this short life cycle is that
government does not face the economic
reality that confronts almost every other
kind of business: Government will never
go out of business as a direct conse-
quence of a lack of delivered quality or
competition.
Government does not have a revenue
stream directly associated with a market-
place decision because taxes are auto-
matically levied on behalf of the groups of
departments and offices included within
the jurisdiction.
In addition, the division of taxes
between the various agencies that
spend the money is most often done by
formula—through legislative and budget-
ing action—and no individual agency is
evaluated based on a positive marketplace
impact. Each agency gets a legislatively
determined piece of the pie.
There is no self-correcting economic
motivation as there would be for the divi-
sions of a single organization that would
show the products and services of one
division were widely accepted by consum-
ers while those of another were rejected.
Government is generally managed as a
package deal. Only elected representa-
tives can shutter those that do not work,
and the record of such shutdowns is
almost nonexistent.2
Some may argue that those who hold
political office must serve as primary
stakeholders in the place of customers.
Through their collective political actions,
they must provide the correct economic
motivation and leadership direction for
quality to result.
In some cases, they do so, and over-
sight committees and audit agencies
hold government accountable.3 It is a
difficult proposition to know which offices
or bureaus are operating efficiently and
effectively, however, without uniform and
verifiable measurements of the quality of
the organizations supervised.
The challenge of incentivizing quality in
government is to make the existence of
quality, efficiency and effectiveness visible
to elected representatives and the public.
The ASQ Government Division has struck
on the idea of auditable quality standards
as a primary means of accomplishing that.
With an auditable standard for measur-
ing process maturity, the division believes
such an audit can be conducted annually
within each jurisdiction. The use of such
a standard will allow every jurisdiction to
report on how many of its offices, pro-
grams and departments have standardized
key processes and to what level. These
guidelines make this possible through an
objective, defined and auditable process-
certification guideline as its base.
Because key processes are funda-
mental to every office and bureau—no
matter how small—this auditable process
management standard makes it possible
for managers and supervisors to develop
a report card based on their respective
management practices. Uniform audits
using the standard could be performed
across all types of government and at all
levels. —R.E.M.
REFERENCE AND NOTES1. The survey was conducted by the ASQ Government
Division and CPS HR Consulting. To read more about the method used and survey results, visit www.cpshr.us/resources_whitepapers.html.
2. Charles S. Clark, “Flattening Government: Why Rhetoric on Killing Agencies So Seldom Becomes Reality,” The Government Executive, April 2011, pp. 21-28.
3. The U.S. Federal Government has an Office of the Inspec-tor General that performs periodic agency audits. Many state and local entities have similar types of audit offices that perform similar reviews. These reviews are con-ducted randomly, but often focus on a single program or process. The reviews also do not provide comprehensive and prospective indicators of problems.
PROCESS CAPABILITY
AUDITABLE QUALITY STANDARDS WILL INCENTIVIZE QUALITY IN GOVERNMENT
RICHARD E. MALLORY is principal consultant and senior project manager at CPS HR Consulting in Sacramento, CA. He holds a master’s degree in man-agement from the University of Phoenix. Mallory is a senior member of ASQ and the immediate past chair of the ASQ Government Division. He has served seven times as an examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige Na-tional Quality Award. He is the author of Management
Strategy—Creating Excellent Organizations (Trafford Publishing, 2006) and Quality Standards for Highly Effective Government (Trafford Publishing, 2014).
INNOVATION IMPERATIVE BY PETER MERRILL
Benchmarking InnovationBest practices for implementing an innovation program
AFTER I LEARNED this issue of QP
was focused on benchmarking, I decided
to benchmark the benchmarking others
have done to find correlations in best
practices. It was a tough exercise. I have
grouped my findings into five categories:
1. Strategy.
2. Education and competence.
3. Culture.
4. Structure.
5. Process and metrics.
StrategyThe most obvious finding is that innova-
tion must be aligned with the strategic
objectives of an organization, and they
must be clearly explained to the people
who must understand why innovation is
important.
The innovation strategy must draw on
clear strengths and competencies of an
organization. I worked with an organiza-
tion that built cockpit flight simulators
for the aerospace sector. The sector
was in a downturn at the time, and the
CEO saw a new business opportunity in
the nuclear industry. Making simulators
for that industry used skills and tech-
nologies the organization already had in
place. It showed that competitors can
copy an idea, but it takes much longer
for them to copy competencies.
While it’s exciting to come up with
new ideas, it’s more difficult to kill
projects after resources are invested.
Your strategy must include criteria and
a process for killing a project. A popular
maxim for innovators is, “Fail early.”
Try to build this into your strategy and
process.
Partnering is another critical aspect
of strategy. You don’t know everything,
and you can’t do everything. Ask your-
self, “Where are my organization’s skill
shortages, and how can I address them?”
Look for partners who are short on your
particular strengths. Seek areas in which
you can achieve that elusive win-win,
which will enable you to enter new mar-
kets quickly. There are many other as-
pects to strategy, but I have just picked
those which emerged as significant in
benchmarking.
Education and competenceThose in leader-
ship are the first
people who must
fully understand
innovation, and
they must under-
stand creativity and
develop their own
creativity. Being
creative is increas-
ingly in demand,
and the war for
talent is shifting from quantitative minds
to creative ones.
Everyone in an organization—espe-
cially leaders—must understand that
innovation starts in the marketplace
with a business opportunity, not in the
lab. People also must learn innovation is
a process—not magic—and that it’s rela-
tively easy to come up with ideas, and
more difficult and expensive to execute
them. That’s why innovators fail early.
When we seek new hires, we can
fall into the “mirror trap” and recruit
individuals who mirror ourselves. If your
organization is mostly made up of linear
thinkers, break that trend, increase
diversity, and recruit and retain creative
talent at undergraduate and graduate
levels.
As you build your education plan, en-
sure it contains concrete examples from
your own organization. People love real-
life stories: Find innovation successes,
however small, and show how they were
achieved.
Innovation culture changeThe question I’m most frequently asked
is, “How do I create an innovation cul-
ture?” The question these people should
be asking is, “How do I get a culture of
creativity to coexist with a culture of
execution?” because both are necessary.
The first task is to identify the barri-
ers to change. Typically, the biggest bar-
rier is the structure of the organization,
not individuals. One group of people,
however, is frequently overlooked. Orga-
nizations educate leaders who run town
hall meetings for our people, but ignore
middle managers and supervisors.
Front-line supervisors have the
September 2016 • QP 43
biggest influence on the majority of
people’s behavior. You must recog-
nize and compensate everyone. Do it
continuously and not just at the end of a
project. Remember that creative people
often respond more to recognition than
to rewards.
Organizations recognize behavior
such as collaboration, a willingness to
take risks, and a willingness to step out
of one’s comfort zone and be coura-
geous. Others in the organization will
then recognize that those behaviors are
valued.
The best results do not come from a
lone scientist. Teams must be given the
opportunity to innovate, and they also
can be rewarded by giving them the op-
portunity to work on a project they see
as important.
It also is useful to see how many full-
time employees are on a core innovation
team. Most core teams, however, are
quite small (see Figure 1).
A leader has a key role in chang-
ing a culture by closely engaging with
individual teams and not just speaking
promising words. If heartbreaks hap-
pen, a leader’s prime responsibility is to
remind people that they have permis-
sion to fail and help them learn from the
experience.
StructureAn innovative organization is a result of
a peaceful coexistence of diverse, agile,
open and networked creativity alongside
highly focused delivery chains.
Diversity can be obtained inter-
nally and externally. Looking
outside your four walls and
innovating without borders is
where you can find some of
your best new ideas.
Partnering with customers,
suppliers and even competi-
tors can lead to open innova-
tion, in which we find ideas
from the outside.
Agility is gained by avoiding
highly defined job descrip-
tions. In the organization I led
in the United Kingdom, we had
key tasks, not job descriptions.
I did this because we were ex-
periencing such rapid change
and growth. People should be
able to move to different parts
of the organization quickly and easily.
Networked organizations are an in-
creasing reality as technology advances.
Successful innovation comes not just
from having the right structure but also
the right infrastructure. As knowledge
grows exponentially, dedicated websites
or portals become essential tools.
Procter & Gamble Co. is a great
champion of innovation. For many
years, it has uncovered open innovation
solutions through its partnership with
InnoCentive—a crowdsourcing orga-
nization that works on R&D problems.
For a larger organization with multiple
projects underway, a shared portal is
essential.
Creative people need a safe space.
There are many methods of creating a
safe space, and you have to find those
that work best for you: whether it is
Lockheed Martin’s “skunk works”—an
alias for its advanced development pro-
grams—or the self-managed teams of
W. L. Gore & Associates Inc. and 3M.
Innovation process and metricsIt’s imperative that creative and imple-
mentation processes are integrated. For
QP • www.qualityprogress.com44
Number of FTEs on innovation team / FIGURE 1
3.3%
5.2%5.2%
7.8%
18.8%55.2%
4.6%
No FTEs
1 to 9
10 to 24
25 to 49
50 to 99
100 to 499
More than 500
FTE = full-time employee
Source: Innosight, “Innovation Benchmarking Report 2015,” report, Innovationleader.com, http://tinyurl.com/2015-innovation-report.
Tools used in the innovation program / FIGURE 2
71.8% Rapid prototyping
64.7% Focus groups
62.2% Idea capture
51.9% Customer profiling
46.8% Discussion platforms
46.8% Product lifecycle and management tools
43.6% Application development
40.4% Big data tools
35.9% Crowdsourcing
33.3% Customer sentiment analysis
Source: Innosight, “Innovation Benchmarking Report 2015,” report, Innovationleader.com, http://tinyurl.com/2015-innovation-report.
INNOVATION IMPERATIVE
PETER MERRILL is president of Quest Management Inc., an innovation consultancy based in Burlington, Ontario. Merrill is the author of several ASQ Quality Press books, including Innovation Never Stops (2015), Do It Right the Second Time, second edition (2009) and Innovation
Generation (2008). He is a member of ASQ, previous chair of the ASQ Innovation Division and current chair of the ASQ Innovation Think Tank.
example, Walmart insists that the people
responsible for implementation are in the
same room as those developing solu-
tions.
The overall process also must be
understandable with just five or six
basic steps. One that has 39 steps, for
example, is likely to be forgotten.
A common mistake in defining the
innovation process is merging the con-
cepts of finding the opportunity and find-
ing the solution into a one step. People
involved in market research must work
with those in product research while
keeping their distinct roles.
The innovation process starts with
finding the best opportunities and having
clear criteria for their evaluation. A mar-
ket opportunity might be defined during
strategy development, but it is still the
first step in the process. In suggestion
schemes, people are expected to define
the problem and solution. This will pro-
vide improvements, but it rarely creates
breakthrough innovation.
The next step is finding solutions. The
best methods for finding solutions or
ideas tap into collective knowledge, and
they also must align with the corporate
capabilities and goals.
After developing ideas, it’s essential
to use a review process in which innova-
tive ideas with the most potential are
given resources. The review also allows
people to hear why their ideas did or
didn’t make the cut.
Narrowing the focus of ideas is es-
sential to avoid an idea avalanche that
cannot be resourced. You must then
implement ideas quickly, and failing to
do this could lead to being overtaken
by competitors and organizationwide
disappointment. The leaders of the
business unit must buy in, move with
speed, and not become bogged down by
processes and approvals.
There are many tools available to
manage the innovation process (see Fig-
ure 2). To know whether your strategy
and processes are working, you need
metrics. The wrong metrics can kill
innovation, but the right metrics will be
easily understood by leaders. Figure 3
illustrates organizations’ typical metrics
used during the execution phase.
In the creative phase, metrics will be
atypical: They might include the number
of ideas created, but you also will mea-
sure the strength of the relationships be-
tween people or degree to which an idea
can be copied. In the execution phase,
metrics typically are project focused, but
ensure process metrics are included as
well. You must know where your innova-
tion process can be improved. QP
BIBLIOGRAPHYBuchan, John, The 39 Steps, Michael O’ Mara Books, 2011.Burkus, David, “10 Practices From the Most Innovative
Organizations,” Creativitypost.com, April 23, 2016, http://tinyurl.com/innovative-orgs.
Canadian Innovation Center, “10 Best Practices for Enter-prise Innovation,” 2011, http://tinyurl.com/ best-practices-ent-innovation.
Innosight, “Innovation Benchmarking Report 2015,” report, Innovationleader.com, http://tinyurl.com/ 2015-innovation-report.
Jain, Vani, “Innovation Without Borders: Six Best Practices to Improve Innovation Success Rates,” Innovationmanagement.se, June 17, 2015, http://tinyurl.com/innovation-borders.
Labovitz, George and Victor Rosansky, “Five Best Practices to Drive Innovation,”Innovationexcellence.com, Aug. 4, 2013.
Lash, Rick, “Best Practices for Leading Via Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, Aug. 6, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/08/best-practices-for-leading-via.
Merrill, Peter, Innovation Never Stops, ASQ Quality Press, 2015.
Pennsylvania State University, “Benchmarking for Innova-tion and Improvement,” Innovation Insights, http://tinyurl.com/pennstate-innovation-insights.
Organizations’ innovation metrics / FIGURE 3
68.5%
67.4%
58.4%
56.2%
45.5%
37.6%
33.2%
21.9%
17.4%
Revenue generated from innovation products
Projects in pipeline
Stage-gate specific
P&L impact or other financial impact
Number of ideas generated
Patent applications or patents received
Internal rate of return or similar metric
Earned-value analysis or other scoring
Media references or press mentions
P&L = profit and loss
Note: Total exceeds 100% because many respondents cited more than one metric.
Source: Innosight, “Innovation Benchmarking Report 2015,” report, Innovationleader.com, http://tinyurl.com/2015-innovation-report.
September 2016 • QP 45
ATTEND THE ASQ INNOVATION DIVISION CONFERENCE: For more information about how you can personally benchmark innovation best practices within your organization, attend the ASQ Innovation Division Conference being held in San Diego on Oct. 14-15 and visit www.asq.org/ innovation-group.
QP • www.qualityprogress.com46
MEASURE FOR MEASURE BY DILIP SHAH
Resolution ResolveNavigating measurement uncertainty due to a device’s display
THERE’S A QUESTION I’ve heard asked
more often than it should be: “How should
I treat measurement uncertainty contrib-
uted by the resolution of a device?”
If the device’s resolution is digital—dis-
playing the least-significant digit incre-
ment as a single digit from zero to nine—
it is assumed that it somehow increments
or decrements by a single digit. This as-
sumption is based on the “invisible digit”
to the right of the least-significant digit.
The invisible digitIf this invisible digit is in the range of zero
to four, the least-significant digit will re-
main the same or decrease by one digit. If
it is in the range of five to nine, it increases
the least-significant digit by one count.
This is similar to conventional rounding
rules we learned in early math classes (see
Figure 1).
The Guide to Uncertainty of Measure-
ment (GUM) suggests that you take half
of this display resolution and treat it as
a rectangular distribution.1 For example,
if the = 0.000 288 7 (note that the
numbers shown have a space after three
digits to comply with SI, or metric sys-
tem, conventions).2
What if the least-significant digit incre-
ments by a count of five? For example, if
the digital micrometer displays on an inch
scale, the resolution is 0.000 05 inches.
That means the least-significant digit will
display as a zero or five (see Figure 2).
Unless the manufacturer of the device
provides the information on how the
least-significant digit increments or decre-
ments, you may have to determine how to
estimate the uncertainty contributed by
this kind of resolution. The GUM states
that you can always treat a contributor
as a rectangular distribution and divide it
by a square root of three. The resolution’s
uncertainty in this example is =
0.000 028 87. In other scenarios, a device’s
resolution may increment in odd numbers
or even numbers (see Figure 3).3
In thinking about resolution, you also
must consider analog displays. The best
resolution a device can get
between two major indica-
tion lines is half the distance
between the lines (see Figure
4). In other words, if the
analog display’s pointer is
between eight and nine, the
best value you could resolve
on that measurement is 8.5.
Some might ask, “Should this be treated
like a digital display and state that the
estimated uncertainty is = 0.288 7? Or
should this uncertainty be = 0.577 74?”
In most cases, the best an analog
display can read is usually a half digit
when it interpolates between divisions
in an analog display. You might need to
take additional readings and calculate the
repeatability contributor in this case.4
Without an invisible digit Let’s examine another scenario of the
Vernier micrometer. Using the Vernier
scale on a micrometer, you can resolve
your measurement to 0.000 1 inches. How
should this uncertainty for the microm-
eter resolution be estimated? There is no
trailing invisible digit after the 0.000 1 inch
resolution. In this case, the resolution
uncertainty is best estimated at =
0.000 057 735.
Because resolution is one of the con-
tributors to a device’s uncertainty budget,
its overall contribution may be significant
or insignificant compared with other
contributors. In the end, you can only
read the display indication on the panel
meter (see Figure 5). If the uncertainty
contributed by the display resolution
is insignificant, it will not matter in the
overall uncertainty. If it is significant, it
Digital display Half digit for rounding
0 . 0 0 1 0–45–9
Digital display Half digit for rounding
0 . 0 0 10–4 Least-significant display
digit remains the same or decreases by one count5–9
Digital display Half digit for rounding
0 . 0 0 20–4 Least-significant display
digit increases by one count5–9
Conventional rounding rules / FIGURE 1
Digital display Digit for rounding
0 . 0 0 0 0 0 ?Least-significant display digit
?
Digital display Digit for rounding
0 . 0 0 0 0 5 ?Least-significant display digit
?
Rounding that displays 0 or 5 / FIGURE 2
0.001 2√3
0.000 05 √3
0.5 √3
1.0 √3
0.000 1 √3
0.001 2√3
0.000 05 √3
0.5 √3
1.0 √3
0.000 1 √3
0.001 2√3
0.000 05 √3
0.5 √3
1.0 √3
0.000 1 √3
0.001 2√3
0.000 05 √3
0.5 √3
1.0 √3
0.000 1 √3
0.001 2√3
0.000 05 √3
0.5 √3
1.0 √3
0.000 1 √3
6. Dilip Shah, “Measure for Measure: Keep Your Resolution,” Quality Progress, March 2011, pp. 56-58.
7. JCGM, International Vocabulary of Metrology—Basic and General Concepts and Associated Terms (VIM), third edition, 2012, http://tinyurl.com/vimterms.
DILIP SHAH is president of E = mc3 Solutions in Medina, OH. He is the chair of ASQ’s Measurement Qual-ity Division and past chair of ASQ’s Akron-Canton Section. Shah, an ASQ fellow, is also co-author of The Me-trology Handbook (ASQ Quality Press, 2012), and an ASQ-certified quality
engineer, auditor and calibration technician.
September 2016 • QP 47
may contribute significantly to the
overall uncertainty. This may be
examined by the individual contribu-
tor’s percentage contribution.
For example, because a 0.001
digital display resolution has uncer-
tainty due to the resolution that is
dominant in an uncertainty budget,
it is not practical to state the mea-
surement as: 5.135 ± 0.000 577 35
(measurement result ± uncertainty
due to resolution). The display
resolution is essentially going to be
the uncertainty (or 0.001). That’s
because this is what the end user is
going to see when he or she is taking
measurements: 5.135 ± 0.001 (mea-
surement result ± uncertainty due to
resolution).
Resolution treatmentTreating resolution measurement
uncertainty from different units of
measurement from the same device
also requires maintaining two separate
measurement uncertainty budgets.5, 6 It
also is important to treat resolution as
it is defined in International Vocabu-
lary of Metrology—Basic and General
Concepts and Associated Terms (VIM):
“[The] smallest change in a quantity be-
ing measured that causes a perceptible
change in the corresponding indica-
tion.”7 If a device has a five-decimal res-
olution and only the first three decimal
places are stable, the device’s resolution
is essentially 0.001 (see Figure 6).
The GUM can only provide general
guidance on the estimation of uncer-
tainty. If each contributor is important
to your measurement process, it is
essential that you conduct rigorous
measurement-analysis studies to
understand your measurement process
rather than blindly accepting what is
stated in a publication and applying it
with a shotgun approach.
Rounding with odd and even increments / FIGURE 3
54 63 7
2 8
1 9
0 10
Analog scale on an instrument / FIGURE 4
Resolution in which only the first three decimal places are stable / FIGURE 6
Digital display Digit for rounding
0 . 0 0 0 0 1? Least-significant
display digit is even?
Digital display Digit for rounding
0 . 0 0 0 0 3? Least-significant
display digit is even?
Digital display Digit for rounding
0 . 0 0 0 0 2? Least-significant
display digit is even?
Digital display Digit for rounding
0 . 0 0 0 0 4? Least-significant
display digit is even?
3
09876543210
0 1 2
20
0
15
10
5
0
20
Vernier scale on a micrometer with a 0.0001 inch resolution / FIGURE 5
Measurement uncertainty analysis helps
analyze a measurement-decision risk. Overes-
timating the uncertainty provides false nega-
tives, while underestimating the uncertainty
provides false positives. Both have costs for
the consumer and supplier of calibration
services. ISO 9001:2015 says organizations
must assess risk in their business operations,
and the ISO/IEC 17025 standard also is being
revised to emphasize assessing measurement-
decision risk. It’s time to treat your instru-
ment resolution with more resolve. QP
REFERENCES AND NOTES1. Joint Committee for Guides on Metrology (JCGM), Evaluation of
Measurement Data—Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement, first edition, section F.2.2.1, “The Resolution of a Digital Indication,” 2008, http://tinyurl.com/evaluationofmea-surement.
2. Ibid.3. For more information on assessing other display-resolution
scenarios, read Philip Stein’s “Measure for Measure: All You Ever Wanted to Know About Resolution,” Quality Progress, July 2001, pp. 141-142.
4. For additional guidance on interpolation, read Philip Stein’s “Mea-sure for Measure: Careful Interpolation Yields Useful Information,” Quality Progress, January 2000, p. 67.
5. Dilip Shah, “Measure for Measure: Best of Both Worlds,” Quality Progress, July 2011, pp. 54-56.
Digital display
0 . 0 0 3 2 5Least two
significant digits not stable
Digital display
0 . 0 0 3 5 6Least two
significant digits not stable
Discovering What WorksEffective change management focuses on the individual
I DIDN’T SET out to become a qual-
ity professional. In university I studied
engineering physics because it covered a
wide range of topics such as mechanics,
electronics and thermodynamics, and I
hoped one of the disciplines would grab
my interest. After graduation, however, I
still wasn’t enamored with any particular
topic, so I took a job that interested me
the most, which was in an electronics lab
of ITT Telecommunications in London.
I was given a boring assignment that I
disliked and was unrelated to any depart-
ment project. I was eager for a change, so
when I heard about a new quality depart-
ment—which I knew nothing about—I
immediately applied for a transfer. I didn’t
know it at the time, but learning about
quality on-the-job taught me a lot about
change management practices.
Learning from a legendIn my new role, I was fortunate to learn
about quality from our corporate quality
vice president, Philip Crosby, whom I
had the honor of meeting a few times.
Crosby was such an influence because
he was kind and patient. He would
visit our department and speak to every
employee.
Early in my career, he suggested I use
a fishbone diagram to solve a manufactur-
ing problem instead of the histogram I
was trying to make. On another occasion,
he offered some ideas about a presenta-
tion I was preparing. He suggested a line
graph would be better than a pie chart
to show an analysis of production data
because I could visualize trends. These
suggestions and Crosby’s one-on-one ap-
proach were inspiring to a young quality
practitioner.
Throughout my career, I’ve applied
this hands-on, explanatory approach to
my managerial style. I have realized the
desire to push performance must come
from within the individual. It cannot be
enforced from the outside.
Failure to recognize this is why many
managers cannot establish a highly
motivated work culture. Instead, these
managers often receive “malicious compli-
ance,” meaning that employees first do as
instructed, but revert to their old ways as
soon as the manager’s back is turned.
Creating lasting changeOn one occasion, a machine operator was
allowing thousands of defective parts to
be produced and no one had been able
to change his unconcerned attitude. I
took him to a telephone office where our
switching equipment was deployed. It had
mechanical, vertical and rotary switches.
When someone dialed, for example, a
three then a two, a lever moved up three
notches and sideways two positions. This
would continue for the entire 10-digit
phone number, physically connecting the
caller to the person whose number they
dialed.
I showed the operator how his piece
part was vital to this process and ex-
plained that he wouldn’t be able to call
his family in an emergency if a defective
part jammed the levers. The next day, he
refused to work and my boss called me
into his office to demand that I fix the
trouble I caused. When I asked the ma-
chine operator why he stopped working,
he insisted on first having a proper setup
with samples and control charts to ensure
his parts were good—procedures he had
previously refused to implement.
Soon after immigrating to Toronto, I
worked with another telecommunications
organization, assisting each level of the
workplace with various quality func-
tions: From the shop floor to corporate
headquarters and hardware to software.
I learned that each department requires
a slightly different approach to change
management.
I worked with shop floor employees,
teaching them to measure samples and
control their processes by participating
in quality circles to identify issues and
find solutions. I taught engineers and
managers how to use quality tools to find
and eliminate the root cause of problems
by facilitating problem-solving teams. I
also held strategic planning sessions with
senior management, and demonstrated
how to define and measure key process
indicators.
It is important for quality professionals
to learn to relate to and influence people
at all levels and functions in an organiza-
tion, because our duties transcend typical
workplace structures.
I was asked to troubleshoot a manu-
facturing line with a high defect rate. I
conducted a statistical experiment and
discovered that design tolerances made
it impossible for assemblers to do any
better. The union leader thanked me
personally because it was the first time his
workers had not been solely blamed for
poor quality.
Surprisingly, the defect rate im-
proved anyway, even though nothing
had changed. I believe this was due to
the famous and sometimes controversial
Hawthorne Effect: The workers took steps
to make things better because somebody
paid attention to them.1
QUALITY IN THE FIRST PERSON BY ROY GREEN
QP • www.qualityprogress.com48
ROY GREEN is the quality manager at Forsythe Lubrication in Hamilton, Ontario. He earned his bachelor’s de-gree in physics from Leeds University in the United Kingdom and is a senior member of ASQ.
September 2016 • QP 49
Navigating conflictI also have developed negotiation and
conflict resolution skills that help me
implement quality in places where it is
not always welcomed initially. For exam-
ple, I met a new marketing manager and
said, “Merry Christmas.” He asked where
I worked, and when I said “quality,” he
stood up and asked me to leave his office.
He had a bad experience with the quality
department in another organization, so I
was painted with the same brush.
Instead of leaving, I sat down and
asked for his business card. Surprised,
he handed it over. I showed him my own
card and said, “Oh, look. They have the
same logo!” He sat down again and be-
grudgingly said, “OK, I’ll listen, but I don’t
promise to cooperate.”
I explained what must be done for
quality compliance and suggested that
first we agree on what we will actually
do and how we will tell our respective
bosses. After that, he was great to work
with.
These experiences piqued my interest
in researching what motivates people to
produce good work. I studied various mo-
tivation theories and realized a one-size-
fits-all approach does not work. In fact,
I found no employee will fit completely
into one theory at any given time.
I saw that sometimes a key obstacle
was personal rather than work-related,
but as long as that personal problem was
foremost in an employee’s mind, he or
she couldn’t focus on the job at hand. I
developed a process to identify this ob-
stacle, including using mediation skills to
defuse a toxic situation without becoming
negatively influenced.
This approach involved being
consciously aware that, regardless of
your own needs, everyone you talk to is
thinking, to some extent, “What’s in it for
me?” By understanding what drives an
employee’s enthusiasm and relating it to
the job at hand, you will motivate him or
her to want to do a better job. QP
REFERENCE1. “The Hawthorne Effect,” The Economist, Nov. 3 2008,
http://tinyurl.com/time-hawthorne-effect.
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HAVE YOU EVER gone to a paint store to
match a color sample? Were you amazed
when they produced an exact match of
your sample’s hue, color and saturation?
You went home, spread it on the walls
right next to the original, and no one could
tell the difference.
A paint store miracle? Not really.
The paint-mixing machines have built-in
colorimeters to measure the sample, and
they have built-in devices for deposit-
ing the required pigment combinations
to match it. The driving software engine
contains a mixture model that instructs
server motors to deposit the right amount
of pigments to blend with the white base
paint to create a paint that matches your
sample closer than your eye’s ability to
detect the difference.
It’s a customer pleaser—a money
maker to be sure. And it is a great feat of
statistical engineering.
It’s a shame it only applies to paint.
Wait. That’s not right. What about deter-
gents, soaps, body washes, all sorts of food
items, drugs and cosmetics? Almost all of
them are blends, of course. But how do
you get the blending model?
Statistical DoE to the rescueIt turns out that experimentation with
mixtures is little different than factorial
experimentation in principle. The major
difference is that the sum of the mixture
ingredients (components) is a constant.
That sum is usually one or 100%, or it can
be made equivalent to one using a trans-
formation.
The important distinction is that for
mixtures, the response depends on the
proportions of the ingredients. And as the
proportion of a given ingredient increases,
the proportion of at least
one other ingredient must
decrease. This is the case for
all mixtures. The responses
may differ, so if you are
blending gasolines, you might
be interested in an octane rat-
ing. If you are blending juices,
you might be interested in
consumer perception. The
constraint holds, however: If
you increase the proportion
of orange juice, the propor-
tion of at least one other type
of juice, perhaps guava, must
decrease.
OK, so maybe you’re not
interested in guava juice
blends. Still, you get the pic-
ture: Factorial experimenta-
tion won’t work, but knowl-
edge of the technology helps.
If you wanted to construct a model for
blending ingredients such as gasoline and
juices, but never together, you might recall
the way you constructed models for the
study of independent variables such as
mixing time and temperature. There, you
conducted factorial experiments ma-
nipulating these independent variables in
logical combinations of extreme lows and
highs to permit an efficient estimation of
their effects. In the simplest of situations,
two-level, the factorial designs and their
fractions prove to be the most appropriate.
For mixtures, the story is pretty much
the same. You would want low, high
and perhaps intermediate levels of each
ingredient. To model most efficiently the
effects of the proportions of orange, guava
and pineapple juices, you would want to
examine the extremes and perhaps some
intermediate blends. The extreme orange
juice high level is one, or 100% with 0%
of each of the other two juices, and the
extreme orange juice low is 0% with 50% of
QP • www.qualityprogress.com50
STATISTICS ROUNDTABLE BY LYNNE B. HARE
Painting by the Numbers Basics of mixture design generation, data modeling and interpretation
Run Orange Guava Pineapple
1 1 0 0
2 0 1 0
3 0 0 1
4 1/2 1/2 0
5 1/2 0 1/2
6 0 1/2 1/2
7 1/3 1/3 1/3
8 2/3 1/6 1/6
9 1/6 2/3 1/6
10 1/6 1/6 2/3
Juice blending design / TABLE 1
September 2016 • QP 51
each of the other two juices.
If you can afford the cost of experimen-
tation, you also might look at the three
50/50 blends and even the center-point
blend consisting of 33-1/3% of each of
the juices—giving a total of seven unique
experimental blends listed in Table 1.
To ensure that your model really fits the
blending responses well, you might even
include runs eight to 10.
Using the responses from such an
experiment, it is possible to generate a
prediction model. It would look like the
typical factorial regression model except
that it would not have a constant term (b0).
If the model fit the data very well, it could
be used to predict the average consumer
attitude toward all blends, including those
intermediate to the 10 actually run.
A simple mixture model might include
only linear terms such as:
h = b1 z
1 + b
2 z
2 + b
3 z
3 ,
in which h is the “true” response, the
b’s are conefficients estimated from the
consumer-response data and the z’s repre-
sent the proportions of the juices.
Quite often, the nature of the responses
is more complex than can be explained by
this simple linear model, and more com-
plex models should be examined. A useful
second order model is:
h = b1 z
1 + b
2 z
2 + b
3 z
3 + b
12z
1 z
2 + b
13z
1 z
3
+ b23
z2 z
3.
Of course, there are many more com-
plicated models that can be evaluated.
Regardless of the model, care should be
taken with the interpretation of model
terms. A second order term, such as z1z
2,
is not an “interaction” as it might be called
in factorial experimentation. Instead, it
is simply a nonlinear blending term—a
measure of how some components work
together to influence the response, but
taking into account all the remaining com-
ponents in the mixture.
Many mixture experiment situations
are not so simple as to permit ingredi-
ents to range from zero to 100% of the
mix. Chocolate pudding, for example, is
composed of cornstarch, sugar, salt, whole
milk, chocolate chips and vanilla extract.
If you try to make it with 100% of any of
these ingredients, it won’t work. Believe
me, I’ve tried.
An experimental design—such as
the one in Table 1—cannot be used. In
its place, we shift to designs formed by
computer algorithms that select a specified
number of experimental combinations
from a full set of candidate points based
on the constraints stated in terms of upper
and lower bounds of each of the compo-
nents.
While the thinking is the same, the math
is more complex, and great care must
be taken to avoid overfitting models by
including terms that are highly correlated
with other terms in the model. It can be a
major hassle, but there is good software
around to help you. You also should talk to
your local, friendly statistician.
After a suitable model is found to fit
the data, the task of interpretation begins.
If the mixture in question has only a few
components—say two or three—mixture-
response surfaces can aid the interpreta-
tion. These take the form of contours of
a constant response superimposed on a
three-component space called a simplex,
shown in Figure 1. This illustrates the re-
sults of blending three vegetable oil solids
sources and measuring the solid fat index
at 50° F.
If the mixture is composed of many
more ingredients, the use of response
surfaces is cumbersome. Many practitio-
ners employ mixture trace plots. They rely
on the choice of a point of interest, which
could be the current product formula-
tion, the center of the design or the boss’s
Vegetable oil 11 0
1
0 0
10
20
3040
50
1Vegetable oil 2
Mixture contour plot of SFI-50(component amounts)
Stearine
Contours of constant response superimposed on a three-component mixture space / FIGURE 1
-0.40 -0.20 0 0.20
A
A
C
C
BBE
EF F
D
D
0.40
15
20
25
30
35
Res
po
nse
: Y
Component deviation from center
A mixture response trace / FIGURE 2
favorite formula. To and from that chosen
formula, they add or subtract a given com-
ponent in tiny increments while keeping
all other components in constant relative
proportion to their presence at the chosen
formula.
The resulting trace, then, depicts what
you would see if you could watch the
change in response while incrementing or
decrementing a given component away
from the reference blend.
In situations such as the pudding ex-
ample, the design space is highly irregular,
and individual component trace lines
are longer or shorter depending on the
distances between their bounds. The trace
is useful because it shows what happens to
the response as each component is varied
independently, insofar as that is actually
possible, from each other.
Figure 2 (p. 51) shows that some com-
ponents, notably B, E and F, seem relatively
inert. The hint is that future experimenta-
tion might take place with them being held
constant at some convenient proportion,
the real drama being with A, C and D.
Interpretation of the results of mixture
experiments also is greatly facilitated by
the availability of software to provide sim-
ulations of multiple responses. Scientists
and engineers typically measure more than
one response and have in mind desired
levels of each of several responses for
product or process success. While traces
may be informative of individual respons-
es, combining them can be cumbersome.
Simulation results can easily number in
the thousands without taxing computer
resources, and the resulting tables can be
sorted to identify component mixtures
fulfilling multiple goals simultaneously.
Mathematically, the experimental
design generation, data modeling and inter-
pretation are more complex than perhaps I
have made them seem here. Conceptually,
however, it’s as easy as, well, painting by
the numbers. QP
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThe author has dedicated this column to John A. Cornell, known as “Dr. Mixtures” in statistical circles, who died in July. He was 75. Cornell, a fellow of ASQ and the American Statistical Association, authored Experiments With Mixtures, second edition (Wiley and Sons, 1990), and served as editor of the Journal of Quality Technology from 1989 to 1991. He also was the recipient of the W.J. Youden Prize for the best expository that appeared in Technometrics in 1973, ASQ’s Chemical and Process Industries Division’s Shewell Award in 1981, ASQ’s Brumbaugh Award in 1995 and ASQ’s Shewhart Medal in 2000. Cornell “represented the best in statistics and statistical consulting,” Hare said. Visit http://tinyurl.com/cornell-obit for a full obituary.
LYNNE B. HARE is a statistical consul-tant. He holds a doctorate in statistics from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. He is past chair of the ASQ Statistics Division and a fellow of ASQ and the American Statistical Association.
QP • www.qualityprogress.com52
STATISTICS ROUNDTABLE
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STANDARDS OUTLOOK BY JOHN E. “JACK” WEST AND CHARLES A. CIANFRANI
ISO 9001:2015—What’s VitalGo beyond the requirements to ensure operational effectiveness
SOMEWHAT LOST IN the chatter about
ISO 9001:2015, the most recent revision to
the quality management standard, is the
fact that it continues to be—by its initial
design in 1987 and its 2015 revision—a set
of minimum requirements for an effective
quality management system (QMS).
If you read recent magazine articles
and social media forums about the 2015
revision, you may get the impression there
is little consideration of ISO 9001:2015’s
requirements as they relate to an organiza-
tion’s strategic and tactical plans. Another
troubling trend is that there’s not much
conversation about what is needed for
short and long-term organizational sustain-
ability. There also seems to be a lack of
intensity in exploring and pursuing what
is needed beyond meeting the minimum
requirements of ISO 9001 for a QMS.
People appear to be misguided about
what they’re choosing to emphasize—fo-
cusing on achieving conformity to the
standard’s requirements and not organiza-
tional excellence and sustainability.
Many external and internal forces,
however, such as competitive pressure
and changes in technology and customer
expectations, are pressing organizations
to go beyond conforming to minimum
requirements to remain relevant.
Compliance just not enough?From the viewpoint of sustainability and
organizational excellence as meaningful
objectives—and using the ISO 9000 model
as a foundation—we suggest expanding
the breadth and depth of the following
processes beyond the minimum required
to claim compliance with ISO 9001:
• Quality management input to the
strategic-planning process.
• Self assessments.
• Correction, corrective action, risk as-
sessment and improvement.
• Innovation efforts.
• Quality cost method.
• Structure and deployment of QMSs to
address globalization challenges.
• Applying specific quality tools and
methods—such as Six Sigma, lean, total
quality management (TQM) or statistical
process control (SPC)—as appropriate.
Consider these examples of going
beyond minimum compliance to enhance
QMS’s effectiveness:
Quality management input to
the strategic-planning process—ISO
9001:2015’s clauses 4 and 6 include re-
quirements that hint at, without actually
stating, the need for strategic planning.1, 2
A robust process that considers exter-
nal and internal threats, and systematically
explores strengths and weaknesses—such
as a formal strengths, weaknesses, op-
portunities and threats analysis—would
address the requirements. This also could
form the foundation of strategic and tacti-
cal planning processes. While not easy to
develop and deploy, such processes are
essential ingredients to achieving organi-
zational sustainability.
Self-assessment—ISO 9001:2015 re-
quires an internal audit: the determination
of conformity with requirements. This is
a binary, yes-or-no determination. Richer
data can be derived from a self-assessment
process that considers the degree of matu-
rity of process deployment.
Much has been written about self-
assessments,3 and a self-assessment
process goes well beyond an internal
audit process in terms of providing an
organization with information to drive
process improvement projects.
A self-assessment must consider not
only the processes and elements of the
QMS, but also the interactions between
QMS processes and other processes of the
organization.
Processes for correction, cor-
rective action, risk assessment and
improvement—Most organizations have
corrective action processes in place. Some
even distinguish between correction and
corrective action. In our experience, few
organizations ensure all personnel under-
stand the difference between correction
and corrective action, and not many seem
to have processes that routinely require a
formal root cause analysis as an element
of corrective action.
Attention to correction, corrective
action and improvement processes,
and ensuring effective implementation
throughout an organization can be a pow-
erful engine for driving improvement. The
effective implementation and adequacy of
existing processes can be probed by ask-
ing simple questions:
• Are corrective action processes de-
ployed?
• Are they consistently implemented?
• Are the processes performed by a
competent staff?
• Is training needed?
Also ask yourself, would a documented
process for conducting improvement proj-
ects increase effectiveness? Consistency
and effectiveness of project implementa-
tion would be a likely result of following a
defined process that staff has been trained
to use.
Innovation efforts—Innovation pro-
cesses are not required by ISO 9001:2015,
which is a major shortcoming of the
September 2016 • QP 53
QP • www.qualityprogress.com54
standard because innovation is of high
interest to top management. We strongly
recommend that organizations have pro-
cesses defined and deployed to consider
innovation in its products and processes.
Without innovation, an organization can
wither and die.
Furthermore, without formal processes
that provide a framework in which innova-
tion can occur, its deployment will be less
effective and sporadic. The formal QMS
should incorporate that framework so that
consideration of innovation is encouraged
by the process and not by chance.
Quality cost method—This method
is not required by ISO 9001:2015, but if
money is the language of management,
processes will be required to put opera-
tional information into that language. A
cost of quality process can be an effective
tool to communicate operational informa-
tion to management in a way that elicits
action to improve.
Structure and deployment of a QMS
to address globalization challenges—A
major concern to CEOs and COOs is the
trend toward globalizing organizational
activities. Even smaller organizations find
themselves engaged in international com-
petition or in international supply chain
concerns.
These pressures can exist through-
out the life cycle of an organization’s
activities—from purchased materials or
contracted services on the front end of
product or service production to postdeliv-
ery services. Although it’s not addressed in
these terms in ISO 9001:2015, consider in-
cluding processes in your QMS to address
unique requirements, concerns or condi-
tions that arise in the global marketplace.
Applying quality tools and methods
such as Six Sigma, lean, TQM or SPC
as appropriate—ISO 9001:2015 does not
address specific methods to be used in
process deployment. It does require that
processes be planned and carried out un-
der controlled conditions, and it requires
continual improvement.
Process control and improvement
are all enhanced by the availability and
analysis of information. While it’s not
required by ISO 9001:2015, you can en-
hance internal process effectiveness and
customer satisfaction by providing staff
training on the use of data collection and
analysis tools.
Review the foundationBefore considering areas to expand your
QMS, it is a good practice to review its
foundations. This should include a review
of the quality management principles4 and
their applications, as well as your orga-
nization’s vision and mission statements.
You also should ensure your current objec-
tives are still adequate.
After your management team and entire
workforce have an aligned understand-
ing of the QMS’s foundation, a quality
professional and a management team can
evaluate where value can be obtained by
expanding the breadth and depth of your
QMS.
Our suggestions about going beyond
minimum requirements are intended only
to give you an incentive to consider what
could be included in your organization’s
QMS. They are not intended to provide
details about what to include or how
processes should be structured. Organi-
zations’ activities will be different and
optimized for the unique needs of each
process.
Your QMS should not be structured to
meet the requirements of a standard but
instead should exist to ensure processes
are operating under controlled condi-
tions, internal operating effectiveness
is achieved and customer satisfaction is
attained. QP
REFERENCES AND NOTES1. International Organization for Standardization (ISO), ISO
9001:2015—Quality management systems—Require-ments, clause 4—context of the organization.
2. ISO, ISO 9001:2015—Quality management systems— Requirements, clause 5—leadership.
3. For more information on self-assessments, read ASQ Z1 TR1–2012: Guidelines for performing a self-assessment of a quality management system (ASQ, 2012).
4. For more information on quality management principles related to ISO 9001, read Quality Management Principles (ISO, 2015) at http://tinyurl.com/iso-qmp-2015.
CHARLES A. CIANFRANI is a prin-cipal consultant for Green Lane Quality Management Services in Green Lane, PA. An ASQ fellow, Cianfrani is a U.S. expert repre-sentative to ISO/TC 176 and has co-authored several ASQ Quality Press books. He holds an MBA
from Drexel University in Philadelphia and a master’s degree in applied statistics from Villanova University in Pennsylvania.
MEMBERS: SUBSCRIBE TO STANDARDS CONNECTIONReceive the latest ISO 9001:2015 news by subscribing to ASQ’s monthly Standards Connection enewsletter at asq.org/standardsconnection. It offers exclusive content and expert advice on your burning standards questions.
JOHN E. “JACK” WEST is a member of Silver Fox Advisors in Houston. He is past chair of the U.S. Techni-cal Advisory Group to the Interna-tional Organization for Standard-ization Technical Committee 176 and former lead delegate of the committee responsible for the ISO
9000 family of quality management system standards. He is an ASQ fellow and has co-authored several ASQ Quality Press books.
STANDARDS OUTLOOK
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• ON-SITE
• PUBLIC TRAINING
• QUALITY AUDITS
• STANDARDS REGISTRARS
• STANDARDS TRAINING
EMNS Inc. (Global Supplier Quality Assurance – GSQA®)Phone: 866-438-4772www.gsqa.com
• LEAN
• QUALITY TOOLS AND MULTIMEDIA
• SIX SIGMA
• SOFTWARE
• SPC
• OTHER
EtQ Inc. 399 Conklin St., Suite 208 Farmingdale, NY 11735 Phone: 516-293-0949 www.etq.com
EtQ is the leading enterprise for quality and compliance management software for identifying, mitigating and preventing high-risk events through integration, automation and collaboration.• QUALITY AUDITS
• QUALITY TOOLS AND MULTIMEDIA
• QUALITY TRAINING
• RECALL MANAGEMENT
• SOFTWARE
60 QP • www.qualityprogress.com
ISO 9001: 2015 and 14001 : 2015 Auditor and Organization Transition Courses — eLearning, flexible with live audit.
Calling all Consultants and Practitioners — Tutors wanted— good earnings per delegate, private courses for 5-10 dele-gates you recruit . Course authors wanted see:
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Quality Resource GuideIQS Inc.24950 Country Club Blvd., Suite 120North Olmsted, OH 44067Phone: 440-333-1344www.iqs.com
World-class quality management demands excellent data visibility with deep functionality. IQS is designed for analytics, and it offers an intuitive and flexible user experience to aid in enterprise-wide quality initiatives.• SOFTWARE
Kingsway Management Services Limited127 Deanburn RoadRoslin, Midlothian, EH25 9REUnited Kingdom Phone: +44 (0)131 445 7159www.kmsltd.com
Kingsway Management Services Limited (KMS Ltd.) offers worldwide e-learning for quality practitioners initially in English. The support for transition to ISO 9001:2015 includes live audit practice.• CERTIFICATION
• CONTINUING EDUCATION
• ISO 13485
• ISO 17020
• ISO 17025
• ISO 9001
• MARINE RENEWABLES TESTING
• MEDICAL DEVICES
• PUBLIC TRAINING
• QMS DESIGN
• QUALITY AUDITS
• SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING
• STANDARDS TRAINING
• TESTING LAB
• UNCERTAINTY OF ESTIMATE
Minitab Inc.Quality Plaza1829 Pine Hall RoadState College, PA 16801-3008 Phone: 800-448-3555 www.minitab.com
Minitab is the leading provider of software for quality improvement. More than 90% of Fortune 100 companies use Minitab Statistical Software, our flagship product.• E-LEARNING
• FMEA
• LEAN
• ON-SITE
• PUBLIC TRAINING
• QUALITY TOOLS AND MULTIMEDIA
• SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING
• SIX SIGMA
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• SPC
61September 2016 • QP
www.minitab.com/insights2016
Join fellow Minitab users and experts for two full days of sessions that will help you master new skills and inspire your work.
Network with your peers and leverage their success!
MINITAB INSIGHTS CONFERENCE 2016Hilton Philadelphia at Penn’s Landing | Philadelphia, PA | September 12 – 13
CASE STUDIES
TIPS AND TRICKS
PRACTICAL ADVICE
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INNOVATIVE USE OF DATA ANALYSIS
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Quality Resource GuideMyQACoach.comPhone: 805-622-3019www.myqacoach.com
• CAREER/STAFFING
• QUALITY TOOLS AND MULTIMEDIA
• OTHER
The National Graduate School of Quality Management186 Jones RoadFalmouth, MA 02540Phone: 800-838-2580, x147www.ngs.edu
The National Graduate School of Quality Management (NGS) offers accelerated, accredited degrees in quality systems management. Highly interactive online formats are designed for adult learners.• CONTINUING
EDUCATION
• LEAN
• QUALITY TRAINING
• SIX SIGMA
PQ Systems210 B East Spring Valley Road Dayton, OH 45458 Phone: 800-777-3020 www.pqsystems.com
PQ Systems solutions help manufacturers optimize process performance, improve product quality, and mitigate supply chain risk, with SQCpack for data analytics and SPC and GAGEpack for measurement system management.• LEAN
• ON-SITE
• PUBLIC TRAINING
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PRI RegistrarPhone: 724-772-4094www.priregistrar.org• QUALITY AUDITS • STANDARDS
REGISTRAR
Predisys Inc.300 Brickstone Square, Suite 201Andover, MA 01810Phone: 978-662-5213www.predisys.com
Predisys is the leading provider of enterprise quality control, manufacturing intelligence, quality data analytics and SPC software that is completely configurable to your business needs.• LEAN
• ON-SITE
• SIX SIGMA
• SOFTWARE
• SPC
62 QP • www.qualityprogress.com
THE NATIONAL GRADUATE SCHOOLOF QUALITY MANAGEMENT
Success you can measure
Ask about our special reduced tuition rates for ASQ members. (800) 838-2580 x505 | [email protected] | www.ngs.edu/asq
NGS is accredited by The New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEAS&C).
Certified to operate by State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV).
NGS is a not-for-profit institution. *Not available in MA. Not available to MA residents.
DEGREES IN QUALITY SYSTEMS MANAGEMENTBachelor of Science Degree Completion* - 10 courses over 12 monthswith Juran Global Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification
Master of Science Degree - 12 courses over 12 months with Juran Global Lean Six Sigma Black Belt Certification
Doctor of Business Administration* - 16 courses over 30 months
Contact [email protected] or (800) 838-2580 ext. 505 to learn more. .
• No entrance or comprehensive exams
• Small, interactive classes
• Accelerated, accredited degrees
• Innovative, project-based learning
• Weekly interaction with faculty and fellow students
• Financial Aid and scholarships available for qualified students
Transform yourself. Become a leader in your industry. NGS offers innovative, flexible degrees designed to support your
professional success and development. One-on-one interaction with faculty and support staff ensure that you won’t get lost in the crowd.
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Quality Resource GuideQI Macros for Excel 2696 S. Colorado Blvd., Suite 555 Denver, CO 80222Phone: 303-756-9144www.qimacros.com
You don’t have to be a statistician to start getting immediate results with QI Macros for Excel! Free 30-day trial: PC or Mac.• FMEA
• LEAN
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SigmaXL 305 King St., Suite 503 Kitchner, ON N2G 1B9 Canada Phone: 888-744-6295 www.sigmaxl.com
SigmaXL + Excel = easy statistical and graphical analysis. SigmaXL and DiscoverSim are cost-effective, powerful, user-friendly and ideal for lean Six Sigma training! Free 30-day trial.• FMEA
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Statpoint Technologies Inc. 560 Broadview Ave, Suite 201Warrenton, VA 20186Phone: 540-428-0084800-232-7828www.statgraphics.com
Statpoint Technologies has been providing statistical analysis and predictive analytics software for performance improvement to Fortune 500 companies and public agencies for nearly 40 years.• BALDRIGE
ASSESSMENT
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63September 2016 • QP
IS YOUR QUALITY CONTROL
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ASQ 1/2 pg Ad_Layout 1 8/8/13 12:03 PM Page 1
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65September 2016 • QP 65September 2016 • QP
Electronic gaging systemMitutoyo has introduced the 519 series of
Mu-Checker probes and displays. These
electronic gaging systems are suitable for
a range of applications from the inspection
room to production-line integration.
High-resolution lever-head probes allow
multipoint measurements of small parts,
flatness and straightness measurements
on an X/Y table, as well as runout measure-
ments of shafts. The cartridge-head type
is built into equipment due to its compact
shape, making it ideal for an automatic
measuring machine.
Probes are offered with a standard or
low-measuring force. The low-force style
enables soft workpieces to be measured
without significant deformation. Optional
styli, extension rods and brackets are avail-
able. Digital and analog display models offer
zero setting with the touch of a button.
• Call: 888-648-8869.
• Visit: www.mitutoyo.com.
Horizontal force testerThe ESM303H from Mark-10 is a configu-
rable horizontal force tester for tension
and compression measurement applica-
tions. It has a rugged design suitable for
laboratory and production environments.
The FollowMe force-based positioning uses
your hand as your guide to push and pull
on the load cell to move the crosshead at a
variable rate of speed.
A wide range of tests can be performed,
including break testing, cycling, limit testing
to a load or distance, loadholding, elonga-
tion testing, tensile testing and compres-
sion testing.
When the ESM303H’s clearance is
insufficient for the application, its modular
mechanical design allows for frame exten-
sions. Individual functions, such as travel
measurement, cycling and loadholding may
be purchased either upfront or enabled in
the field through an activation code.
• Visit: www.mark-10.com.
• Email: [email protected].
Vertical machining centerMethods Machine Tools
has expanded its Feeler
line to include the HV-
1100V, a high perfor-
mance vertical machin-
ing center that features
a rugged design and
many features to provide accuracy and ma-
chining efficiency. The HV-1100V features a
dedicated trunnion, 4+1 axis configuration
and a 13.8” (350 mm) rotary table.
The reinforced cross-ribbed column
structure and no counter-balance weight
design improves torsional torque resis-
tance and reduces low-frequency reso-
nance for optimal stability. This design re-
duces peck-drilling vibration and prevents
oscillation normally caused by a counter-
balance weight.
The HV-1100V also features a 30 tool
swing arm automatic tool changer maga-
zine. A fast chip removal system with chip
conveyor, automatic lubrication system,
dust-proof electrical cabinet and Methods’
safety package are all standard on the
HV-1100V.
• Call: 978-443-5388.
• Visit: www.methodsmachine.com.
VideoscopeThe Iplex NX is Olympus’ industrial vid-
eoscope designed to help locate flaws
that were previously undetectable and
QP • www.qualityprogress.com66
•
•
QPTOOLBOX
September 2016 • QP 67
streamline inspections in difficult-to-reach
areas. With the Iplex NX, operators can
identify and measure flaws from twice the
distance that is possible with conventional
videoscopes.
The image quality makes it easier
to inspect a large area for small, subtle
flaws. The videoscope can capture im-
ages in hard-to-access spaces, such as
the interior of gas turbines, where exter-
nal lighting cannot reach.
The Iplex NX features ghost imaging
which provides inspection record keeping
and defect monitoring by overlaying images
captured during previous inspections with
a current inspection image so users can
quickly view how flaws have changed over
time.
When inspections are complete, the
Iplex NX supports robust archiving and
reporting. The software also can gener-
ate customizable report templates that
contain all the information necessary for
inspection record keeping and archiving.
• Call: 781-419-3562.
• Visit: www.olympus-ims.com.
Surface inspection systemThe Zeiss Abis II surface inspection sys-
tem can identify surface defects directly
at the production step in
which they occur.
The Abis II system
can be used with various
upgrades and in differ-
ent ambient conditions.
The system captures
defects on the compo-
nent quickly and reliably,
keeping laborious
rework to a minimum
in process stages, such
as on the finish band.
The Abis II is ideal for the automotive
industry. The system’s areas of applica-
tion include routine off-line auditing at
regular intervals and the fully automated
in-line inspection of parts at the end of a
press line.
• Call: 763-744-2409.
• Visit: www.zeiss.com.
Rotary encoderThe Leine and Linde 1000 series rotary
encoder with speed monitoring capabili-
ties is used in applications where secure
speed feedback is critical to protect
motors, machinery or operators from risk
of failure. This is useful on heavy-moving
machinery such as hoists, lifts, cranes
and mining equip-
ment.
Leine and
Linde’s overspeed
electronics on
the 1000 series
consist of a speed-detection system
that senses rotational speed and direc-
tion. These electronics control three
different relay switches which can be
programmed for identification of critical
speeds or errors in direction. A fourth
relay also can be set to detect overspeed
conditions or any functional error in the
unit itself.
As critical speeds can vary for differ-
ent applications, the ability to program
application specific set-points offers
flexibility. With this capability, a standard
1000 series encoder with overspeed
electronics can be supplied and pro-
grammed for each installation.
Speed limits can be set for direction,
over and under speed from zero to 6,000
RPM. PC-based software is provided to
configure the encoder using a standard
USB port.
• Call: 805-562-1160.
• Visit: www.leinelinde.com.
GOT A QUALITY PRODUCT?Send your product description and photo to [email protected].
•
•
QP • www.qualityprogress.com
The Decentralized Energy Revolution: Business Strategies for a New ParadigmChristoph Burger and Jens Weinmann,
Palgrave-MacMillan, 2013, 221 pp., $110
(book).
This book is an
excellent review
of the status of
energy (electric-
ity) distribution
at the time of
publication. The
authors go directly
to the sources of
many industries’
improvement in
technologies and quote the organizations
candidly from in-depth interviews. While
this may sound tedious, it is not.
Disruptive innovation is “step change”
continual improvement. It often threat-
ens established producers’ and status
quo dominance. Such is the case with
electricity and its distribution. Two major
changes to energy have occurred in the
recent past: a liberalization of production
with increased competition (removal of
monopoly) and large scale subsidies of
renewable energies.
Economies of scale have peaked;
getting energy to emerging areas is the
current growth and profit thrust. En-
ergy decentralization is the future. When
handled properly, it increases supply
security and decreases costs. The authors
discuss current and future technology, and
the economics of decentralization.
The table of contents is detailed
enough to act as an index, while the index
may serve as a summary table for where
the topics are mentioned. There also is a
detailed reference section for more study
and a set of profiles provided for the ex-
perts cited within.
The value proposition from decentral-
ized energy is vastly different than the cur-
rent energy-system configuration. Electric-
ity is somewhat perishable. It must be used
when made or stored. I learned a lot about
the changing business and profit dynamics.
Most of which would be a valuable lesson
to many older, more established industries.
Marc A. Feldman
Houston
The ASQ CQE Study GuideConnie M. Borror and Sarah E. Burke, ASQ
Quality Press, 2015, 254 pp., $30 member,
$50 list (book).
This book serves
as a valuable study
guide for those
wishing to take
the ASQ certified
quality engineer
(CQE) certification
exam. It also is a
source of informa-
tion pertaining to
quality concepts,
engineering, management and applicable
quantitative tools. The chapters in the book
are aligned with the ASQ body of knowl-
edge for the exam. The subject matter is
covered in a question-and-answer format,
which teaches the required foundation and
simultaneously trains readers to answer the
types of questions that appear on the exam.
This book contain two main sections.
The first section is organized into seven
chapters, with each chapter pertaining to a
main unit of the ASQ CQE body of knowl-
edge. Each chapter contains a large number
of practice questions that stimulate the
thinking of the reader. The question's level
of difficulty mirrors that of the questions in
the exam.
For every question, detailed answers are
provided with a brief explanation of why
the question should be answered as shown.
Also provided for each question is the
section of the ASQ CQE body of knowledge
that corresponds to the question, which fa-
cilitates the process of going back to review
certain sections.
The second section of the book provides
205 additional practice questions from each
of the seven parts of the ASQ CQE body
of knowledge in a randomized order. This
allows readers to test their knowledge by
answering questions from all sections of the
ASQ CQE body of knowledge, thus mirroring
the actual exam environment.
While the primary audience for this book
may be those wishing to take the ASQ CQE
certification exam, the secondary audience
may be those taking other ASQ certification
exams whose body of knowledge has some
overlap with that of the ASQ CQE exam. This
book is valuable preparation material for
those taking the ASQ CQE certification exam.
Anuradha Rangarajan
Harvard, IL
The Probability HandbookMary McShane-Vaughn, ASQ Quality Press,
2016, 248 pp., $60 member, $99 list (book).
This book provides
a simple overview
of probability and
its applications.
It is written in an
easy-to-under-
stand format with
many illustrative
examples that
explain the con-
cepts. It provides
paper-and-pencil solutions as well as solu-
tion strategies using Microsoft Excel where
appropriate. Mathematical symbols are
explained clearly. The mathematical rigor
is kept on an algebraic level (calculus is
avoided). The author states that it has been
her goal to present the concepts as a tutor
would.
This book contains five chapters. The
QPREVIEWS
68
first chapter highlights the origin of prob-
ability and its relative importance. Chapter
two covers topics such as factorials,
permutations and combinations, and the
use of Microsoft Excel functions to perform
counting.
The third chapter covers topics such as
mutual exclusivity, sampling with and with-
out replacement, conditional probability,
calculating odds, law of total probability,
and using the Bayes theorem. This chapter
also covers the concepts of union and in-
tersection, independence, graphical display
of data, Simpson’s paradox and classical
versus empirical probability. Illustrative
problems also are discussed.
Chapter four covers discrete probability
distributions and related concepts such
as the probability mass function, distribu-
tion shape, expected value and variance
are discussed. Related Microsoft Excel
functions are provided. At the end of the
chapter, a summary of all the discrete
probability distributions is provided which
is useful because it provides an overview
of all discrete probability distributions in
one table.
Chapter five covers continuous probabil-
ity distributions which includes the Weibull
distribution, Student’s T distribution, F
distribution, and the Erlang distribution.
Related concepts such as the probability
density function, distributional parameters
and shape are discussed, and related Mi-
crosoft Excel functions are provided.
There is a listing of all the formulas
which will be useful to students because
it helps to locate any formula by its name
or application. The appendixes include a
“distribution road map” as well as relevant
data tables pertaining to the probability
distributions. There is a detailed index and a
bibliography.
This book should serve as an extremely
valuable study guide for students, and a
valuable reference for practicing qual-
ity engineer or statistician. Specifically, it
includes topics that are part of the body of
knowledge for more than one ASQ certifica-
tion exam.
Rangarajan Parthasarathy
Harvard, IL
Mastering Leadership: An Integrated Framework for Breakthrough Performance and Extraordinary Business ResultsRobert J. Anderson and William A. Adams,
Wiley, 2015, 384 pp., $30 (book).
This book has
been written in a
well-organized and
professional manner
that enables reading
and understanding
for average to highly-
skilled professionals
within the fields of
quality and leader-
ship. It provides an
accurate picture of the pros and cons on
leadership, as well as the different styles of
management.
Although well-written, the book does not
have many illustrations to help the reader
understand the subject. There is not a clear
section with case studies and examples in
which the reader can go and test the sub-
ject learned. However, there are examples
embedded in the writing that can be refer-
enced. The reader will need to mark these
examples for easy access at a later time.
The author has hands-on knowledge
of the tools and techniques offered in this
book. This helps the reader understand
theory applicability to real-life scenarios.
The book is structured from a perspective of
comparing different leadership styles, rather
than proposing what would be the best one.
There are adequate citations for further
study at the end of the book.
The book is well-written and I enjoyed
reading it. I would suggest more visuals and
some color. Leadership is an abstract topic
that needs all senses focused on reading. By
using frequent colored visuals, the reader's
attention remains focused with less chance
of distraction.
Roberto Guzman
Morrisville, NC
69 September 2016 • QP
Advertisers IndexADVERTISER PAGE PHONE WEB AIAG 56 248-358-3003 www.aiag.org BSI Americas 57 703-674-1805 www.bsiamerica.com CANEA ONE 58 703-727-2416 www.caneaone.com CyberMetrics Corp. OBC 800-777-7020 www.cybermetrics.comDQS Inc. 59 800-285-4476 www.dqsus.com EtQ Inc. IFC 516-293-0949 www.etq.com IQS Inc. 60 440-788-2725 www.iqs.com Kingsway Management Services Limited 61 +44 (0) 196 867 3968 www.kmsltd.com Minitab Inc. 62 800-448-3555 www.minitab.comThe National Graduate School of Quality Management 63 800-838-2580 www.ngs.edu/asq PQ Systems Inc. 64 937-813-4700 www.pqsystems.com Predisys 64 978-662-5213 www.predisys.comQI Macros for Excel 65 303-756-9144 www.qimacros.comQuality Council of Indiana 10, 11 800-660-4215 www.qualitycouncil.com SigmaXL 55 888-744-6295 www.sigmaxl.com Statpoint Technologies Inc. 65 800-232-7828 www.statgraphics.com
QP • www.qualityprogress.com70
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ONE GOOD IDEA BY BRUCE BADER
The Best of Both WorldsBalance speed and competency in training with a FAST score
LITTLE RAPIDS CORP., a manufacturer
of paper-based products in Green Bay,
WI, had two challenges with training:
student competency and the speed at
which the training was conducted. Little
Rapids Corp. measured these two factors
separately.
Competency was measured with a
pass or fail test. Speed of training was
measured as the time between the start of
training and when a supervisor indicated
the training had been completed. The
desires to maximize competency and
minimize training time often appeared to
be conflicting goals.
During my 17-year tenure as the
continuous improvement manager, Little
Rapids Corp. developed what we call
focused, analyzed success in training
(FAST) to optimize training. FAST uses
statistical tools in a unique combination
of competency measurement and training
speed to develop a meaningful measure of
successfully optimized training.
Training is divided into small incre-
ments, and three teaching methods are
used: lectures, visual aids and hands-on
experience. When a student indicates that
he or she feels the topic has been mas-
tered, the next increment begins. After all
increments are mastered, the training time
is considered complete.
Competency is measured after a prede-
termined period of time has lapsed since
a student completed training. For Little
Rapids Corp. the predetermined time is
six months. The test consists of five or six
questions about safety, quality systems and
key performance issues with written and
physical demonstration segments.
Evaluating the dataThe test is scored and recorded as a
percentage of correct answers, and the
score is divided by time spent in training
to arrive at a value called the FAST score.
Using confidence intervals around a FAST
value, a trainer can determine whether a
student is progressing at an acceptable
pace.
For example, an employee spent 3.1
months learning to operate a sheeter
machine and scored 80% on the compe-
tency test. Eighty divided by 3.1 equals
a 5.65 FAST score, which exceeded our
minimum score and indicated a success-
ful training process for competency and
speed.
We achieved the following after imple-
menting FAST scores:
We had presumed that the time it took
to learn how to operate all machines was
the same. The FAST scores, however,
showed that some machines are easier to
learn than others (see Figure 1). Train-
ers now allot a standard training time
depending on machine group instead of a
general training time for all machines. We
are now able to more accurately predict
when an employee will be ready to oper-
ate a machine at maximum output, which
increases production output.
We reworked training materials for a
machine group in which all students had
low FAST scores, thus improving long-
term competency and reducing quality
defects.
We now select employees to be trained
on a particular machine when their previ-
ous FAST score indicates an affinity with
that machine group. This has eliminated
the waste in training employees who are
unlikely to pass a certain machine’s com-
petency test. QP
September 2016 • QP 71
BRUCE BADER is owner and lead consultant at BBader and Associates in Green Bay, WI. He has an MBA from Northern Kentucky University in Highland Heights. He received his Six Sigma Black Belt certification from the Milwaukee School of Engineering and is an ASQ-certified manager
of quality/organizational excellence. A senior member of ASQ, Bader is the education chair of ASQ Section 1206 in Appleton, WI.
FAST scores in 2014 / FIGURE 1
FAST = focused, analyzed success in trainingA higher score is desired
Machine
FAS
T sc
ore
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Towel
5
Lamina
tor
Gown 2
Neck s
trip
Towel
10
Towel
1
Shee
ter
Utility
Shee
ter
Utility
Core
QP • www.qualityprogress.com72
Solving the ProblemBrush up on your problem-solving skills with these methods
FOR YEARS, I sought to solve prob-
lems only to find out that the issue I was
addressing was not the primary issue.
Because of this, I felt the need to share
some key problem-solving skills. Here
they are:
Stay out of the box—This is,
perhaps, the most important problem
solving skill of them all. People will come
to me and say there is a problem being
caused by this or that and ask me to
solve it. This type of approach, which I
call “jumping in the box,” shuts down the
brain so you’re only evaluating “this” or
“that” when the root cause of the prob-
lem, and therefore the solution, could be
something entirely different.
Say I invite your over for a BBQ. When
the meat is ready, I build a box and ask,
“Would you like a hamburger or a hot
dog?” Are those the only two choices?
Well, those were the choices I suggested
to you, but if you are not that hungry, you
may only want half of a hamburger. If
you are extra hungry, you may want both
a hamburger and a hot dog. Of course,
you could always opt out in favor of a
salad and some fruit. There are several
choices as long as you stay out of the box
and think about choices other than this
or that.
Go to the data, not the informa-
tion—Information is derived from data,
but as most of us learned in school,
secondary sources are not as good as
primary sources. Information is a synop-
sis of data that has often been misin-
terpreted. Never trust the information,
always find the data and do an analysis
to discover the information yourself.
Don’t work alone—Find a person
with whom you can brainstorm and
collaborate. Even if that person is on the
other side of the world and you have to
communicate via telephone conversa-
tions, email or Skype, it is far better than
working alone. When working on a qual-
ity issue, it is best to find another quality
professional who will understand your
jargon and methods.
Ask a subject matter expert
(SME)—You need an SME to help you
understand the process and how it is
supposed to work. That person also can
direct you to other
organizations that
may have faced and
solved a similar
problem.
Go back to the
beginning and ask
what changed—
This is a basic
diagnostic tool that
seldom gets used.
“What changed?”
should come off
your lips almost im-
mediately.
Step away—If you can, take a break
from the problem and let your subcon-
scious go to work. It is amazing what so-
lutions will pop into your mind when you
are not even thinking about the problem.
Ask the right questions—A ques-
tion asked in the right way points to its
own answer. This is part of root cause
analysis (RCA). But if you are not do-
ing RCA for your current problem, this
thinking skill might be missed. Always be
mindful that a question asked correctly
will give you the best answer.
Just recently, for example, my wife
asked when an ASQ exam I was proctor-
ing would be over, so I told her that it is
over at 1 p.m. After talking to the examin-
ees, going to FedEx and the post office, I
got home around 2 p.m. to an upset wife
and cold soup. She thought I would be
home by 1:15 p.m. She actually wanted to
know when I would be home, but didn’t
ask me that question. To be fair to her, I
also failed to ask why she asked me the
question in the first place. Had I known, I
would have told her 2 p.m.
I enjoy problem solving, as most of us
in the quality profession do. By remem-
bering these skills, I can use quality
tools such as RCA, logic modeling and
the theory of innovative problem solving
to work on real problems, instead of
wasting time attempting to fix the wrong
thing. QP
BACK TO BASICS BY TOM SHEFFREY
TOM SHEFFREY has a master’s degree in science project manage-ment and an MBA from the Univer-sity of Alaska in Anchorage. Sheffrey is a senior member of ASQ, an ASQ-certified quality manager and auditor, and a Project Management Institute-certified project manager
and scheduling professional.
ASQ certification is a cornerstone of your career growth, formally recognizing your expertise in a specific body of knowledge. You immediately establish yourself as a recognized expert in your field, resulting in promotions, higher salaries, greater demand for your services, and an advantage over your competition. Invest in your career and your future with an ASQ certification. Apply for the upcoming exams: CQA, CQE, CQIA, CSQE, CSSGB, CQPA, CCT, CPGP.
Upcoming Application Deadline: November 4, 2016Testing window: December 1 – 17, 2016
Get Your ASQ Certification
For more information or to apply for an exam, visit asq.org/cert.
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