When I started my career nearly 20 years ago, the world was a little different. People were still smoking in the workplace, Dilbert was in everybody’s desk and the quality program of the month was the joke du jour. Many things have changed since then for the goodness of the world and the quality of products and services, but the fact is, it wasn’t easy. So if you are just starting your quality career or if you have been there, you may want to know that reaching for continual improvement is really not so easy and a caveman could not do it!

I’m sure you’ve heard of laptops being stolen, but have you heard of laptops being swapped? Lost or stolen laptops and the data they carry are just one of the disasters that may ail you or your organization one day. In reality, there are many more security incidents that can affect the security of your organization or employees, putting sensitive information at risk. 

Whether your organization is adopting the ISO 27001 Information Security Management System standard or not, whether your organization is small or large, or whether you deal with top secret information or not, nowadays everyone needs to be aware of information security. Information has become such an intricate part of every individual and most certainly every organization, that ignoring this area is not an option. In this article, I present to you 9 basic controls I believe are essential in every organization in order to preserve the security of their information.

When a quality management system is implemented, results are evident immediately: reduction in warranty cost, reduction in rework, reduction in scrap, higher profit margins, etc. Would you agree that ISO and other quality initiatives such as Lean, Six Sigma, 5S can significantly improve any company’s processes -if requirements are correctly implemented? Why, if you know that a good quality management system improves your processes, are you then reluctant to include all company processes in this system? Why would most companies barely include sales on any quality initiatives? If and only if you apply the same ISO and quality concepts to the entire Sales process, inside and outside sales, you stand to see significant improvements.

Ok, so we’ve been certified to the ISO 9001 standard for the longest. Yes our processes are better, we have gotten new customers over the years because of the certification, and yes we track our objectives and customer satisfaction. But is there anything else left to be extracted out of our program and its recurrent costs? Our sales don’t seem to be significantly affected by our certification anymore, and our improvements seem to be stagnated. So what else can ISO and other quality programs do for us? Boy oh boy, if you could only let top management cover themselves in Continual Improvement, would you only know the true benefits that ISO and other quality programs can bring.

Not complex at all. Basically the KISS principle applies to document numbering as well as document headers and footers. Think about it. When you are reading a document, whether it is a procedure or a record, you are most interested on the contents of the document and the quality of it, rather than how long the document number is or whether the President of the company signed and reviewed the document. Is that allowed by ISO? Well, let’s look at the actual requirements of the standard and figure out what we need to do to add value and reduce pain.

When you think about equipment that is used for measuring and test activities, you think about important equipment that is used to pass/fail product but may not necessarily find correlation with suppliers. However this very equipment – whether is calibrated in-house or off-site - does involve a supply chain one way or the other and therefore adherence to suppliers and supply-chain requirements is imperative.

This article was published by Quality Digest on 10/19/2009.