So you’ve heard about measuring training effectiveness but are unsure about how to do this. You have been filling training attendance sheets for as long as you can recall and so far they have served the purpose. So what is this new question all of the sudden a topic of discussion and what exactly is required to demonstrate training effectiveness?

This article was published by Quality Digest on 06/29/2011.

There is not a bigger vicious cycle in this world than that of problems which constantly re-occur because there is no time to stop and solve them correctly. Although we all would like for this cycle to stop, Managers can't afford letting employees waste time with too much researching and employees don't have the time because they are constantly fighting fires. As long as this cycle continues, problems will reoccur and everyone will have to spend more time in what should not have occurred on the first place. How do we get out of this vicious cycle? Through training, dedication and appropriate problem solving techniques.

This article was published by Quality Digest on 03/09/2011.

If you know the story of BP's spill response plan, chances are, you know it talked about saving walruses, sea lions and more walruses. While that is all fine in paper, now that the spill disaster has happened, the plan proved not only to be flawed but false. To begin with, the plan was big on saving walruses and sea lions -which as one of the congressman pointed out, have not lived in the Gulf area for nearly 300 years. To compound matters worse, the spill response plans from Exxon, Shell and Texaco read almost exactly the same as if they had all been written, bought or copied from the same source. This proves a point that I have long made, and that is, procedures have to match the company processes, and each organization has their own set of processes which is different than that of their neighbor.

Are you a service provider selling project management services, engineering or IT services? Have you been asked more than once whether you are ISO 9001 certified and wonder what is all that about? Before you tell your prospective client they have an error on their forms, see why more and more organizations are demanding their suppliers –materials and service – to become ISO 9001 certified.

If your company continuously ships goods across the border and in and out from overseas, more than likely you are looking to become a C-TPAT partner in order to speed up the customs process. Learn how a company achieved C-TPAT status and ISO 9001 certification by combining C-TPAT requirements with the ISO 9001 standard requirements.

Are you confused as to whether your organization needs to implement goals, objectives or KPIs? Do you know the difference between objectives and targets? Let’s see what each one brings, what you really need and how many of those you need to implement in your organization.

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!

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.

One difficult task of many companies is the ability to instill in its employees the mindset of error or problem prevention in order to prevent problems or mistakes from happening and to improve the processes in place. This consequently translates into a low to none ratio of preventive actions against corrective actions issued which may raise an alarm flag that your preventive action is weak. So how can a company boost the number of preventive actions and increase awareness in problem prevention and continual improvement?

This article was published by Quality Digest on 8/24/2009.

This article was published on the October 2009 edition of the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG)'s Standard and Tools Newsletter.

There are some misconceptions about what ISO audit findings are.  In this article, I attempt to explain clearly what audit findings are, what types of findings may be generated in an audit and the guidelines that is widely use to categorize audit findings.

I still remember it, it was 1997 and the company had just hang a new projector from the ceiling. As with every new tool, I jumped on the bandwagon and switched from slides to using the PC and projector to show my presentation. Unfortunately, Murphy was in the meeting too and my presentation along with other managers like me, did not work. I will never forget Mr. G, who rests in peace, when he said, “Ha, ha, ha. What is this technology good for? Technology is not always good. Look at it, look at how much time you are spending...it doesn't work.” Those are the last words I remember from him—laughing about us trying to use computer projectors.