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.

Do you ever feel that even though you have a lot of procedures your QMS system seems unfulfilling and unable to add value to your company? Do you feel the lack of adherence to your QMS system is perhaps a lack of understanding of your QMS? If you answer is yes to these questions then perhaps the cause of your problems can be a basic case of lack of good process mapping.

A slightly revised version of this article was published by ASQ's Quality Progress magazine in the November 2010 issue.

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.

I was recently at a meeting with some colleagues and the subject of forged certificates was brought up. We discussed the fact that some organizations do have the audacity of not just creating a fake certificate, but sometimes even wanting to change registrars. Seems odd? Later on, I was asked by a reader for some tips on how to find out if a registration or certificate is valid or not. The reader noticed while auditing their potential supplier that the processes in this company did not look very much in control the way an ISO certified company would.

So here I'm with some concise steps and links that can hopefully help anybody confirm if a certain organization is indeed ISO certified.

This article was published by Quality Digest on 1/19/2010.

In case you are not sure if the equipment you are currently using for your monitoring and measuring activities is the most adequate equipment or if you are wondering why such as expensive tool is used to inspect a certain part, then it may be worth for you to understand tolerances, accuracy and what the impact of the equipment on meeting your specification requirements is.

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.

If you have ever found equipment that is out of calibration, then you know it is not something to take lightly. Whether you manufacture children’s toys or automobile tires, you know that the implications and ramifications of the decisions you make, can be devastating for your company. Although the requirements from the ISO 9001 standard in regards to equipment found out of calibration are simple and succinct, make no mistake that this is not something to take for granted. If you ensure that the processes for handling non-conforming equipment is in place and if you take into considerations the steps provided below, you will be ready to handle and perhaps be able to avoid out-of calibration conditions.

This article was published by Quality Digest on 10/05/2009.

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

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.

This article was published by Quality Digest on 8/05/2009.

This post is Part 2, continuation from the original post Evaluation and Reevaluation of Suppliers Part 1.  In this post, we look at the criteria for selection and reevaluation of suppliers as well as the analysis of data on suppliers.

This article was published by Quality Digest on 9/10/2009.

This article was published by Quality Digest on 9/10/2009.