Policies and procedures define your processes, are a part of deploying your strategy, and identify what is important to the business.  ISO standards require certain procedures and forms as critical elements to improvement and a working management system.  Yet, how often have you contemplated your business strategy in terms of policies and procedures?

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Every enterprise has a strategy for growing sales.  But does your company include a strategic look at the Cost of Quality (COQ)?  If your strategy does not take into account your cost of quality then your strategy is only half-baked and you are likely to perform poorly.

What is Cost of Quality?

The cost of quality is typically explained as consisting of four elements: prevention, appraisal, internal failure and external failure costs.  But I have a simpler explanation.  Your business has three things to worry about:

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If you need to make a strong business case for the value of quality to management then you need Cost of Quality.  Crosby described the cost of quality as the cost of nonconformance.  Juran, another quality guru explained it as the cost of “poor” quality or the costs incurred as a result of poor quality.

If you are trying to explain the importance of quality to management then you need to explain it to management using the language of management — costs.  Cost of poor quality (COPQ) consists of four basic elements: prevention, appraisal, internal failures and external failures.

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How do you apply lean to product development?  I like to think that you can apply lean to anything and product development is no exception.  Yet, product development is different than manufacturing, so the application of lean is different.  Manufacturing is about reducing variability to zero to create exact replicas.  Product development is about increasing variability enough to overcome your barriers to greatness – i.e. thinking outside the box.  Design is the opposite of manufacturing in the application of lean.

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A lot of companies are implementing lean systems to develop a lean competitive advantage, but then question if what they are doing is really lean.  Some people think applying lean is like applying six sigma.  But, Lean is not like six sigma. So how do you know when you have gotten lean?  In other words, what does lean look like?  Here are ten simple ways to tell how lean you really are.

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What is a Quality Management System (QMS)?  It is a management system pure and simple.  It is not quality’s management system; it is a management system that, if done right, produces quality products.  Quality Management Systems are built for ISO registration, to satisfy customer requirements, or to produce better products.  Building a robust QMS is not hard if you follow these 10 easy steps.

1. Define and Map your processes.  The process of creating your process maps will force you to define your processes and the sequence and interaction of those processes.  Process maps are important for understanding who is responsible for what.  They define your core business process and communicate the flow of your business.  When mapping your processes:

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Lean thinking has been popularized by companies like Toyota, Apple, Dell, and many others.  But will practicing lean thinking produce a competitive advantage?

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There are two types of actions in an ISO 9001 Quality Management System: Corrective action and preventive action.  Many people struggle with just what a preventive action looks like and how it differs from a corrective action.  What’s funny about this discussion is how everyone tries to explain the difference as merely an interpretation of the words “occurrence” and “potential”.

For example, the ISO 9000:2005 definition states:

Corrective Action (Clause 3.6.5):
action to eliminate the cause of a detected nonconformity and its recurrence.

Preventive Action (Clause 3.6.4):
action to eliminate the cause of a potential nonconformity and its occurrence.

But does this really clear it up for anyone?

What’s the Difference between Corrective Action and Preventive Action?

Corrective action is performed on detected nonconformities.  In other words, there are real defects that exist right now

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Some people think that you can only implement lean in manufacturing.  What about in an office area like Human Resources (HR)? Can you implement lean in HR?

Fist you have to ask yourself what does HR do?  HR’s function is to support hiring and termination, training and development, benefit programs, HR compliance-safety and their own improvement projects.  There are five topics to discuss.

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As the Quality Manager you are responsible for Quality Management System (QMS) compliance.  In other words, you must manage all company-wide, quality policies, procedures, processes, programs, and practices, to assure the company of continuous conformance with appropriate standards and regulations.  In a smaller company you may also be the document control manager, quality auditor, and process improvement specialist.

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