Can Quality become appealing to everyone?

As a Quality Management firm, we live and breathe Quality. But let’s be honest, most people dislike and/or do not understand it. If a business has a Quality department, many will view it as the necessary evil to make big customers happy.  Smaller organizations, that cannot afford a quality group, often think of quality as  “added work, hindrance and complexity to the business”.

Would you believe us if we told you that there is value to having a Quality Management System? Would you believe us that there is no need for you to think of it as a hindrance to your job or business?

Quality after all is a term that has numerous definitions.  Quality, according to Juran, means that “a product meets customer needs leading to customer satisfaction, and quality also means all of the activities in which a business engages in, to ensure that the product meets customer needs”.  However, meeting requirements has often gotten more complex over time.  Industries and businesses have developed over time “sets of rules” that are supposed to enable companies help meet requirements.  These “rules” are often terms that are not well understood, and people have imposed their interpretations and unknowingly ended up implementing unneeded activities to their businesses.

In our attempt to show that Quality is indeed simple, during the next few weeks we will take time to go over different terms that are used in the Quality field.  In doing so we hope to make quality more appealing to all.  Here are some terms that we will explain:

Quality Management System

Document Control

Calibration

Process-based approach

Nonconformance

Corrective Action

Risk Based thinking

PDCA cycle

Please let us know if there is a term you’d like us to add to this list.  We will be more than happy to explain it, the Factor Quality way, always keeping it simple but effective.