Now that you’re getting ready for Virtual Audits, it’s time to look into the ‘Cost of Quality’ concept. All the ideas apply to Environmental, Health and Safety and all other management systems. How are we making sure our systems are giving us value? What kind of resource allocation should we make to this activity? To …
John Seddon has been promoting Systems Thinking for years – I’ve been following him for nearly 30 years now and I’ve used the Vanguard Method approach to management system design since the early 2000s. A number of Federal Departments in Ottawa still have them in place. This post is based on the last part of …
John Seddon (vanguard-method.net Tactics for Getting Started) has been helping companies improve processes for decades. He has improved organizations with ‘Systems Thinking’ based on Deming’s work and the Toyota Production System that Taiichi Ohno created in post WWII Japan. He is laser-beam focused on the customer and it shows. In this instalment, we’re going to …
Are Our Measurements Helping Us Understand Customers? Read More »
ISO 10004 has some fine ideas to get your customer satisfaction activities organized. As we’re bombarded more and more with surveys, suffering from survey fatigue to the point where we’re saying ‘Why bother?’ we still need to get some information to continue our improvement journey. The conceptual framework looks like this: It’s the Input -> …
In Clause 4 of ISO Standards using the High Level Structure (HLS) you’ll see that we’re required to identify ‘internal issues’, ‘external issues’ and ‘interested parties and their requirements’. What possible value can this bring us? First of all, change the word ‘issues’ to ‘conditions’ or ‘circumstances’ so that the negative association with the word …
The last two posts got us on the road to ‘understanding customers better’. By the time we’ve gathered information on our customers’ perceptions of how well we met their expectations, we could be lost in the weeds. ISO 10004 has some more guidelines on what to do next in Clauses 7.4 and 7.5… 1. Analyze …
Last Post until January 8th, 2020!! ISO 10004 has some ideas for us on how to go about getting a handle on this elusive number. First, there’s a ‘concept’ diagram – a great place to start: By getting a handle on customers’ expectations, you’ll be able to tell more about how well you’ve satisfied them. …
The challenge of determining Customer Satisfaction continues. With all the available technology, we haven’t made much headway, really. Requirements = Needs + Expectations Needs are outlined in the ‘contract’ with your clients, and determined in Clause 8.2. But what about ‘expectations’? These are hard to nail down, but at the very least, make sure you’re …
Without doubt, our customers need to be the focus of our efforts. You’ll find that the word ‘customer’ appears 88 times in ISO 9001:2015. Some of the places it appears are in the ‘General’ section, Quality Management Principles, the Process Approach, Scope, and these clauses: 4.2 Needs and Expectations of Interested Parties; 4.3 Scope; 5.1.2 …
For years we’ve had to demonstrate that we’ve improved the effectiveness of our management systems. It’s a great money-maker for the Private Sector and improving a management system helps the Public Sector work within their budgets. Easy words to say; hard to implement without some effort. Here’s a way to structure your strategy to systematically …
