Improvement

What’s This ‘Cost Of Quality’ Thing?

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 […]

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Why Do A Root Cause Analysis – What’s In It For Me?

Ever since the first non-conformance was written, we’ve been looking for ways to find the cause, do a corrective action and bid farewell to the profit sucking problem. It’s been a problem closing out non-conformances since I’ve been associated with ISO – 1992. All the studies of ‘Top non-conformances’ from Registrars showed closeouts as the

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ISO 31000 – Your Blueprint for Risk Management!

Any worthwhile Standard starts with a set of ‘Principles’. ISO 31000 is no exception. Let’s see if we can tie these Risk Principles into a typical ISO Management System. Value Creation and Protection is at the core of this section of ISO 31000 and gives it relevance to any business. Without ‘structured risk management’ an

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What’s YOUR Problem?!?

When making your non-conformance (problem) statement, be sure to choose words that will get the response that you’re looking for. Stating a non-conformance as, “The operator did not follow the procedure” will set the root cause analysis back 30 years. Statements that identify a person as the problem will only end in disaster. Statements like

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Managing Risk vs Risk Management – What’s The Difference?

You may have heard these terms used interchangeably – I know I have. I thought I’d take a look into ISO 31000 to see if any light could be shed on this monumental question! It turns out that the answer is in there…here’s the scoop: Managing Risk… Top management is accountable for managing risk. It

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The Process Approach – What’s In It For Me?

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

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Are Our Measurements Helping Us Understand Customers?

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

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How Can We Create a ‘Risk Based’ Culture?

ISO Standards, for the most part have moved to ‘Risk-based thinking’ as one of their themes. It makes complete sense to include this as part of the fabric of our organizations in order to reduce the chaos of unexpected events, as least the ones we can control. ISO 31000:2018 has some ideas that will help

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Virtual Auditing – Where Do We Go From Here?

ISO 19011:2018 has more guidance for remote auditing than the previous versions. There are a number of advantages to the client when a remote audit takes place: Lower expenses charged to the client – no travel time, mileage, accommodation costs Less damage to the environment Auditors can spend more time with their families There are

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ISO 10004 – Customer Satisfaction!

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 ->

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