The ASQ World Conference in Fort Worth, Texas, brought people from around the world together to talk about quality and change. The sessions discussed Quality 4.0, digital disruption, and continuous improvement.

While there are many important quality management principles, this time we will look at continuous improvement. Perhaps the idea most commonly associated with quality, it means never being satisfied with the status quo.

Have you given any thought about the difference between someone focused on being a perfectionist or a high performer? The difference is quite remarkable. Let's talk about the drive to be perfect and what it can cost you.

Lean and agile are well recognized in the manufacturing sector and in the quality community. Like many quality methodologies, lean and agile work in tandem and separately, depending on an organization’s needs. Where do these methodologies meet and diverge, what are their driving principles, and how you can add them to your toolbox (or convince others to do so)?

For anyone who’s worked in product or service industries, it’s a safe bet that you’ve encountered situations in which problems, once thought to be resolved, resurfaced later.

Data isn’t everything. But it’s perhaps the main thing standing between you and a successful project. Continuous improvement takes effort, but more than anything, it takes solid information and analysis. In other words, wouldn’t it be more helpful to use statistical process control to find out where your process is going wrong, rather than just a hunch?

Over a career that spans 40 years, Steve Gruler has struggled with the fact that quality seems to be a soft term. “Companies often say, ‘We’ve got great quality. We’ve got the best quality,’ and they’re looking at customer complaints and certification systems as their primary metrics,” he attests. 

Demonstrated by Dr. Joseph M. Juran’s Spiral of Progress, implementing quality is an evolutionary process. This point is so important that countless books and articles have been written on this subject.

It’s a rare company that doesn’t want to implement a better quality system, resulting in performance excellence for their company, employees, customers and stockholders. However, the pursuit of quality is easier said than done.