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I’d like to take an overview of what quality is… and why it’s strategically important to your business. What is Quality? Quality means meeting requirements. It isn’t about providing more features, or complexity, or performance that increases cost, takes longer to provide or makes it more difficult to use and may not be required. A [...]         Many moons ago I was blogging about Corrective Actions and said that, whilst they were invaluable, taking Preventive Actions was even better, as it should stop the problems occurring in the first place, but is considerably more difficult! I thought I should elaborate… It is obviously more difficult to say whether it will rain tomorrow [...] It seemed like a good idea to contribute to the 2010 Windsurfing 4 Cancer Research event, having lost both an uncle and a friend to the disease recently and with a member of the family currently undergoing treatment. And yes it will be cold and knackering but it wouldn’t mean as much if it was [...] I’ve just returned from a very interesting visit to a Contract Electronics Manufacturer in Shenzhen, China. Many of the things I have blogged about recently were clearly demonstrated including rigorous application of the 5S methodology along with good SPC and TQM – it was a good quality manufacturer and we were made very welcome. We [...] The Hawthorne Effect was first described by psychology researcher Henry Landsberger in the fifties when he analysed work done decades earlier at Western Electric’s Hawthorn Works near Chicago. Western Electric ran a study to see if its workers would become more productive if the light levels were raised. This did indeed happen, there was a [...] 5S stands for Seiri, Seiton, Seiso, Seiketsu, and Shitsuke. And, by the way, despite being called 5S many people say there’s a 6th – Safety. Well, I’m glad to have cleared that up! Perhaps I had better explain… You have probably deduced that 5S is another Japanese-inspired approach to quality improvement; in this case it’s [...] To the uninitiated, product regulatory and approvals requirements seem baffling and over-complicated beyond belief; ‘bureaucracy gone mad’. CE marking is a prime example. Most products that are to be placed on the market in Europe need to have the familiar CE mark applied to them: Now, I’m not ambitious or foolish enough to provide a [...] The quality guru W. Edwards Deming once said “you can not inspect quality into the product; it is already there.” There is a great deal of emphasis within the quality management profession on Quality Assurance (preventive techniques) rather than Quality Control (corrective techniques). Inspection, in most cases, is seen as Quality Control; in other words [...] I’m not going to join the ‘let’s knock Toyota’ brigade, don’t worry. Enough people are filling that role already. In fact, I drive a Toyota (an older model) and I’ve been very happy with it, and one of my clients has got one too and is equally happy. My point is how easy it is [...] There is an assumption, held dear by many people, that apparently random events really are random. If you’re manufacturing 800 widgets a day, and 1 in 100 is faulty when you test it, then every hour you get a test failure and the production line klaxons go off like in Stephen Fry’s ‘QI’ programme. It [...] |
Welcome to my blog, which I hope you'll find to be an interesting mixture of real-world experience, ideas, comments and observations.
Tom Gaskell
I've worked in industry as a consultant, manager and quality trouble-shooter for most of my career.
After spending 14 years in a multi-national consulting organisation and 10 years working in telecomms design and manufacturing start-ups, I set up the Cambridge (UK)-based quality, manufacturing and business consultancy Primilis (http://www.primilis.com) in 2006. |
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