Quality Systems

What is an audit program? According to the international standards for management systems, an audit program is an overall plan to list and organize the audits to be performed, define the schedule, assign the auditors (depending on the audit type and reference to be used -i.e. ISO9001-) during a period Read more…

As part of my job I have always supported manufacturing facilities to establish a quality management system and get certified. In the planning and implementation process, I consider training as one of the most important elements and of course, it needs to be addressed to everybody in the organization, management Read more…

Process Analysis Tools In this blog we have talked several times about Quality Management Systems and the famous process approach and risk-based-thinking. As you might remember, we started by describing the main business processes as the “add-value-stream”. But sometimes it is difficult to have an objective and abstract view of Read more…

Quality Management Systems and the famous family ISO 9000 There is a huge advantage in the global standardization: regardless of your location in the world, your product, industry branch, etc. the requirements and certification rules for quality management systems remain the same. It was not always like that. I personally Read more…

Ishikawa diagram, fish bone or cause-effect chart. Ishikawa or fish bone diagram is a tool that can be useful to find the root cause or causes for a certain problem. It can be used once you have defined and stated the problem.   As we have discussed in other posts Read more…

You may fall when learning to ride… but, you can get up and keep on trying! Before starting this article, I would ask you first: what is a mistake? I believe that your own answer will help us stress the importance of today’s topic. Let’s start with a 100 year-old-quote Read more…

What do I need? One of them? All? Prevention, correction or improvement? And the answer is: it depends…. Nowadays all of them are considered as improvements. They are even called such in the ISO9001 and related standards. However, they are not exactly the same, nor can they be treated in Read more…

The GR&R – the most used MSA technique In this blog we have mentioned that the MSA has many great techniques to assess and to improve your measurements systems, however, many persons still believe that MSA = GR&R and unfortunately, many systems fail not because the device or appraisers are Read more…