QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS SURE A+
✔✔Quality Circles - ✔✔A team from all levels who meet to discuss, analyze, and
eliminate quality issues using Deming's 14 points; a senior manager overseas their
progress and approves their changes.
✔✔Total Quality Management (TQM) - ✔✔An organization-wide philosophy that calls
for 1) focusing on the customer, 2) quality function deployment, 3) responsibility for
quality, 4) team problem-solving, 5) employee training, and 6) fact-based management.
✔✔Voice of the Customer - ✔✔Describes what customers want and what they like and
dislike; can get to know customers, hold focus groups, and request improvement
suggestions; the business can also use their knowledge of how the customer would
benefit from a new technology that they are not familiar with to create a future need on
behalf of the customer.
✔✔Quality Function Deployment (QFD) - ✔✔Relating customer needs and expectations
to specific design characteristics through a series of grids or matrices.
✔✔House of Quality - ✔✔The matrix used in Quality Function Deployment (QFD); lists
customer needs (WHATs), design characteristics related to these needs (HOWs), the
nature of the relationship between each customer's need and design characteristic
, (WHAT versus HOW), the reasons for WHATs (WHYs), and performance comparisons
on design characteristics against competitors (HOW MUCH).
✔✔Quality Control Department - ✔✔Where quality control obligations traditionally fell;
now, it is up to everyone to ensure quality.
✔✔Standardization - ✔✔Developing a preset procedure.
✔✔Documentation - ✔✔The act of putting a procedure into writing.
✔✔ISO 9000 - ✔✔2000: An international quality standard.
✔✔Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle/Deming Wheel/Shewhart Cycle - ✔✔A cycle of continuous
improvement that is repeated indefinitely. Planning involves using appropriate tools to
identify problems or improvement opportunities. Doing involves acting upon the plan.
Checking involves analyzing the actions performed to ensure that goals were achieved.
Acting involves standardizing and documenting the changes, communicating changes
to other, and determining why goals were not achieved.
✔✔Seven Tools of Statistical Process Control (SPC) - ✔✔Fishbone diagrams, check
sheets, control charts, histograms, Pareto charts, scatter diagrams, and control charts
(classified as flow/run charts).
✔✔Check Sheets - ✔✔Used to record data points in real-time at the site where the data
is generated; raw data is collected without interpretation and then depicted using a
different statistical tool.
✔✔Histogram/Box Chart - ✔✔Shows the frequency of data observations within a preset
range of values.
✔✔Scatter Plot - ✔✔Displays data as a relationship between two variables; correlations
can be drawn based upon the data. The controlled variable is the independent variable.
✔✔Pareto Chart - ✔✔A bar chart that reflects data values in a descending order.
✔✔Control Chart - ✔✔A graphical depiction of process outputs where the raw data is
plotted in real-time within upper control limits (UCL) and lower control limits (LCL); this
allows one to determine if a process is stable or trending towards instability and take
corrective action before variations result in non-conforming products (see Page 30 for
example).
✔✔Run Chart - ✔✔Another form of a control chart for processes that have common
features, a common scale, or a central tendency; an optimal line is drawn horizontally
across the chart to gauge the central tendency (see Page 30 for example).