By Tom Taormina
Editor’s note: This is the third of three articles in a series defining a new approach to quality management for conformity-assessment professionals. You can read part one here and part two here.
In recent years, I have been collaborating with partners to create the gold standard for defining fitness for intended use and acceptable quality. That has manifested itself as the Quality Masters training and certification program. The new definition of quality we propose is that no critical defect ever reaches a customer, nothing more and nothing less than “fitness for intended use.”
This approach does not intend to add more quality tools or skills certification. Instead, by elevating the role of the quality professions to champion the idea that no critical defect should ever reach a customer, we allow quality become a profit center instead of an overhead expense. In our five-tiered certification program, professionals are first recognized for the training and experience they have.
The first course begins by introducing the candidate to the concepts of quality mastery.
The second course makes the transition from quality management to business process management at an enterprise level. It is the model for business management system (BMS) replacing a traditional overhead QMS. The model is that every operation in a business is a process, with inputs and outputs that can be measured. Stopping defects from moving from one process to the next is the basis for no defect ever reaching a customer. By involving the whole organization in the BMS, it goes on to make the transition from overhead to becoming a profit center.
The third and fourth courses create the new benchmarks for business excellence mentioned earlier. First comes certification in business process excellence, marking the transition from conformance to performance. Next is certification of risk avoidance, which completely dismantles traditional risk management and risk-based thinking and replaces it with techniques for removing risk from all processes. These three courses employ the ISO 9001:2015 structure so that there is no need to reinvent the organization.
The fifth and final course certifies the candidate at the most senior level of quality expertise and ability to lead business process excellence and risk avoidance as an internal champion or in a consulting role. It gives the certificate holder credentials as an accomplished quality professional and as a champion of continual improvement.
The new gold standard
The Quality Masters program includes breakthrough publications for the masters to use in implementing each phase of the program to redefine quality. One of the documents is BMS 9001:2024, A Business Process Management Guidance Document. Because ISO is just beginning to revise ISO 9001:2015, they left a great vacuum for quality professionals who must deal with evolving technology and business methods. It follows the clauses of the standard but redefines them, in plain language, in the context of business process excellence and risk avoidance. Other titles include Paradigm Shifting 2.0, Conducting Forensic Investigations: The New Standard of Management Systems Auditing, and The Strategic Thinkers’ Compendium.
The Quality Masters program, BMS 9001:2024, and Forensic Investigations were debuted at the 2023 ASQ Quality Audit Division Conference. More information is available at www.QProductivity.com.
About the author
Tom Taormina, CMC, CMQ/OE, was one of the first quality control engineers at NASA’s Mission Control Center. He supported all 17 Apollo Moon Missions. He went on to run three manufacturing companies successfully replacing QC with self-inspection. Over the last 50 years, he has worked with more than 700 companies as a consultant, auditor, and trainer. He has trained scores of QMS auditors and conducted hundreds of audits. For 20 years, he has provided expert witness testimony in more than forty lawsuits. Taormina is the former Chair of ASQ QMD Quality Management Systems Committee. He has published 12 books on quality management.