• Planning

Quality planning is the activity of developing products and processes required to meet customer's needs. It involves a series of universal steps:

1. Establish quality goals.

2. Identify the customers - those who will be impacted by the efforts to meet the goals.

3. Determine the customer's needs.

4. Develop product features that responds to the customer's needs.

5. Develop processes that are able to produce those product features.

6. Establish process controls, and transfer the resulting plans to the operating forces.

• Control

1. Evaluate actual quality performance.

2. Compare actual performance to quality goals.

3. Act on the difference.

• Improvement

This process is the means of raising quality to unprecedented levels ("breakthroughs"). The methodology consists of a series of universal steps:

1. Establish the infrastructure needed to secure annual quality improvement.

2. Identify the specific needs for improvement - the improvement projects.

3. For each project, establish a project team with clear responsibility for bringing the project to a successful conclusion.

4. Provide the resources, motivation, and training needed by the teams to:

1. Diagnose the causes.

2. Stimulate establishment of remedies.

3. Establish controls to hold the gains.

Last Modified: June 28, 2007