QUALITY-SPEAK: A MANAGER'S GLOSSARY

                            by Nancy K. Austin

     I HAVE YET TO FIND TWO PEOPLE who agree on what quality is, or the        
   best way to measure it, or whether you need a consultant to design the      
   perfect quality-improvement program for your company.  I do know that it    
   helps to be armed when you get into a quality debate, so here's the         
   lingo you'll need to hold up your end of the argument.                      
     TQM:  Short for Total Quality Management, TQM applies quality             
   principles to everything a company does, even the way its departments       
   work together on the inside; satisfying your "internal customers" is a      
   hallmark of the TQM process.  This stem-to-stern approach has led some      
   experts to hail TQM as a "thought revolution in management" that reaches    
   far beyond the quality-control department to embrace "quality of work,      
   quality of service, quality of innovation...quality of people, quality      
   of company, quality of objectives."                                         
     CQI:  The Japanese left TQM behind in their search for a better way       
   and "zero defects," focusing on a never-ending journey they call kaizen.    
     Stateside, we call it Continuous Quality Improvement, or CQI. There's     
   another reason we're hearing more about CQI, according to Karl Albrecht,    
   a leading authority on quality.  "More and more businesses are              
   abandoning the term "TQM," says Albrecht, "because of its negative          
   implications of mindless hypercontrol and dehumanization, and are moving    
   to more generic terms, such as 'total quality.'"  Philosophy more than      
   procedure drives total quality and CQI, which stress a wholesale            
   commitment to creating value for the customer, from product design          
   through delivery to aftersales services.  Central to CQI is the notion      
   that, for better or worse, quality is relative; it never stands still.      
     Competitive Benchmarking:  A tool to propel continuous improvement        
   that involves rating your company's products, services and practices        
   against those of the front-runners in the industry.  Benchmarking makes     
   it kosher to steal a nifty idea from somebody else and do it even           
   better. It's sometimes called market intelligence.                          
     Pareto Analysis:  A bar chart and basic measurement tool that             
   pinpoints the impact of a host of possible forces on quality. To "do a      
   pareto" is to find out which variables significantly affect results and     
   which are merely distractions.  Often called the 80-20 rule, because 80     
   percent of the problems can be traced to 20 percent of the causes.          
     ISO 9000:  The definitive global standards for quality as published by    
   the International Standards Organization (ISO) in Geneva.  Membership       
   covers some 90 countries, representing more than 95 percent of the          
   world's industrial production.  If your company trades outside the U.S.,    
   you need official ISO 9000 certification before your products and           
   services have a prayer of getting to market. ISO 9000 is the latest (and    
   worst) example of quality red tape--ism, but it has absolutely              
   bewitched countries in Europe and North America alike.  The arcane,         
   paper-driven certification process is a bureaucratic nightmare.             
   Fortunately, if you already have a well-documented quality-management       
   system, some minor tweaking should make the ISO beadledom happy.            

   [This article first appeared in _Working_Woman_, March, 1993.]