Cost of Quality: battling to measure cause and effect       

If you could save 15% of your costs, would you do it?

Many do not know of a tried and true technique to measure the dollars and cents cause and effect of business issues. Quality cost is a 50-year-old discipline that has been eclipsed by quality fads, but it remains the best way to tell if you are getting a decent return on your improvement investment. Even Six Sigma, a powerful approach, fails to take full advantage of this powerful technique.

Who should attend and what will they gain?

• Business owners: how can the ROI of improvement be measured?
• Business leaders involved in operations improvement: how can interdepartmental cooperation in process improvements be obtained?
• Performance improvement professionals: How can we gain senior management’s attention for long enough to make a difference?
• Accounting personnel involved with improvement measurement: how can improvement be measured in dollars and cents?
• Sales leaders: how can we convert operational metrics into new revenue projections?
• Quality managers: how do we place quality in strategic planning as an equal?

Douglas C. Wood’s book on quality costs will be available for sale at the meeting. For $30, you can own a copy signed by the author. The title is “The Executive Guide to Understanding and Implementing Quality Cost Programs,” published by ASQ Press. This book uses concise language and common sense insight applied to measuring quality in dollars and cents, linking cause and effect in ways conventional accounting systems often do not.

Doug Wood has been in the food and printing industries for 30 years. He is active in the American Society for Quality (ASQ), serving as Kansas City section education co-chair. He was site committee chair for the 2003 Annual Quality Congress. He holds three ASQ Certifications and one Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) certification: ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt, ASQ Certified Quality Engineer, ASQ Certified Manager of Quality/ Organizational Excellence, and SME Lean bronze level. He has been an examiner/ lead examiner with the Kansas and the Missouri quality awards. He is also on the board of the Project Management Institute (PMI) Quality Community of Practice.

His work has been in supplier quality, product planning, return on investment, financial budgeting systems, office labor and process flow work measurement, and scorecard implementation. He teaches webinars for ASQ and Paton Professional, and face-to-face courses at Johnson County Community College. He holds a BS in Industrial Engineering.

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