Archive for Joseph A. De Feo
Wanted: High Quality and Safety in Food
From a quality perspective, the difference between food production and goods manufacturing is huge. Food production processes materials by converting raw goods such as wheat into other products, including flour, bread, and cookies. Goods manufacturing assembles materials into products like electronics, appliances, or automobiles. This fundamental difference poses unique challenges for quality professionals in the food production industry.
Why does food need to be managed differently?
Raw materials such as fruit and vegetables differ from item to item, day to day, and crop to crop. If the final produced good is out of spec, it cannot be distilled or disassembled back to its original component parts, as those parts do not retain their original identity like assembled products can. These fundamental chemical differences require a fundamentally different quality approach.
Challenges facing food producers today
The ultimate goal for food producers is to develop a quality system that is rich in customer sensory data, applies exact measurement of raw material qualities, and ensures a production process that is always in control and capable of producing the highest quality of food possible. The customers include a wide range of characters: ultimate consumers or restaurateur who purchases the product, the supermarket that needs to make money selling the product, and the regulatory agencies that are in place to ensure food safety.
Missing anything that is critical to quality (CTQ) could mean not being able to sell the product because the user did not like it, or it harmed a person because of a failure…
8Feb2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Customer Is Still #1
In today’s global economy and competitive business world, fully satisfying your customers is imperative. Empowered by technology, dissatisfied customers tend to share their experiences with anyone who is willing to listen or read about their stories. When these experiences are negative, the effects on an organization can be detrimental. For many customers, the service landscape of recent years has become almost unrecognizable as they navigate through company websites and voice response systems, wait for delayed shipments only to receive the wrong goods or become frustrated over language barriers in their discussions with suppliers’ service representatives. These experiences do not do much to build customer satisfaction and loyalty. Despite countless companies struggling to operate profitably and respond to customer needs, there are organizations doing it right. In fact, some companies are delivering benchmark quality products and services to their customers.
Delivering quality products and services that meet customer’s needs separates the leaders from the pack in a competitive marketplace and it is essential to survival in a competitive global marketplace. Those organizations that engage in a relentless pursuit of delivering high-quality products and services outperform those that do not. MEDRAD, one of the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award winners, uses a systematic voice-of-the-customer approach to better focus on customer needs. Customer information is collected from listening posts, trade associations, benchmarking, and other mechanisms deployed globally and tailored by region, business, and language, and then communicated to the appropriate sales team for analysis. The success…
30Jan2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedSocietal Responsibility
Without socially responsible leaders, organizations striving towards performance excellence in today’s market will get left behind. Ethical behavior and considerations for societal well-being are crucial elements to running a quality business. Leaders need to be role models for their organization by focusing on ethics and the protection of public health, safety, and the environment. The protection of these three elements includes the organization’s operations, as well as the life cycles of products. Effective planning will help to anticipate adverse impacts from production, distribution, transportation, use, and disposal of products.
Effective planning will help to prevent problems, provide a response if problems occur, and make available information and support needed to maintain public awareness, safety, and confidence. Henry Ford Health System, one of the winners of the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award for Health Care, know how to think about these big-picture issues; HFHS community benefit initiatives have increased by almost 78 percent since 2006. HFHS’s commitment to patient safety is further emphasized through its evidence-based global harm campaign (evidence-based medicine integrates an individual doctor’s examining and diagnostic skills for a specific patient with the best available evidence from medical research) to reduce or eliminate some 23 sources of harm. According to the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, this program is a national best practice. HFHS’s performance in relation to overall global harm has improved from approximately 60 harm events per 1,000 patients in the first quarter of 2008 to 40 harm events per 1,000…
26Jan2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | ContinuedJuran Institute Acquires Baldrige.com
Juran Institute, Inc. is pleased to announce the acquisition of Baldrige.com into our family of quality solutions and services. Our legendary founder, Dr. Joseph M. Juran, was a particularly vocal advocate for the Baldrige program. Prior to the passage of the congressional act that created the Baldrige Award in 1987, he testified in front of Congress on behalf of creating the award to help bring the focus of quality to the United States. Dr. Juran was also one of the original overseers of the Baldrige Award process. Juran Institute has offered its own staff in support of the Baldrige process, many of whom have participated in the roles of Judges, Sr. Examiners, and Examiners.
Let me personally thank Steve George for all of his contributions to this website and to the Baldrige process overall. We will continue to focus the site on the same principles that Steve did, which will be to offer insights and information on the Baldrige model as an archetype for performance excellence. We will offer articles, links, and information directly related to the Baldrige categories that will be both relevant and interesting to our readers. We also will have Steve join us from time to time as a guest author.
Baldrige.com will be managed by Joseph A. De Feo, President and CEO of Juran Institute, as well as Tom Huizenga, our General Manager and Baldrige examiner. Both of us were personally managed and coached by Dr. Juran prior to…
23Jan2012 | Joseph A. De Feo | 0 comments | Continued
