Quality management teams

To put these leadership goals into practice, we have established Quality Management Teams (QMT) in each of our plants. The QMT consists of the complete plant management team—quality, production, engineering, technical support, human resources, and finance. The plant managers chair the QMT to symbolize their responsibility for quality and because they have the power to assure all employees follow the quality principles. The purpose of the QMT is ... 

Harbour, G.C. Kieffer, R.G. Quality management team (QMT)—managing the quality system. Pharm. Technol. 2000, Oct, 152-158. 

In addition to the central quality group, each deveiopment department headed by a program director has an assigned quaiity management team. The quality of the product (or certain parts of the product) shouid be the top priority for the quality management team. The main tasks of these decentralized quality management teams are as follows ... 

Test plans document the planned scope of the verification. The test cases are based on developers and quality management team members expertise. Test packages document the implementation of the tests. 

In this version, the quality management team occupies staff position and is organizationally directly responsible to the executive management. 

The commitment of the company to the values and standards laid out in Our Credo drives management to strive continually for excellence in a number of overlapping areas. Based upon the principles of the Baldridge Award, the Quality Management team of Janssen-Cilag developed a self-assessment process known as Signature of Quality . The process is supported by a checklist on a carefully constructed questionnaire in five interdependent areas ... 

In some respects this requirement is ambiguous as there are no equivalent requirements for when the APQP approach is used. The APQP manual merely offers guidance. With the APQP approach the equivalent of the project manager is the project team leader and the equivalent of the project team is the product quality planning team. 

For a major incident investigation using a comprehensive root cause analysis system, teams will be formed to acquire information relevant to determine the structure and analyze the causes in depth. In addition to evaluations of the immediate causes, imderlying causes are likely to be evaluated by investigations in areas such as safety and quality management. Both paper- and computer-based systems will be used to acquire and record information for subsequent detailed analyses. 

Teams such as quality improvement teams (QIT), may be used for implementation of all Quality Management projects. These teams are usually established for specific improvement projects and consist of staff involved in the management processes under review. For this project, PSM and ESH specialists, operations, maintenance, and engineering representatives would be members of the team. 

All group working sessions should be led by someone with a strong background in Quality Management and good facilitation skills. It is important that these individuals have the ability to draw out ideas from the team without imposing their own ideas. These facilitators need not be full-time members of the team, but are called upon when needed. 

Different requirements may be filled by a single team member. One member of the team should be appointed as the team leader and the team should agree about the division of other responsibilities. The team leader should be given clear instructions on the scope of work for the team and the schedule within which they are working. This will most likely be achieved through the application of Quality Management analysis techniques. Staff can be involved in more than one team, but avoid having one person lead more... 

Measurement of performance. Quality Management requires that measures of performance be established for every activity. These measures include end-of-pipe measurement, such as amounts of material released into the environment or injury rates, and in-process measures of how efficiently you are managing, such as time to review safety improvement proposals or total resources expended on PSM. Each team should be required to identify potential performance measures for the processes they are developing and the activities these processes manage. Many of the end-of-pipe measures will already exist these should be critically examined to ensure that they truly measure performance and are not unduly influenced by other factors. For example, the number of accidents in a fleet of road vehicles is almost directly dependent on the number of miles driven with no improvement in performance, a reduction in miles driven would reduce the number of accidents. 

Try to select Quality Management tools that the integration team and other staff in your organization are familiar with otherwise invest time in training. 

Team analysis of the plan. This will usually take the form of a meeting, or series of meetings, where Quality Management techniques are used (see below) to analyze the pilot study. 

Many issues in one management area are bound to affect performance in other areas. For example, an inherent safety review may propose a change in the process chemistry that will allow a definite reduction in chemical reactivity hazards, perhaps by eliminating a reactive intermediate. Such changes will have to fit with product quality requirements, and the customer may need to be included in the process of changing to the inherently safer alternative. Effective communication among all parts of the management team will avoid many problems and help identify what works best. 

The results of this VIP are used by the project management team to update its project execution plan for each FEL phase. The class of facility quality VIP provides the best results when conducted prior to executing any other VIP eftbrt in the conceptual phase (FEL-1) of the project. 

Robert W.R. Humphreys, National Starch and Chemical Company Allen, you talk about your innovation process, which is not too different from the one we use. When you re doing portfolio management and a lot of projects are coming through, you ve got to make decisions. The quality of your portfolio management team is obviously a critical thing or there will be many mistakes that won t be discovered for a long time. How do you choose that team ... 

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