Entries by Steve Williams

Winning is not a sometime thing…

Operational excellence takes work; more specifically, it takes relentless execution. There should be no lack of available continuous improvement projects in the average PCB or other custom component manufacturer. Developing a strategy for identifying the potential projects should be the first step in the process. Using defect data and Pareto analysis you can easily see […]

Two heads are better than one

Formal improvement teams are arguably the most effective continuous improvement vehicle available to an organization. When resources are scarce, many companies are using their TRB (technical review board) as a CI team. Providing group dynamics and team building training to teams increase their effectiveness exponentially. Companies have come up with some very creative names for […]

Improvement is a state of mind

The underlying philosophy, which ensures the success and growth of an organization, is that every facet of the operation must continuously improve. This means that instead of having one specific objective that once met signals the end of progressive effort, employees at every level of responsibility must always strive to perform better next month than […]

Are you in a crisis management mode?

Continuous improvement is a journey, and as with most things worthwhile, needs to be an integral part of an organization’s everyday life. It can only come from people, motivated and committed, learning what they can learn, solving problems that they can solve, and implementing solutions that they develop. The venerable quality guru W. Edwards Deming […]

Tired of working FOR your quality system?

As you fill out one of your endless forms, have you ever asked yourself why you are doing it, only to remember that it is needed for ISO? That should never be the answer; every single activity should be adding value to your organization. Yes, ISO certainly has requirements that must be complied with, but […]

Tick Tock… Only 10 Months to the ISO Deadline

September 2018. That is the date every company in the world must be transitioned to ISO 2015. That is the best-case scenario; the bad news is that if your current certificate expires after March 2018, you have even less time. Remember, you are competing with over a million companies for registrar time, and if you […]

Capturing Tribal Knowledge

Every year, decades of experience walk out the door of our companies as the aging workforce retires, or employees move on to bigger and better things. Unfortunately, too often our training programs are not aligned to capture the experience, tips and techniques that exist only in the heads of our veteran workers. Capturing this tribal knowledge […]

3 reasons you need to upgrade to a TRAC QMS

If your company is like most, your QMS has morphed into an unwieldy, overgrown paper monster that gets bigger with every customer & registrar audit. Let me give you 3 compelling reasons to hire The Right Approach Consulting to upgrade your new & improved QMS with you.   Simple is better. Period. This overlying TRAC […]

My QMS Certification Guarantee

I have a 100% success rate with dozens of companies, across numerous industries with my ISO 9001 & AS9100 quality systems. Whether this is your initial certification, or an upgrade to the new standard(s) revision, I guarantee certification with the QMS system we customize to your company. I also guarantee that this QMS transition can […]