This book is written for quality practitioners in manufacturing shop environments to aid them in the understanding of how process-approach quality management is implemented and practiced to the rigorous requirements of ISO 9001/2000. It is a completely integ- rated system in which the organizational quality objectives are identified and interactive- ly communicated in the fulfillment of internal and external customer requirements. This is not a theory book, but a fact-impelled reality, based on experience, derived from actual quality practice in manufacturing shops. Process-approach to quality management is the preferred technique by ISO 9001/2000. It embodies a total commitment from organiza- tions to establish, implement, and maintain a documented quality system that controls process-driven interactions among all the internal and external parties in achieving conformity of a product to quality requirements.

To control process-driven interactions among these parties, I have established a system- wide integration of quality objectives and interactively structured them into all the core departmental work assignments, creating a quality throughput system. By doing this, I have interconnected the sequentially flowing work processes with the quality objective criteria. At the same time, I have also identified the beginning and end of these interacting work assignments to enable us to determine the process and quality boundaries for each. This, now, allows us to measure performance results in each work assignment as the flow-process is continuing toward product realization. By knowing the performance results, we can promptly determine whether the process or the quality requirements have been met and accordingly implement continual improvements. The entire quality system’s procedures in this book have been designed to support this type of organizational interaction with all the contractual parties, maintaining integration and coherence in achieving internal and external customer satisfaction.

As a management representative in the sense of ISO commitments, I have taken the lessons learned from being an ISO Rep and coupled them with the lessons learned from my forty-years shop experience in manufacturing and produced this book. It contains the necessary instructions, procedures, and examples, all integrated and accurately communi- cated to the relevant work centers. My intention was to ensure that others would be able to take this book and convert and implement their quality systems along the model of this process-approach quality management system, without outside help. This process- approach quality system is specially tailored for small businesses in the manufacturing sector, incorporating all the quality system’s objectives in line with ISO 9001/2000 requirements. To ensure operational effectiveness, I have implemented and debugged this system in real manufacturing environments. This is now the operating system with several Connecticut based companies. The works contain the quality manual, quality operating procedures, and appropriate forms. To ensure effective implementation, I have created some 235 pages of flowcharts as a training aid, which can be converted to become the quality operating procedures in small shops to replace text-type procedures.

This is a TQM system for small manufacturing firms, incorporating the P-D-C-A provi- sions as a preventive quality tool and also as a corrective action tool.