Quality Solutions in Unexpected Places

“You’re away from the office—at home, at the store, at a sporting event, at your children’s school—and you spot a situation where a quality tool would really come in handy. Or, you find that a quality tool is being used, quite unknowingly. Have you spotted a non-work situation that could use a quality tool? Or how about a quality solution in a surprising place?” asked Paul Borawski in his new blog post.

In our daily routine we use a lot of Quality Tools without knowing we are implementing them. As a Quality Engineer, Mom and Yoga Teacher I’m always thinking “which Quality Tool can I apply in this situation?“, from going to the market to planning the goals for the next year as a family. And I’m pretty sure you, no matter what your profession is, use a lot of quality tools, maybe without knowing you are applying a quality concept on your life.

Let me write down just a few examples: 

• How many times have you seated with your partner/friends/family to generate ideas of what to do during the weekend or where to go for your vacations; and then vote for the best option? The quality tools used here are called Brainstorming and Multivoting.
• If you are a Mom like me, I’m pretty sure you are always looking for the best practices to learn, for example how to teach your baby to use the potty or how to handle a tantrum. Reading different books, and learning techniques from different moms, helps me to incorporate the best ideas into my own technique to apply on my baby. Here we performed what is called Benchmarking.
• How many times during our life have we worked on identify and eliminate all non-value adding activities/things/toys/papers (waste) in order to have a cleaner and better organized life/house/office? Here we apply concepts from the Lean practices: Eliminating waste – 5S.
• How many times have you used checklist, a list of things you have to buy before leave for vacation?
• Every time we have a situation/problem where we need to analyse and identify all the possible causes for that problem, my husband and I use the Fishbone tool to help us go through the process. 
• Doesn’t your child ask you at least 5 times “why” in order to identify the root cause of a problem he/she has? The quality tool used here is called 5 Whys or Why-Why diagram. 
• How many times when you plugged your iPod into your computer have you thought “I love this device because you can not put it in a wrong way”. That device was manufactured using the concept called Poka-Yoke.
• We as human being are always looking for improvements in our life as professional, as partners, as parents; we always want to be better, it’s a circle that never ends. We like to plan what we are going to do to be better, we try to do everything to get that goal, we check the actual results and compare them against the expected results, and then we get the conclusions, analyze what went wrong and act forward to perform better next time. Kaizen and the PDCA cycle are using here. 

And the list keeps going and going. The most you learn about quality tools, the most tools you could apply to live your life more organized and easy.

Because of this topic, the “Quote of the Month” I’ve selected is: “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.” ~ Steve Jobs

Do you use any other quality tool in your life? Share your story with us!