Certified Quality Improvement Associate Training

Explores the sponsor, champion, facilitator, team leader, team members, scribe, and timekeeper roles, outlining each responsibility and how they enable effective project improvement.

Select team members by matching required skills, communication ability, and subject matter knowledge to the goal, while balancing personal traits like organization, confidence, and being a team player.

Explore how conflict adds value, avoids group thinking, and resolves disagreements using the Kilmann model's five strategies: competing, accommodating, avoiding, compromising, and collaborating, driven by empathy and assertiveness.

Explore group thinking as a negative team dynamic, its causes like time pressure and group pressure, and how leaders counter it with an independent expert, diversity, and the devil's advocate.

Learn team decision making within the PDCA framework, from recognizing and defining problems to implementing and evaluating solutions. Use brainstorming, voting, and consensus to develop and select effective alternatives.

Practice brainstorming to generate as many ideas as possible for a problem, recording all ideas without judgment, and then use nominal group technique to balance participation and refine solutions.

Master multi voting to narrow brainstormed ideas into a short list with group consensus. Assign letter codes, vote one third, tally results, and round to three ideas.

Identify value and map the value stream (VSM) to reveal material and information flow, distinguishing value-added from non-value-added activities, and compare current and future state maps to reduce lead time.

Compare incremental and breakthrough improvement in process performance by gradually reducing a defect index through Kaizen, PDCA, and quality circles, versus drastic 10x gains via six sigma or BPR.

Organize brainstorming ideas into natural groups using the affinity diagram (K-J method) to reveal customer needs and translate them into actionable groups for course improvements.

internal audits systematically review objective evidence against criteria (ISO 9000 2015 and ISO 9001 standards) by independent auditors to identify gaps and drive corrective action for continuous improvement.

Explore the seven basic quality tools for process improvement, with a focus on the cause and effect (Ishikawa, fishbone) diagram used for brainstorming and root cause analysis.

Identify defects and patterns using check sheets as data collection tools, tallying bottle defects by type and size to guide Pareto-driven improvements.

Use the control chart, the sixth basic quality tool, to display process variation over time, interpret control limits, and distinguish common versus special causes to decide when to act.

Identify root cause analysis outcomes by applying structured tools like 5 whys, Ishikawa fishbone diagrams, and process mapping, then use prioritisation matrices to select and implement corrective actions.

Explore a proactive FMEA example from perfume bottle production, analyzing receiving risk, severity, occurrence, detection, and the resulting RPN to prioritize preventive actions and continuous improvement.

Calculate the risk priority number in FMEA by rating severity, occurrence, and detection, identify failure modes and effects, apply controls, plan actions, and update the living document before SWOT.

Master seven steps for supplier selection, from identifying potential suppliers to awarding a purchase order, including pre-qualification, bidder list, and bid evaluation.

Identify internal and external customers and map the supplier–organization–customer chain. Explore segregation of customers to tailor quality and meet the voice of the customer.

Utilize informal, unsolicited customer feedback from social media for honest insights, and analyze warranty data and focus groups to identify and prevent future issues.

Explore quality function deployment, the house of quality, to translate the voice of the customer into prioritized requirements across design, build, and lifecycle.

Apply practical qfd by mapping customer needs to course features using a qfd template with weighted relationships and align with ASQ body of knowledge.