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Thomas Pyzdek (born July 13, 1948) is an American author and management consultant. He is best known for being an advocate of operational excellence (quality control, process improvement, Lean, Six Sigma) and is an author of several books, [1] [2] hundreds of articles and papers on those topics.
Pyzdek was born in Omaha, Nebraska, one of three children born to Charles and Margaret Pyzdek. Other than a brief period in the early 1950s, the family lived in Omaha during Pyzdek's entire childhood. Pyzdek's father and mother were blue-collar laborers, born to immigrants from Poland and Ireland, respectively. Pyzdek attended Holy Ghost Catholic elementary school and graduated from Ralston High School in Ralston, Nebraska in 1966.
Pyzdek received a BGS in Economics from the University of Nebraska at Omaha (1973), an M.S. in Systems and Industrial Engineering from the University of Arizona (1982), an MS in Management from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. in Management (ABD) from the University of Arizona (1995). [3]
Thomas Pyzdek entered the quality profession in 1967 as a Quality Technician at Continental Can Company in Omaha, Nebraska. He next became a Quality Engineering Technician in 1971 at Lozier Corporation in Omaha, a leading manufacturer of store fixtures for supermarkets and retailers.
In 1975, Pyzdek worked for Valmont Industries, a manufacturer of central pivot irrigation systems, light poles and high-power transmission towers. At Valmont Pyzdek rose to the position of Supervisor, Quality and Reliability Engineering, supervising a group of Quality and Reliability Engineers.
In 1979, Pyzdek moved to the missile systems group of Hughes Aircraft Company in Tucson, Arizona. At Hughes, Pyzdek was Head of Total Quality Systems. He led a team of engineers and scientists focused on quality and process improvement. The mission of this group was to explore state-of-the-art quality and apply what they learned to processes at Hughes. Their responsibility was to teach management the most effective techniques and help in integrating these techniques into management systems at Hughes. Pyzdek's group operationalized their mission by analyzing Hughes's supplier database and benchmarking sources to identify those suppliers with premier quality performance records as determined by their customers.
The experience with TQS helped Pyzdek establish connections with people who were using groundbreaking quality methods to achieve world-class results. He delved into self-employment in late 1983 by creating his own company, Applied Concepts, Inc. American firms, especially in the automotive industry, were under tremendous pressure from Japanese competitors. The documentary “If Japan Can, Why Can't We?” inspired Pyzdek. The documentary explained how Dr. W. Edwards Deming had taught post-WWII Japanese leaders how to use quality to help them make their organizations more competitive. Pyzdek, already familiar with Dr. Deming's work, contacted Ford and was added to the list of approved consultants. Pyzdek periodically visited Ford World Headquarters to attend meetings conducted by Ford Executives and Dr. Deming. As an approved consultant, Pyzdek provided consulting services and training to many Ford suppliers.
Pyzdek traveled with Dr. Deming to international leadership conferences and training sessions. Tom's role was to provide instruction on statistical process control (SPC) tools and techniques and “statistical thinking”, while Dr. Deming taught management concepts.
Besides Ford suppliers, Pyzdek provided consulting and training for hundreds of clients of all sizes in virtually every major business segment.
In 1988, Pyzdek attended a ceremony at The White House and was on the Board of Examiners where President Ronald Reagan presented the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award to Bob Galvin, [4] CEO of Motorola. Bob and his team invented Six Sigma. The improvements to Motorola's systems from applying Six Sigma won them the award.
In 2004, Pyzdek helped found The International Journal of Six Sigma and Competitive Advantage. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the journal.
In 2008, Pyzdek founded The Pyzdek Institute. The institute was one of the first to provide online Six Sigma certification and training and was one of the first training organizations accredited by IASSC. [5]
Through his extensive career, Pyzdek has provided Lean and Six Sigma consulting to major clients in a broad spectrum of industries. Pyzdek serves on numerous editorial boards and helped found such journals as The Quality Management Journal, Quality Engineering and the International Journal of Six Sigma and Competitive Advantage.
Quality America (1986-1990). Statistical software, quality and process improvement consulting.
Quality Publishing (1986-1998). Publisher of books and training materials for quality professionals.
Pyzdek Consulting, Inc. (1983-2022). Quality and process improvement consulting.
Pyzdek is a Fellow of the ASQ and recipient of the ASQ Edward's Medal [6] l and the Simon Collier Quality Award, both for outstanding contributions to the field of quality management
Pyzdek was awarded the ASQ E.L. Grant Medal for outstanding contributions to Quality Education in 2007. [7]
In 2010, Pyzdek received the Lean Six Sigma World Conference Leadership Award. [8]
In 2016, Pyzdek received the first ASQ Six Sigma Forum Award for the Advancement of Six Sigma. [9]
A quality management system (QMS) is a collection of business processes focused on consistently meeting customer requirements and enhancing their satisfaction. It is aligned with an organization's purpose and strategic direction. It is expressed as the organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information, and resources needed to implement and maintain it. Early quality management systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a continual improvement cycle. In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with sustainability and transparency initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality are increasingly tied to these factors. Of QMS regimes, the ISO 9000 family of standards is probably the most widely implemented worldwide – the ISO 19011 audit regime applies to both and deals with quality and sustainability and their integration.
William Edwards Deming was an American business theorist, composer, economist, industrial engineer, management consultant, statistician, and writer. Educated initially as an electrical engineer and later specializing in mathematical physics, he helped develop the sampling techniques still used by the United States Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He is also known as the father of the quality movement and was hugely influential in post-WWII Japan, credited with revolutionizing Japan's industry and making it one of the most dominant economies in the world. He is best known for his theories of management.
Total quality management (TQM) consists of organization-wide efforts to "install and make permanent climate where employees continuously improve their ability to provide on demand products and services that customers will find of particular value." "Total" emphasizes that departments in addition to production are obligated to improve their operations; "management" emphasizes that executives are obligated to actively manage quality through funding, training, staffing, and goal setting. While there is no widely agreed-upon approach, TQM efforts typically draw heavily on the previously developed tools and techniques of quality control. TQM enjoyed widespread attention during the late 1980s and early 1990s before being overshadowed by ISO 9000, Lean manufacturing, and Six Sigma.
Six Sigma (6σ) is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. It was introduced by American engineer Bill Smith while working at Motorola in 1986.
Quality assurance (QA) is the term used in both manufacturing and service industries to describe the systematic efforts taken to assure that the product(s) delivered to customer(s) meet with the contractual and other agreed upon performance, design, reliability, and maintainability expectations of that customer. The core purpose of Quality Assurance is to prevent mistakes and defects in the development and production of both manufactured products, such as automobiles and shoes, and delivered services, such as automotive repair and athletic shoe design. Assuring quality and therefore avoiding problems and delays when delivering products or services to customers is what ISO 9000 defines as that "part of quality management focused on providing confidence that quality requirements will be fulfilled". This defect prevention aspect of quality assurance differs from the defect detection aspect of quality control and has been referred to as a shift left since it focuses on quality efforts earlier in product development and production and on avoiding defects in the first place rather than correcting them after the fact.
Statistical process control (SPC) or statistical quality control (SQC) is the application of statistical methods to monitor and control the quality of a production process. This helps to ensure that the process operates efficiently, producing more specification-conforming products with less waste scrap. SPC can be applied to any process where the "conforming product" output can be measured. Key tools used in SPC include run charts, control charts, a focus on continuous improvement, and the design of experiments. An example of a process where SPC is applied is manufacturing lines.
Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) is a collection of best-practices for the development of new products and processes. It is sometimes deployed as an engineering design process or business process management method. DFSS originated at General Electric to build on the success they had with traditional Six Sigma; but instead of process improvement, DFSS was made to target new product development. It is used in many industries, like finance, marketing, basic engineering, process industries, waste management, and electronics. It is based on the use of statistical tools like linear regression and enables empirical research similar to that performed in other fields, such as social science. While the tools and order used in Six Sigma require a process to be in place and functioning, DFSS has the objective of determining the needs of customers and the business, and driving those needs into the product solution so created. It is used for product or process design in contrast with process improvement. Measurement is the most important part of most Six Sigma or DFSS tools, but whereas in Six Sigma measurements are made from an existing process, DFSS focuses on gaining a deep insight into customer needs and using these to inform every design decision and trade-off.
PDCA or plan–do–check–act is an iterative design and management method used in business for the control and continual improvement of processes and products. It is also known as the Shewhart cycle, or the control circle/cycle. Another version of this PDCA cycle is OPDCA. The added "O" stands for observation or as some versions say: "Observe the current condition." This emphasis on observation and current condition has currency with the literature on lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System. The PDCA cycle, with Ishikawa's changes, can be traced back to S. Mizuno of the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1959.
Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service consistently functions well. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. Quality control is also part of quality management. What a customer wants and is willing to pay for it, determines quality. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Quality can be defined as how well the product performs its intended function.
In process improvement efforts, defects per million opportunities or DPMO is a measure of process performance. It is defined as
Advanced product quality planning (APQP) is a framework of procedures and techniques used to develop products in industry, particularly in the automotive industry. It differs from Six Sigma in that the goal of Six Sigma is to reduce variation, but has similarities to Design for Six Sigma (DFSS).
William B. Smith, Jr. was the "father of Six Sigma". Born in Brooklyn, New York, Smith graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1952 and studied at the University of Minnesota School of Management but did not graduate. In 1987, after working for nearly 35 years in engineering and quality assurance, he joined Motorola, serving as vice president and senior quality assurance manager for the Land Mobile.
Certified Quality Engineer, often abbreviated CQE, is a certification given by the American Society for Quality (ASQ). These engineers are professionally educated in quality engineering and quality control.
In business, engineering, and manufacturing, quality – or high quality – has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority or superiority of something ; it is also defined as being suitable for the intended purpose while satisfying customer expectations. Quality is a perceptual, conditional, and somewhat subjective attribute and may be understood differently by different people. Consumers may focus on the specification quality of a product/service, or how it compares to competitors in the marketplace. Producers might measure the conformance quality, or degree to which the product/service was produced correctly. Support personnel may measure quality in the degree that a product is reliable, maintainable, or sustainable. In such ways, the subjectivity of quality is rendered objective via operational definitions and measured with metrics such as proxy measures.
A continual improvement process, also often called a continuous improvement process, is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. These efforts can seek "incremental" improvement over time or "breakthrough" improvement all at once. Delivery processes are constantly evaluated and improved in the light of their efficiency, effectiveness and flexibility.
Dorian Shainin was an American quality consultant, aeronautics engineer, author, and college professor most notable for his contributions in the fields of industrial problem solving, product reliability, and quality engineering, particularly the creation and development of the "Red X" concept.
Lean Six Sigma is a process improvement approach that uses a collaborative team effort to improve performance by systematically removing operational waste and reducing process variation. It combines Lean Management and Six Sigma to increase the velocity of value creation in business processes.
Subir Chowdhury is a Bangladeshi-American author of 15 books and noted for his work in quality and management. He is currently the chairman and CEO of ASI Consulting Group, LLC, in Bingham Farms, Michigan.
Dr. Erick Christopher Jones Sr. is an industrial engineer and professor at the University of Nevada at Reno. He is an expert in radio-frequency identification (RFID), quality engineering, and Lean Six Sigma. Jones was the program director of The National Science Foundation's (NSF) Engineering Research Centers. He is currently Chair of the Supply Chain Technology Committee of International Supply Chain Education Alliance's (ISCEA) International Standards Board (IISB) and Editor in Chief of the International Supply Chain Technology Journal (ISCTJ).
This is an alphabetical list of articles pertaining specifically to quality engineering. For a broad overview of engineering, please see List of engineering topics. For biographies please see List of engineers.
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