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Lou Ann Lathrop is an ASQ fellow, ASQ board of directors’ treasurer for 2025, and past chair of ASQ Automotive Division. She also recently wrote an article for Quality about Dr. Deming's teachings.

Checklists play an important role in maintaining consistency, compliance, and traceability. They offer structure and ensure activities are carried out with discipline. 

In February 2024, the FDA took a bold step that will change the regulatory landscape of the medical devices industry as we know it.

I was giving a presentation on my journey in quality and the automotive industry to a university class that was studying quality methods the other day. 

A huge part of any Lean transformation is getting your team fired up about a mission, aligned on problem-solving, and hardest of all, actually working together.

Access and availability of Quality 4.0 based tools, techniques, and technology has increased over the past two decades. Organizations have benefitted from it in multiple ways across industries.

Additive manufacturing has matured from a prototyping tool to a production technology, but scaling into cost-effective, high-volume manufacturing poses challenges: from equipment, material, labor costs and process consistency, to regulatory and quality assurance. 

In the Quality function of our organizations, we deal with a variety of activities: problem solving, decision making, project management, systems development, and much more. But few of them have the impact of communication.

While consulting with a hydraulic pump manufacturer, the executive officer related their company’s revolutionary journey. 

In the early 1980s, my Quality career emphasized variation and corrective action. Although I’ve attended various solution-branded workshops, many organizations still struggle with understanding variation and effectively implementing corrective actions.