Organizations and their leadership teams must embrace a different way of leveraging quality and think beyond terms of just preventing defects from getting into the hands of their customers. During the past few years, the environment is such that society demands that businesses deliver high-quality value.

Seven data collection strategies enhance your quality analyses. Data and information are at the heart of good investigations and decision making, but are all kinds of data the same? What are the major categories and types of questions to ask to collect and analyze data?

The absence of a quality culture gave rise to six serious quality management failures, wrote Lowellyne James, a lecturer at the Aberdeen Business School in the United Kingdom, in his personal blog about the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Together, he wrote, these failures caused a tragic loss of life and catastrophic environmental disaster.

Collaboration reduces risk in quality data management. Quality has long been an initiative, a goal and—especially in regulated industries—a requirement for staying in business. Today’s quality professionals are pushing the envelope to take quality to new levels and make it a way of life for their organizations.