Fundamentals of Quality course

Fundamentals of Quality
Fundamentals of Quality

The following course in Fundamentals of Quality is provided in its entirety by Atlantic International University's "Open Access Initiative " which strives to make knowledge and education readily available to those seeking advancement regardless of their socio-economic situation, location or other previously limiting factors. The University's Open Courses are free and do not require any purchase or registration, they are open to the public.

The course in Fundamentals of Quality contains the following:

  • Lessons in video format with explaination of theoratical content.
  • Complementary activities that will make research more about the topic , as well as put into practice what you studied in the lesson. These activities are not part of their final evaluation.
  • Texts supporting explained in the video.
  • Evaluation questionnaire, that will grant access to the next lesson after approval.
  • Final exam for overall evaluation of the course.

The Administrative Staff may be part of a degree program paying up to three college credits. The lessons of the course can be taken on line Through distance learning. The content and access are open to the public according to the "Open Access" and " Open Access " Atlantic International University initiative. Participants who wish to receive credit and / or term certificate , must register as students.

Lesson 1: Quality (business)

Quality in business, engineering and manufacturing has a pragmatic interpretation as the non-inferiority or superiority of something; it is also defined as fitness for purpose. 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. Simply put, a quality item (an item that has quality) has the ability to perform satisfactorily in service and is suitable for its intended purpose.

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Lesson 2: Quality Administration

Aristotle analyzed qualities in his logical work, the Categories. To him, qualities are hylomorphically–formal attributes, such as "white" or "grammatical". Categories of state, such as "shod" and "armed" are also non–essential qualities (katà symbebekós). Aristotle observed: "one and the selfsame substance, while retaining its identity, is yet capable of admitting contrary qualities. The same individual person is at one time white, at another black, at one time warm, at another cold, at one time good, at another bad. This capacity is found nowhere else... it is the peculiar mark of substance that it should be capable of admitting contrary qualities; for it is by itself changing that it does so". Aristotle described four types of qualitative opposites: correlatives, contraries, privatives and positives.

John Locke presented a distinction between primary and secondary qualities in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. For Locke, a quality is an idea of a sensation or a perception. Locke further asserts that qualities can be divided in two kinds: primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are intrinsic to an object—a thing or a person—whereas secondary qualities are dependent on the interpretation of the subjective mode and the context of appearance. For example, a shadow is a secondary quality. It requires a certain lighting to be applied to an object. For another example, consider the mass of an object. Weight is a secondary quality since, as a measurement of gravitational force, it varies depending on the distance to, and mass of, very massive objects like the Earth, as described by Newton's law. It could be thought that mass is intrinsic to an object, and thus a primary quality. In the context of relativity, the idea of mass quantifying an amount of matter requires caution.

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Lesson 3: Workers' self-management and Quality Management

Self-management or Workers' self-management (also referred to as Labor management, Workers' control, Industrial democracy and Producer cooperatives) is a form of management that involves management of an organization by its workers. Self-management is a characteristic of many models of socialism, with proposals for self-management having appeared many times throughout the history of the socialist movement, advocated variously by market socialists, communists and anarchists.

There are many variations of self-management. In some variations, all the worker-members manage the enterprise directly through assemblies; in other forms, workers manage indirectly through the appointment of managers through election. Self-management may include worker supervision and oversight of an organization by elected bodies, election of specialized managers, or management without any specialized managers as such. The goals of self-management are to improve performance by granting workers greater autonomy in their day-to-day operations (self-directed activity), while reducing alienation and eliminating exploitation.

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Lesson 4: Process Monitoring and Measurement

Process management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, techniques and systems to define, visualize, measure, control, report and improve processes with the goal to meet customer requirements profitably. It can be differentiated from program management in that program management is concerned with managing a group of inter-dependent projects. But from another viewpoint, process management includes program management. In project management, process management is the use of a repeatable process to improve the outcome of the project. ISO 9001 promotes the process approach to managing an organization.

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Lesson 5: Strategies and Procedures Quality of Service

A customer may or may not also be a consumer, but the two notions are distinct, even though the terms are commonly confused. A customer purchases goods; a consumer uses them. An ultimate customer may be a consumer as well, but just as equally may have purchased items for someone else to consume. An intermediate customer is not a consumer at all. The situation is somewhat complicated in that ultimate customers of so-called industrial goods and services (who are entities such as government bodies, manufacturers, and educational and medical institutions) either themselves use up the goods and services that they buy, or incorporate them into other finished products, and so are technically consumers, too. However, they are rarely called that, but are rather called industrial customers or business-to-business customers. Similarly, customers who buy services rather than goods are rarely called consumers.

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Lesson 6: Total quality management

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the developed countries of North America and Western Europe suffered economically in the face of stiff competition from Japan's ability to produce high-quality goods at competitive cost. For the first time since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the United Kingdom became a net importer of finished goods. The United States undertook its own soul-searching, expressed most pointedly in the television broadcast of If Japan Can... Why Can't We? Firms began reexamining the techniques of quality control invented over the past 50 years and how those techniques had been so successfully employed by the Japanese. It was in the midst of this economic turmoil that TQM took root. The exact origin of the term "total quality management" is uncertain. It is almost certainly inspired by Armand V. Feigenbaum's multi-edition book Total Quality Control (OCLC 299383303) and Kaoru Ishikawa's What Is Total Quality Control? The Japanese Way (OCLC 11467749). It may have been first coined in the United Kingdom by the Department of Trade and Industry during its 1983 "National Quality Campaign". Or it may have been first coined in the United States by the Naval Air Systems Command to describe its quality-improvement efforts in 1985.

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Lesson 7: Iso 9000 and ISO 14000

ISO 14000 is a family of standards related to environmental management that exists to help organizations (a) minimize how their operations (processes etc.) negatively affect the environment (i.e. cause adverse changes to air, water, or land); (b) comply with applicable laws, regulations, and other environmentally oriented requirements, and (c) continually improve in the above. ISO 14000 is similar to ISO 9000 quality management in that both pertain to the process of how a product is produced, rather than to the product itself. As with ISO 9000, certification is performed by third-party organizations rather than being awarded by ISO directly. The ISO 19011 audit standard applies when auditing for both 9000 and 14000 compliance at once. The requirements of ISO 14001 are an integral part of the European Union‘s Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS). EMAS‘s structure and material requirements are more demanding, foremost concerning performance improvement, legal compliance and reporting duties.  

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Lesson 8: Lean Manufacturing, Lean enterprise and Lean Production

Lean software development (LSD) is a translation of lean manufacturing and lean IT principles and practices to the software development domain. Adapted from the Toyota Production System, a pro-lean subculture is emerging from within the Agile community.

The term lean software development originated in a book by the same name, written by Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck.The book presents the traditional lean principles in a modified form, as well as a set of 22 tools and compares the tools to agile practices. The Poppendiecks' involvement in the Agile software development community, including talks at several Agile conferences has resulted in such concepts being more widely accepted within the Agile community.

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Lesson 9: DMAIC, Six Sigma

DMAIC (an abbreviation for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) refers to a data-driven improvement cycle used for improving, optimizing and stabilizing business processes and designs. The DMAIC improvement cycle is the core tool used to drive Six Sigma projects. However, DMAIC is not exclusive to Six Sigma and can be used as the framework for other improvement applications.
Steps

DMAIC is an abbreviation of the five improvement steps it comprises: Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control. All of the DMAIC process steps are required and always proceed in the given order.

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Lesson 10: Zero Defects

or ZD) was a management-led program to eliminate defects in industrial production that enjoyed brief popularity in American industry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Quality expert Philip Crosby later incorporated it into his "Absolutes of Quality Management" and it enjoyed a renaissance in the American automobile industry—as a performance goal more than as a program—in the 1990s. Although applicable to any type of enterprise, it has been primarily adopted within supply chains wherever large volumes of components are being purchased (common items such as nuts and bolts are good examples).

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