Action plans - things that an organization must do to meet its strategic objectives [5]

Actionable - the ability of a measure or indicator to provide the basis for decisions at the level at which they are applied. [8]

Activity-based costing – an approach to management accounting that organizes information about the work or activity that consumes resources and delivers value in a business. [8]

Actual quality - the outcome of the production process and what is delivered to the customer. [4]

Aesthetics – how a product looks , feels, sounds, tastes, or smells. [1]

Affinity diagram – a technique for gathering and organizing a large number of ideas or facts. [5]

After action review - a process derived from the U.S. military that focuses on reviewing results as a basis for organizational learning. [7]

Agility - a term used to characterize flexibility and short cycle time. [7]

Alignment - consistency of plans, processes, actions, information, decisions, results, analysis, and learning to support key organization-wide goals. [14]

Appraisal costs – costs associated with efforts to ensure conformance to requirements [8]

Balanced scorecard - a set of performance measures that address financial, internal process, customer, and innovation and learning perspectives. [8]

Behavioral approach – a leadership theory that attempts to determine the behaviors that lead to successful task performance and employee satisfaction. [5]

Benchmarking – the search of industry best practices that lead to superior performance. [7]

Best practices – approaches that produce exceptional results, are innovative in the use of technology or human resources, and are recognized by customers or industry experts. [7]

Brainstorming – a group problem-solving procedure for generating ideas. [10]

Breakthrough - the accomplishment of any improvement that takes an organization to unprecedented levels of performance. [10]

Central limit theorem - a fundamental statistical result that characterizes the sampling distributions of the mean. [9]

Certified supplier - one that, after extensive investigation, is found to supply material of such quality that routine testing on materials received is unnecessary. [7]

Check sheet – a special type of data collection form in which the results may be interpreted on the form directly without any additional processing. [10]

Common causes of variation – the complex interactions of variations in materials, tools, machines, operators, and the environment. [9]

Companywide quality control - the Japanese concept of total quality control. [3]

Compensation and recognition – all aspects of pay and reward, including promotions, bonuses, and recognition, either monetary and nonmonetary or individual and group. [6]

Competitive advantage – a firm’s ability to achieve market superiority. [1]

Competitive benchmarking - studying products, processes, or business performance of competitors in the same industry to compare pricing, technical features, and other performance characteristics. [7]

Concurrent (simultaneous) engineering – a process in which all major functions involved with bringing a product to market are continuously involved with product development from conception to sales. [7]

Configuration management - a process for designing and maintaining software by controlling the set of software components that make up a complex system in order to provide an effective means for incorporating changes. [13]

Conformance – the degree to which physical and performance characteristics of a product match pre-established standards. [1]

Consumers – ultimate purchasers of a product or service. [4]

Consumer benefit package - the total package of products and services that a business offers to its customers. [4]

Contingency (situational) approach – leadership theory that holds that there is no universal approach to leadership; leadership depends on situational factors that may change over time. [5] 

Continuous improvement - incremental or rapid improvements that enhance value of products or services, reduce errors or waste, increase productivity and effectiveness of resource utilization, or improve responsiveness and cycle time performance. [1]

Control - the activity of ensuring conformance to requirements and taking corrective action when necessary. [11]

Control chart – a run chart with added control limits to characterize the range of statistical stability. [10]

Core competencies - behaviors, skills, and attributes critical to an organization's success. [6]

Core process – a process that drives the creation of products and services. [7]

Corporate culture – a company's value system and its collection of guiding principles. [14]

Cost of quality (COQ) - a measure of the costs associated with avoiding poor quality or incurred as a result of poor quality. [8]

Defects per million opportunities (dpmo) - a measure of quality expressed as a rate of defects per million. [8, 10]

Defects per unit - number of defects discovered divided by number of units produced. [8, 10]

Defective – an item having one or more defects. [12]

Deming cycle – a methodology for improvement based on four steps: Plan, Do, Study, Act. [10]

Deployment - the extent to which approaches are applied to all requirements of the Baldrige criteria. [3]  In the context of strategic planning, developing detailed action plans, defining resource requirements and performance measures, and aligning work unit, supplier, and partner plans with overall strategic objectives. [5]

Descriptive statistics – the efficient collection, organization, and description of data. [9]

Design-for-environment (DfE) - design process aimed at reducing disposal and regulatory costs, increasing the end-of-life value of products, reducing material use, and minimizing liabilities. [7]

Design for manufacturability (DFM) – the process of designing a product for efficient production at the highest level of quality. [7]

Design of Experiments - a technique to compare two or more methods to determine which is better or to determine levels of controllable factors to optimize the yield of a process or minimize the variability of a response variable. [9]

Design processes - all activities that are performed to incorporate customer requirements, new technology, and past learning into the functional specifications of a product. [7]

Design review - a process of reviewing designs to generate new ideas and solutions to help designers anticipate problems before they occur. [7]

Designed experiment – a test or series of tests that enables the experimenter to draw conclusions about the situation under study. [9]

Discovery sampling - a statistical sampling plan for attributes in which the expected rate of occurrence is zero. [9]

Dissatisfiers – requirements that are expected in a product or service. [5]

Durability – the amount of use one gets from a product before it physically deteriorates. [1]

Environmental assessment - an assessment of customer and market requirements; the competitive environment; financial, societal, and other risks; and human resource, operational, and supplier and partner capabilities as a basis for strategy development. [5]

Exciters/delighters – new or innovative features that customers do not expect. [4]

Experienced meaningfulness – the psychological need of workers to have the feeling that their work is a significant contribution to the organization and society. [6]

Expected quality - true customer needs and expectations. [4]

Experienced responsibility – the need of workers to be accountable for the quality and quantity of work produced. [6]

External customers – firms that act as intermediaries between a supplier and a consumer. [1]

External failure costs – costs that occur after poor-quality products reach the customer. [8]

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) - a process of identifying all the ways in which a failure can occur. [13]

Failure rate – number of failures per unit time. [13]

Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) - a logical procedure that lists potential hazards and works backward to develop a list of causes and origins of failures. [13]

Features – the "bells and whistles" of a product. [1]

Feedback from the job – the degree to which clear, timely information about the effectiveness of performance of the individual is available. [6]

High performance work - work approaches used to systematically pursue ever-higher levels of overall organizational and human performance. [6]

Histogram – a graphical representation of the variation in a set of data. [9]

Hoshin kanri – another term for policy deployment, a process for annual planning and implementation of strategies. [6]

House of Quality – a matrix that describes the relationships between customer and technical requirements as part of the quality function deployment approach. [7]

Human resource management -- those activities designed to provide for and coordinate the people of an organization. [6]

Internal benchmarking - identifying and transferring best practices within an organization. [14]

Internal customers – persons or departments that receive goods or services from suppliers within a company. [1]

Internal failure costs – costs incurred as a result of unsatisfactory quality found before delivery of a product to the customer. [8]

Interrelationship digraph – a graphical tool to identify and explore causal relationships among related concepts or ideas. [6]

Lot sentencing - determining whether to accept or reject a lot received from a supplier. [11]

Mass customization - providing personalized, custom-designed products to meet individual preferences at prices comparable to mass-produced items. [7]

Mastery descriptions - narratives of behavior that one who has mastered it would likely engage in. [6]

Matrix diagram – a "spreadsheet" that graphically displays relationships between ideas, activities, or other dimensions. [5]

Mean time to failure (MTTF) - average time until an item fails; the reciprocal of the failure rate. For repairable items, the mean time between failures (MTBF) is used. [13]

Measurement – the act of quantifying the performance dimensions of products, services, processes, and other business activities. [8]

Measures and indicators – numerical information that results from measurement. [8]

Metrology – the science of measurement. [11]

Mission – the reason for a firm’s or organization’s existence. [5]

Moment of truth - every instance in which a customer comes in contact with an employee of the company. [4]

Motivation – an individual's response to a felt need. [6]

Population - a complete set or collection of objects of interest .[9]

Practices – those activities that occur within a management system to achieve high performance objectives. [4]

Precision – the closeness of agreement between randomly selected individual measurements or results. [11]

Pre-control – an alternative to statistical process control in which samples are compared to specifications to determine whether or not to adjust a process. [12]

Predictive statistics – the development of future values based on historical data. [9]

Prevention costs – investments made to keep nonconforming products from occurring and reaching the customer. [8]

Probability distribution - a theoretical model of the relative frequency of a random variable. [9]

Problem – a deviation between what should be happening and what is actually happening. [10]

Problem solving - the activity associated with changing the state of what is actually happening to what should be happening. [10]

Problem solving teams – teams whose members gather to solve a specific problem and then disband. [6]

Process – a sequence of activities intended to achieve some result. [1]

Process benchmarking - studying key work processes such as distribution, order entry, or employee training to identify the most effective practices. [7]

Process capability – the range over which the natural variation of a process occurs as determined by the system of common causes. [9]

Process capability index – the ratio of the specification width to the natural tolerance of the process. [9]

Process capability study – a study designed to yield specific information about the performance of a process under specified operating conditions. [9]

Process decision program chart – a method for mapping out every conceivable event and contingency that can occur in solving a problem. [5]

Process management – the planning and administering of activities necessary to achieve a high level of performance and identifying opportunities for improvement. [7]

Process Model - the term used to describe the structure of the four major sections of the ISO 9000:2000 standards. [3]

Process owner – an individual or group accountable for process performance. [7]

Product life characteristics curve – a plot of the cumulative failure over time. [13]

Product-based definition of quality – quality as a function of specific measurable variables that differ in quantity among products. [1]

Production – the process of converting resources into products. [1]

Quality engineering - the process of establishing functional performance of a product to meet customer requirements and be produced economically and efficiently with high quality. [7]

Quality function deployment (QFD) – a process for translating customer requirements to design and operations. [7]

Quality manual – a document that serves as a permanent reference for implementing and maintaining a quality system. [11]

Quality policy – a statement of key quality objectives of an organization [11]

Quality Trilogy – Joseph Juran's characterization of fundamental quality processes: quality planning, quality control, quality improvement [3] 

Quincunx – a device for illustrating the natural process of variation. [3] 

Reliability (of measurement) - how well a measuring instrument consistently  measures the true value of a characteristic. [8]

Reliability (service definition) – the ability to provide what was promised, dependably and accurately. [5] 

Reliability failure – product failure after some period of use. [13]

Reliability function - a function representing the probability of survival. [13]

Reliability management – the process of establishing, achieving, and maintaining reliability objectives [13]

Repeatability (equipment variation) - variation in multiple measurements by an individual using the same instrument. [11]

Reproducibility (operator variation) – the variation in the same measuring instrument when it is used by different individuals to measure the same parts. [11]

Responsiveness – the willingness to help customers and provide prompt service. [5] 

Results - outcomes resulting from the deployment of approaches in the Baldrige criteria. [3]

Return on quality (ROQ) - a measure of the revenue gains expected against the costs associated with quality improvement activities.

Role approach – leadership theory that suggests that leaders perform certain roles in order to be effective. [5]

Root cause – a condition that causes a defect to occur, which once corrected, permanently prevents recurrence of the defect. [10]

Run chart – a line graph in which data are plotted over time. [10]

Sample space - the exhaustive set of outcomes from an experiment [9]

Sampling distribution - a probability distribution of sample statistics [9]

Sampling error - error resulting from the fact that samples may not always be representative of the population from which they are taken. [9]

Satisfiers – requirements customers say they want. [5] 

Scatter diagram – a plot of the relationship between two variables. [10]

Self managed team – a highly trained group of employees fully responsible for turning out a well-defined segment of finished work. [6]

Service – an activity that does not directly produce a physical product -- that is, the nongoods part of a transaction between a customer and provider. [2]

Service standards – measurable performance levels or expectations that define the quality of customer contact. [5]

Serviceability – speed courtesy, and competence of repair work. [1]

Seven management and planning tools - affinity diagrams, interrelationship digraphs, tree diagrams, matrix diagrams, matrix data analysis, process decision program charts, and arrow diagrams. [5]

Seven QC Tools - flowcharts, check sheets, histograms, Pareto diagrams, cause-and-effect diagrams, scatter diagrams, and control charts. [10]

Simple random sampling - a sampling technique in which every possible sample of a given size has an equal chance of being selected. [9]

Six-Sigma - an approach to measuring and improving product and service quality. [10]

Skill variety - the degree to which the job requires the worker to use a variety of skills and talents. [6]

Special (assignable) causes of variation – sporadic variation arising from external sources not inherent in the process. [9]

Specifications - targets and tolerances determined by designers of products and services. [1]

Stable system – a system governed only by common causes of variation. [9]

Standard error of the mean - the standard deviation of the sampling distribution of x-bar. [9]

Statistics - the science concerned wit the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. [9]

Statistical inference – the process of drawing conclusions about unknown characteristics of a population from which data were taken. [9]

Statistical process control (SPC) – a methodology for monitoring a process to identify special causes of variation and signal the need to take corrective action when appropriate. [12]

Statistical quality control (SQC) – the application of statistical methods for controlling quality. [1]

Statistical thinking - a philosophy of learning and action based on viewing all work as a system of interconnected processes, understanding that variation exists in all processes, and recognizing that understanding and reducing variation are keys to success. [9]

Strategic benchmarking - examining how companies compete and seeking the winning strategies that have led to competitive advantage and market success. [7]

Strategic planning – the process of envisioning an organization's future and developing the necessary procedures and operations to achieve that future. [5]

Strategic objectives - what an organization must change or improve to remain or become competitive. [5]

Strategies - broad statements that set the direction for the organization to take in realizing its mission and vision. [5]

Strategy – the pattern of decisions that determines and reveals a company’s goals, policies, and plans to meet the needs of its stakeholders. [5]

Stretch goals (breakthrough objectives) – challenging goals that force an organization to think in a radically different way. [7]

Substitutes for leadership theory - a theory that suggests that if characteristics of subordinates, nature of tasks performed and guidance and incentives provided by the organization are aligned, then formal leadership tends to be unproductive or counterproductive. [5]

Suggestion system - a management tool for submission, evaluation, and implementation of an employee's idea to save cost, increase quality, or improve other elements of work. [6]

Supplier and partner processes – processes that describe how supplier and partner relationships are managed. [7]

Supplier certification - a formal program to rate and certify suppliers. [7]

Support processes – processes that are critical to the operation of a business, but do not add value directly to a product or service. [7]

System – a set of functions or activities within an organization that work together for the aim of the organization. [2]

System design – the process of applying scientific and engineering knowledge to product a basic functional design that meets customer needs and manufacturing requirements. [7]

Tools [of quality] - graphical and statistical methods to plan work activities, collect data, analyze results, monitor progress, and solve problems. [1]

Total quality – a people-focused management system that aims at continual increase in customer satisfaction at continually lower real cost. [1]

Total quality control – a comprehensive approach to quality developed by A. V. Feigenbaum, primarily from an engineering perspective. [1]

Total quality management (TQM) – the system for managing for total quality and organization-wide performance excellence. [1]

Traceability – the ability to quantify a laboratory's measurement uncertainty in relationship to national standards. [11]

Trait approach – a leadership theory that involves discovering how to be a leader by examining the characteristics and methods of recognized leaders. [5]

Transactional (charismatic) theory - a leadership theory that assumes that certain leaders may develop the ability to inspire their subordinates to exert extraordinary efforts to achieve organizational goals, owing to the leader's vision and understanding of how to tap into the developmental needs of the subordinates.

Transcendent definition of quality – superiority or excellence. [1]