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Friday, December 14, 2007

Moldovan Quality infrastructure


The Swedish King Charles XII, who stayed in the Ottoman territories 4 years between 1709 and 1713, lived off the largess of the Sultan and eventually overstayed his welcome. The Janissaries detailed to guard him were ordered to seize the Swedish King and only succeeded after a pitched fight of a handful of Swedes pitted against thousands of Janissaries reluctant to hurt the King - that tumult came to be called "The Kalabalik at Bender". An EU-team, representing Germany, Belgium, and Sweden arrived nearly 300 years later, to assess economical priority areas for approximation of the Moldovan Quality infrastructure with the European.

Ethiopian Quality infrastructure

Occupational safety seem not to be a big issue in Ethiopian construction industry.









The German "Building Ethiopia"-program will probably change that by Capacity Building.











Four days, including a weekend, was a first intervention to support the transforming of the standards part of QSAE to an Ethiopian National Standards Body in line with international principles.

Monday, July 09, 2007

Quality has followed my working life, first implicit, later more explicit when I came to work directly with Quality management and now with Quality infrastructures.

The year I decided to leave the Royal Library and the project on the LIBRIS Library Information System (http://www.libris.kb.se/english/indexeng.jsp), I received, as a personal gift from one of my colleagues, a book with the title Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig. The book became on my desk some time, before I opened it, and started to read it. I was not motivated for reading about neither Zen nor Motorcycles. Then I found a note inserted between two pages, from my colleague:
"We miss you in the project, ... I am not the only one in the library world, who feels sad about your departure from the project. I have tried to figure out what it is that is so sad. When I read about this book [Zen...] I found what it was: With you, Quality disappeared from the project!"
First I really felt ashamed, not having understood what the message was. After a while, and especially after reading the whole book, I became glad and proud. I hope I let my colleague Ingeborg know about my pride and satisfaction!

Having entered standardization already during the library project, Quality did not appear explicitly until the ISO 9000-drafts were presented in 1986. The SIS-support for organizations that wanted to implement the standards changed my working life, from Public Communication in general into Quality Management. During the early 90's it sometimes became a little bit too much. That may explain the advice I gave my son Tom, when he, in his work was asked to join a Quality development project. He wanted to prepare himself by reading some of the quality literature. He certainly knew the extensive space my books on Quality occupied in my bookshelf. From The Quality handbook, by Juran, to standard documents from the ISO 9000-series. I hesitated to recommend any book in which the word Quality were endlessly repeated, and were choosing two examples, which both dealt with the concept Quality, without using the term, i.e. books that were dealing with Quality, without mentioning it. The books were The Goal, by Eli Goldratt, and The World Champions [in Swedish], by Jan Helling. Both complied with my criterion; dealing with Quality without using the Quality terminology.

When moving from Quality management to International Development Co-operation around the year 2000, I found the concept Quality used in a new context: Quality infrastructure. In the beginning I had a lot of reservations to this use of the Quality-concept in such a context. Quality was usually defined as a characteristic of a delivered produce. Coming to "national infrastructures", I found it difficult to apply the existing Quality terminology. When I came to attend the planning activities within CEN of the EU-ASEAN Economic co-operation programme on Standards, Conformity Assessment and Quality, I felt a need for clarifying the Quality infrastructure-concept in a market perspective using the Process approach, that is mapping activities performed by using the verb form, instead of the usual Organizational approach, by using nouns for disciplines or institutions involved. That conceptual model is described in a recent article, published in ISO Focus, June 2007. To read the article, please visit my web site http://www.ambiprospect.com/ambi/en.

On my blog on Quality infrastructure, http://qualityinfrastructure.blogspot.com I will try to report on interesting developments in the area, an area which to my knowledge, is missing such a reviewing service. With a blog reader (web based RSS-reader) like Bloglines or Google Reader, you can easily get a notice of all new posts to this blog by subscribing to it by RSS- or Atom-feeds.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

What does the term "quality infrasatructure" mean? In the past, the abbreviation MSTQ was used, standing for Metrology, Standardisation, Testing and Quality. When "accreditation" was introduced, the abbreviation SQAM was sometimes preferred, standing for Standardisation, Quality assurance, Accreditation and Metrology. The International Trade Center (created by UNCTAD and WTO) states in a report A STRATEGIC APPROACH TO THE QUALITY ASSURANCE CHALLENGE from 2001:
"As accreditation must now be built into the quality infrastructure, there has been a shift from an emphasis on MSTQ (metrology or measurement traceability, standards, testing and
quality assurance) to SQAM (standards, quality assurance, accreditation and
metrology)
."

Probably it was thought that "testing" was part of "quality assurance". Den numera vanligaste termen har kommit att bli Quality Infrastructure, som omfattar Standards, Metrology, Testing, Certification, Accreditation. See e.g. brochure from PTB in Germany.

A most comprehensive list of references to the concept "Quality Infrastructure" is contained in the service from Karsten Weitzenegger Consulting.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

ExportSource.ca - Let's Get Technical: An Exporter's Guide to Technical Standards

Article about standard from a Canadian export service