Building and Sustaining a Culture of Quality
Concurrent Session
Branko Bufacchi
Quality Manager
European Patent Office
The Hague, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands
Michael Levenhagen, ASQLSSBB, LBC, PMP
Chair
ASQ Lean Enterprise Division
Oshkosh, Wisconsin
Level: Advanced
Division: Service Quality Division
A culture of quality enables an organization to continually satisfy interested parties. Service industries rely on human effort to create and maintain services rather than provide tangible objects, and need to consider how to build a culture of quality. A service organization with international branches faces the additional challenge of differing cultural norms, and an intergovernmental, treaty-based nonprofit service organization faces even more. This session shows how such a complicated organization can build and sustain a quality culture to guarantee service excellence. It covers the path taken and the lessons learned by the European Patent Office, and shows that their chosen approach, namely certification under the ISO 9001 standard, is a sustainable framework that could benefit all organizations in their quest to provide exceptional service. The focus is on those aspects of implementing ISO 9001 that proved especially beneficial and/or challenging within the context of this particular organization. Participants will be able to assess which aspect of the standard could be of value to their own service organization.