Improvement Insights Blog
ASQ Is Missing Out on a Huge Market for Quality
ASQ Membership is mainly manufacturing which is only 13% of US employment. How can we start helping the underserved?
Download my “Agile Process Innovation” E-Book
“I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].
“I was looking at one of ASQ’s media kit things and I was kind of surprised (but not really) when I looked at it and noticed that about 80 percent of the membership is manufacturing but only 13 percent was healthcare or other service-related things.
“The funny thing about that is that’s not how America is employed, right? 80% of America works in service industries and only 13 percent work in manufacturing. That means that ASQ has been catering to a very small marketplace. That’s the reason there’s only 88 000 members.
“What if we rethought our mission here? Maybe we can help those 80 percent in service industries, especially healthcare, right? If we could help those people start to figure out how to solve problems, make things better, faster, and cheaper this would be a cool thing, right? How do we create a hassle-free America, hassle free healthcare? Well, we have to get all those other businesses that are not represented in ASQ, and that might make ASQ’s membership grow by five[fold] or tenfold. That wouldn’t be all bad, right? That would be good for ASQ but we haven’t been doing that.
“Now recently I wrote a book called “Agile Process Innovation” which is about how do we take and scale down what we actually teach in Six Sigma and Lean and put that in a format that’s easier for the people in service industries to implement. They don’t have to know everything. They don’t need to know Gage R&R and all that other stuff. They don’t gotta, right? So how do we do that? I put a link at the bottom of this email where you can download my free pdf about this. You can buy a copy on Amazon if you want, but you can download it and get started with how do we start to solve these problems for everyone else.
“Now, in America manufacturing is a two trillion dollar industry, but I got news for you: Healthcare is a three trillion dollar industry, so that means all the service industries are huge and can really benefit from the things we teach and the skills that we offer and the software we have to make it happen, and guess what? We’re not doing it, all right?
“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Let’s go out and improve our ability to embrace more and more disciplines, more and more industries, service industries that really could benefit from what we’re doing. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”
