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<pre>Hi to all,

Apologies for the length of this but ........

Fundamentally you have to acknowledge that some form of QA (quality
assurance) is necessary in all businesses. It should focus on
exceeding customer quality expectations. In the bad old days we had
SQC (Statistical Quality Control) which focussed essentially on batch
controls but was reactive rather than proactive. Some people (Malcolm
Baldridge being the main guru) woke up to the fact that preventative
quality control was far better and that designing quality into
processes and products was important and far cheaper than rectifying
faults. Hence TQM was born (and the slogan "quality is free").

Of course, you had to have someone certify that your TQM approach was
satisfactory and that's why ISO standards were developed for
different industries. ISO accreditation is a way of saying that a
third party has looked at your processes and they meet the standards.
(By the way, that's all that auditors do with company accounts).
About 9 years ago the TQM movement was very strong, particularly in
manufacturing industry and ISO 9000 accreditation was the way to go,
not only in Australia but also across Asia where it became a movement
amongst believers.

HACCP (Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Points) is a technique for
identifying potential problem areas in the process which are leading
causes of defective products. This is particularly critical in olive
oil processing because at best we can only maintain the quality in
the fruit delivered to us. It is first and foremost a management tool
for delivering a high quality product.

If you treat HACCP/ISO/TQM/OliveCare as a paper-filling exercise,
then you are only cheating yourself and the public. In fact, you are
exposing yourself to public liability. Gino Russo and others should
firstly be thanked for taking the trouble to develop these courses
before being criticised for making them inconvenient to attend.

One of the beneficial roles of these courses and audits is that they
have the potential of reducing your insurance liability. These
courses should (and this requires industry level action to become a
reality) reduce your insurance premiums and effectively be "free".

The other business reason for becoming quality accredited in some
form is that buyers along the supply chain will want to reduce their
liability to legal action by shifting responsibility to others. If
you don't have accreditation, they won't take the risk (particularly
in Australia). Without industry accreditation, it's also certain we
will provide our export markets with a tool to place non-tarriff
barriers to our export trade.

Let's be critical of how these things are being implemented. Let's be
wary of those who simply see them as a marketing tool without doing
the hard work involved in monitoring and review. But, let's not throw
out the baby with the bathwater by missing the significant benefits
of these programs.

Regards,
Lambros Karavis
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Karavis & Associates Phone: (+61) 414 997 997
850 Buffalo-Stony Creek Rd Fax/Voice Mail:
(+61) 3 9923 6999
Stony Creek VIC 3957 eMail: lkaravis@...
Australia
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