Quality Assurance Terms Glossary/V

From Elsmar Cove Quality Assurance and Business Standards Wiki

V

Validation

Value - "Worth in usefulness or importance to the possessor; utility or merit." (American heritage dictionary) "price without a measure of quality is meaningless" (Deming) value is a combination of attributes, including quality. Some writers include price in the definition of value.

Value Added - A customer-based perspective on quality that is used by services, manufacturing, and public sector organizations. The concept of value-added involves a subjective assessment of the efficacy of every step in the process for the customer.

Value Based - A definition of quality relating to the social benefit from a product or service.

Value Chain - A tool, developed by Michael Porter, that decomposes a firm into its core activities.

Value Chain Activities - Porter’s chain of activities, including inbound logistics, production, and outbound logistics.

Value System - A network of value chains.

Variable - A characteristic that may take on different values.

Variables Data - Data arising by obtaining a quantitative measure of a characteristic on an individual item or event. Often used to describe continuous data.

Variance - The mean of squared deviations of individual values from the average. Is a measure of spread.

Variation - Any quantifiable difference between individual "items". In business variation is often concerned with the differences between actual outcomes and what is expected by the customer. All variation is caused which can be classified as being due to common causes (random) or special causes (assignable).

Variety - The range of product and service choices offered to customers.

Vendor

Verification

Vertical Deployment - A term denoting that all of the levels of the management of a firm are involved in the firm’s quality efforts.

Virtual Teams - Teams that do not physically meet but are linked together through intranets and the internet.

Vision - Picturing something as it ought to be or as you would want it to be in its ideal state.

Voice of the Customer - (1) A term that refers to the wants, opinions, perceptions, and desires of the customer. (2) The needs and wants of the customer (or aggregate of customers) for a service or product that typically is expressed as a "target", but in the past was usually expressed as a set of tolerances (a "target" with acceptable deviations in either direction). This information provides the basis for designing and managing the process. A process sometimes used to translate the customer voice into product and process planning is [[Quality Function Deployment (QFD).

Voice of the Process - Whatever the process is producing (the outcomes). How this gets reported will depend on the sampling and measurement methods used. How the reported information gets translated will depend on the knowledge the interpreter has about that process, about variation and about systems.