Cascading data sets: putting the pieces together.

Just as quality programs have evolved into organization-wide performance improvement efforts, the quality professional's role has expanded, bringing new challenges and expectations. The quality services umbrella, an operational framework for a total systems quality process, helps organization leaders and quality professionals identify organizational functions that contribute to overall performance. This article describes the benefits of utilizing the quality services umbrella framework through five examples. Each example highlights different benefits of the model, such as identifying a system's quality issues, enhancing performance improvement efforts, sustaining improvements, and effecting cost savings.