ASQ CQPA Certification Exam Syllabus

2. Quality planning
- Define a quality plan, describe its purpose for the organization as a whole, and know who has responsibility for contributing to its development. (Understand)

3. Quality standards, requirements, and specifications
- Define and distinguish between national or international standards, customer requirements, and product or process specifications. (Understand)

4. Quality documentation
- Identify and describe common elements of various document control systems, including configuration management. Describe the relationship between quality manuals, procedures, and work instructions. (Understand)

5. Cost of quality (COQ)
- Define and describe the four cost of quality categories: prevention, appraisal, internal failure, and external failure. (Understand)

2. Audit components
- Identify various elements of the audit process, including audit purpose and scope, the standard to audit against, audit planning (preparation) and performance, opening and closing meetings, final audit report, and verification of corrective actions. (Understand)

3. Audit roles and responsibilities
- Identify and describe the roles and responsibilities of key audit participants: lead auditor, audit team member, client, and auditee. (Understand)

2. Team development
- Identify various elements in team building, such as inviting team members to share information about themselves during the initial meeting, using ice-breaker activities to enhance team membership, and developing a common vision and agreement on team objectives. (Apply)

3. Team stages
- Describe the classic stages of team evolution: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. (Understand)

4. Team roles and responsibilities
- Describe the roles and responsibilities of various team stakeholders: sponsor, champion, facilitator, team leader, and team member. (Understand)

5. Team conflict
- Identify common group challenges, including groupthink, members with hidden and/or competing agendas, intentional distractions, and other disruptive behaviors. Describe ways of resolving these issues and keeping team members on task. (Understand)

2. Six Sigma
- Identify key Six Sigma concepts, including variation reduction, voice of the customer (VOC), belt levels (yellow, green, black, master black), and their roles and responsibilities. (Understand)

3. Benchmarking
- Define and describe this technique and how it can be used to support best practices. (Understand)

4. Risk management
- Recognize the types of risk that can occur throughout the organization, such as scheduling, shipping/receiving, financials, operations and supply chain, employee and user safety, and regulatory compliance and changes. Describe risk control and mitigation methods: avoidance, reduction, prevention, segregation, and transfer. (Understand)

5. Business process management (BPM)
- Define and describe this continuous process improvement practice, including the business process lifecycle phases (Design, Modeling, Execution, Monitoring, and Optimization). (Understand)

2. Project management tools
- Select and interpret scheduling and monitoring tools, such as Gantt charts, program evaluation and review technique (PERT), and critical path method (CPM). (Apply)

2. Basic distributions
- Define and explain frequency distributions (normal, binomial, Poisson, and Weibull) and the characteristics of skewed and bimodal distributions. (Understand)

3. Probability concepts
- Describe and use probability concepts: independent and mutually exclusive events, combinations, permutations, additive and multiplicative rules, and conditional probability. Perform basic probability calculations. (Apply)

4. Reliability concepts
- Define basic reliability concepts: mean time to failure (MTTF), mean time between failures (MTBF), mean time between maintenance (MTBM), and mean time to repair (MTTR). Identify elements of the bathtub curve model and how they are used to predict failure patterns. (Remember)

2. Data types
- Identify, define, and classify data in terms of continuous (variables) and discrete (attributes or counts). Determine when it is appropriate to convert attributes data to variables measures. (Apply)

3. Data collection and analysis
- Identify and describe the advantages of collecting and analyzing real-time data. (Understand)

4. Data integrity
- Recognize methods that verify data validity and reliability from source through data analysis using various techniques such as auditing trails, vendor qualification, error detection software, training for record management, etc., to prevent and detect data integrity issues. (Apply)

5. Data plotting
- Identify the advantages and limitations of using this method to analyze data visually. (Understand)

2. Acceptance sampling
- Identify and define sampling characteristics, such as lot size, sample size, acceptance number, and operating characteristic (OC) curve. Identify when to use the probability approach to acceptance sampling. (Understand)

2. Rational subgroups
- Explain and apply the principles of rational subgroups. (Apply)

3. Control charts for attributes data
- Identify, select, and interpret control charts (p, np, c, and u) for data that is measured in terms of discrete attributes or discrete counts. (Analyze)

4. Control charts for variables data
- Identify, select, and interpret control charts (X-R, X-s and XmR) for data that is measured on a continuous scale. (Analyze)

5. Common and special cause variation
- Interpret various control chart patterns (runs, hugging, trends) to determine process control, and use SPC rules to distinguish between common cause and special cause variation. (Analyze)

6. Process capability measures
- Describe the conditions that must be met in order to measure capability. Calculate Cp, Cpk, Pp, and Ppk measures and interpret their results. (Analyze)

2. Hypothesis testing
- Calculate confidence intervals using t tests and the z statistic and determine whether the result is significant. (Analyze)

3. Design of experiments (DOE)
- Define and explain basic DOE terms: response, factors, levels, treatment, interaction effects, randomization, error, and blocking. (Understand)

4. Taguchi concepts and methods
- Identify and describe Taguchi concepts: quality loss function, robustness, controllable and uncontrollable factors, and signal to noise ratio. (Understand)

5. Analysis of variance (ANOVA)
- Define key elements of ANOVAs and how the results can be used. (Understand)

2. Supplier performance
- Describe supplier performance in terms of measures such as quality (e.g., defect rates, functional performance), price, delivery speed, delivery reliability, level of service, and technical support. (Understand)