The Quality Movement
Unless you've been on a slots binge in a dark casino in Vegas for the last five years, you probably have at least heard of TQM (Total Quality Management), or the term "continuous improvement." These terms refers to the movement by operations managers everywhere to improve their bottom line, the success of their companies, and customer satisfaction by improving the quality of the processes that are involved in producing the product or service. Often, this push is instigated by pressure from competition. In order to get the competitive edge, you have to improve quality, price, as well as the delivery of your product. This requires the analysis of your processes that we talked about earlier, and the initiation of quality standards and improvements to those processes.Continuously improving quality is also known by the Japanese word "Kaizen." The key to Kaizen is eliminating waste from the business and production process. This is a way of improving production and reducing costs without much of a monetary investment.
Applying this concept to new processes takes a lot of attention and work. By definition, continuous means that the improvement activity is designed to be ongoing. Historically, skilled craftsmen practiced this concept, without giving it name, simply because they had to compete with other craftsmen and that's what it took to make a living. They had to constantly hone their skill to be faster, better, and more cost-effective. Making this idea a part of your everyday business processes will require planning, thought, and training. It will also require constant review and re-analysis. In effect, you will be on a constant mission to find better methods of doing what you do.
Involve Your Employees
Beginning the task of improving your processes requires involvement from your employees. This is a very simple way to dig up some potentially great ideas. Think about it this way. You do your job every day. Every day you probably think, "hey, if I didn't have to wait for this, I could get that done a lot faster." Your employees probably have many thoughts just like that. Get their opinions and use them. Not only will you benefit by getting some great ideas, you'll also benefit because simply involving your employees creates a better working environment, more job satisfaction for them, and more support for the quality improvement goal. There is a definite correlation between employee involvement and employee satisfaction. There is the same correlation between employee satisfaction and productivity improvements.
Keys to Making It Work
In order for quality improvements, particularly continuous improvements, to take place, your business must be able to turn loose of its existing ideals about how it does things, and especially how upper management thinks things should be done. The mind-set to make continuous improvement work in a business will require three things:
- There must be motivation for employees and supervisors. They have to want to do these things. Setting up a reward program is usually key to getting the best level of support. Rewards can be monetary or non-monetary. You may battle with the HR department over this since those policies are typically set at the corporate level rather than the operational level. [Unless you function as both!]
- There must be a clear vision of the big picture by all employees. Your staff must understand the ultimate goal, what is expected of them, what the reward is, and how it is going to work.
- The necessary tools and training must be available. Your staff must have the proper tools they need to make it possible to do what is expected of them. This may or may not require much of an investment, but it is something to make sure you take into consideration when you begin planning.
By cooperation, we also mean upper level management must also buy into the idea. This doesn't just mean "talking the talk" and using "quality" words in your vision and mission statements. It means they have to "walk the walk" in order for the quality movement to succeed in your business. Remember these keys to walking the walk.
- Many processes cross into different functional areas. Make sure you have good communication between groups so that every area can understand, work through problems, and ultimately "walk the walk."
- In order to get true total company buy-in, set up groups of middle managers that will regularly review the process improvement activities and compare them with the original goals you've established.
- In the same vein, set up teams of workers from all job function areas that will help ensure that the quality plan is working at the operational level. They can also help solve other problems that arise as a result of a process change and refine it to make it work.
- Having exposure to the ultimate buyers or customers is a good wake-up call for anyone who normally doesn't see the fruit of their labor in use. By giving everyone exposure to customers and their needs, your business can reap the benefits of better understanding, as well as some good ideas for improvement.
- Measure the satisfaction levels of both your customers and your employees, and use the feedback to further improve your quality.
Aside from extracting quality- and process-improvement ideas from your employees and management, there is also the area of waste in which to focus your attention. Although waste can be looked at from the perspective of simply not utilizing raw materials in the most efficient way, it often considerably affects your bottom line through defective products. You can combat defects and ultimately improve quality in three unique ways:
- Preventing defects through improved processes, training, and equipment.
- Improve the product through re-design to reduce problems, returns, customer complaints and dissatisfaction.
- Improve quality checkpoints on both the product prior to shipping, and the production process itself.
- The physical actions required to produce the product -- Is there unnecessary movement required by your employees such as lifting and carrying objects, bending, pushing, etc. This may not only take additional time and reduce productivity, but it may also increase chances of injury and repetitive trauma for your workers.
- The right tools for the job -- Often a large machine is used to do a job a much smaller machine could do. This creates waste in the amount of energy consumed, as well as the additional cost of the equipment itself. Re-visit your equipment.
- High inventory levels -- If your levels of inventory are too high you're wasting not only money on production, but also money for the space and energy required to house that inventory. (We'll go over more inventory and supply issues in the next session.)
- Transporting parts and products -- Do your workers spend too much time moving materials and products from one area to another? Could you rearrange work spaces to bring materials closer to where they are needed, and move the space for finished products closer to the area where they are actually shipped?
- Down-time -- Are there too many periods of down-time where employees are waiting for materials, information, or other things? Can you rearrange the work flow to engineer out some of those time lags?
ISO 9000
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It's a little known fact, however, that ISO is not actually an acronym for International Organization for Standardization. It really is a word derived from the Greek word isos, which means "equal". OK, now it makes more sense, especially if you also think about other words that use that prefix like isometric which means of equal measure. [Source: International Organization for Standardization web site.] |
To make your job a little easier, ISO has developed internationally recognized standards for quality known as the ISO 9000 series. This series of standards is used internationally as a foundation for developing quality systems in business. The ISO 9000 standards have recently been significantly revised and updated to be more applicable to all industries and to bring in more of a focus on continuous improvement. They also strived to create a more user-friendly document!
The series is broken down into many documents, however the primary pieces we are interested in for this workshop are the ISO 9000:2000 fundamentals and vocabulary document, the ISO 9001:2000 quality management systems requirements document, and the ISO 9004:2000 quality management systems guidelines for performance improvements document. There is also the ISO 14000 series that deals with environmental issues. We'll talk about that a little later in this article.
There is a good resource with instructions for implementing these guidelines into your own quality program at the ISO web site.
Quality should be the guiding principle for every function of the business. If you can create an environment where everyone thinks about quality and is motivated to improve it, you'll have a leg up in continuous improvements to your processes.
Now, let's move on to your supply chain and inventory issues...
