visions

Visions of Quality

When our memories outweigh our dreams, we have grown old.
Bill CLINTON

To have a vision of where the Quality journey should lead, and clearly communicate that vision, is a vital part of any manager’s job.

My present vision is the result of continuous updates of those I have seen over the years, since those heady days of TQM. I do not believe the fundamental elements of Quality have changed, nor will change. The emphasis may change, dependent upon the environment and how well an element is understood. For example, when TQM started in the 1980s little emphasis was put on data; today companies’ Quality has improved to a level where the use of data is vital if further progress is to be made.

The definition of Quality is still developing. Words to be included as normal today, but not common 10 years ago are:

Customer expectations – not just needs – of QCD
Provided in a sustainable way – not just the cheapest suitable raw material
Not putting anyone at risk or harm
Not exploiting the underprivileged

My perception of today’s Seven Key Elements for Quality are to:

Understand processes, both manufacturing and business.
Continually Improve = Problem Solve = Variability Reduction
Listen to customer epectations
Value people, teams and a learning culture
Speak with data
Choose managers that lead
Document the processes within a Quality System

The old seven dimensions of WCP, focussed on specific aspects of the business that required improvement. These had been driven by customers and competition;

process capability,
understanding customer needs,
training,
innovation,
production line effectiveness,
supply chain management,
EH&S.

As new levels of operational effectiveness have been reached and become a part of the way things are done, the focus changes to weak aspects of the process, with the confidence that the old seven are a part of the culture.

1. Understand processes, both manufacturing and business

The first step in gaining control over an organisation is to know and understand the basic processes (Taylor, 1911; Deming, 1982; Juran, 1988). Not just use processes.

In 1809 Nicolas Appert discovered and used the sterilisation process to preserve food; a lot of people subsequently died from food poisoning, through eating food preserved with the Appert system. Then in the 1860s Pasteur collected special data to understand the process, and was able to determine the key parameters in the process which ensures food safety; the people stopped dying. This is often described as a breakthrough. Now people only die from food poisoning when the key parameters are ignored.

Are you still using your processes or have you made the breakthrough to understand your processes? A quick check you can make is to ask: what are the key parameters and what percentage of the process variability is explained through their control? Even though you may think you have a standard process, often key parameters can be specific to a plant, due to raw material differences, environmental differences, machinery differences. Your level of understanding has to be much greater than it was ten years ago as you are beginning to refine the process to new levels. Ten years ago you possibly understood 60%, today to be competitive you need to be pushing towards 95%.

Issues

Huge scope for improvement in business processes (estimated 50% waste).

Some industries are operating at very low levels of defect in the manufacturing, so have transferred their attention to analyse weaknesses in their business processes. This leads to the increased importance of selecting and developing, good people. Whereas we could improve mechanical processes with science and technology, business processes live or die on the basis of the people within them.

Improving business processes is seen as the next significant saving in people.

We must be obsessed with process understanding

As the understanding of manufacturing processes improves, standardisation is critical if we are to benefit from process knowledge.

Think how often you find one plant’s ability to provide a standard product to a customer is better than another plant’s ability. There are differences between the processes. Elimination of small differences between processes will become more important as defect levels drop.

True, there is more than one way to skin a cat, but if operator A starts with process A then operator B takes over with process B it will be a disaster.

It is difficult to understand a process and then share that understanding.

Even simple processes are difficult to remember. How observant are you about your own processes?

Increasingly processes are designed to cross company boundaries

The success of quality will increasingly depend upon connecting up separately managed processes. The consumer knows this as buying a package.

When ATT & Apple launched the i-phone in June 2007, they sold 270k in first 30 hours; they didn’t work. Apple immediately blamed AT&T and the recriminations started. The auditors had checked that all the purchase invoices were filed correctly, but not that the system was robust.

During an earthquake which measured 6.7 in NW of Japan, at Kashiwazaki, Niigata prefecture on 16 July 2007 (fortunately a public holiday) Riken the supplier of piston rings(cost €2 a ring) suffered damage to the plant. For five days, from 20 to 25 July 2007, Toyota had 12 car plants on stop, delaying 50,000 cars.

Maintain your boiler with the Baxi Heat Team. Advertised by Baxi, but in the small print maintenance organisation is handled by Domestic & General Insurance. When I had a problem with the service, they each blamed the other.

Lessons Learned

Waste is inversely proportional to process understanding.
Lack of knowledge about process requirements upstream and downstream are a major source of waste.
Processes are so complex, at the level of understanding now required, that improved Process mapping / documentation is inevitable for progress.
We must start to work on business processes.

Vision

A perfect understanding of key processes, documented in a way that will share the knowledge with others and facilitate decisions.
Joint investigation between supplier – customer, to refine process controls.
The ability to transfer a process between plants and suffer no loss of quality; as the chemical industry does now.
Decisions about process changes being made with reference to the process map.
Lights out operation.

2. Continually Improve = Problem Solve = Variability Reduction

When there is talk of improvement, there will be problem solving in the systems and processes that determine quality, delivery and cost.

Continually Improving = Problem Solving = Variability Reduction

Everyone needs to understand Quality, or you get Oh you need to talk to the Quality department about that.

Geoff Tennant said: Six-sigma involves much more than simply running a few quality teams to improve performance in existing processes. Long term success will depend upon the organisation’s ability to align to customer processes, to ensure consistency and control with regimentation and to continually adapt to the changing environment.

This concept of flexible consistency seems to have been the source of GE’s phenomenal success. It is believed that the key was identifying six-sigma as a common metric so that everyone within the organisation – at any level or within any department – had the same, clearly defined vision, goals and tools to achieve the desired outcome.

Ten years ago, we were trying to convince people that change was necessary. Today we understand that it is the rate of change that correlates with profit. There are still a few people left around that would do well to read Albert Einstein’s quote One definition of insanity is doing nothing and expecting things to improve. Originally said about politicians.

is a tool to help you understand better a process, by removing all the unnecessary rubbish and distractions. It must become a part of the culture to have a clean and ordered workplace

Perception and truth about a process

It is common sense that if something goes wrong with the process, which results in waste (lost time, lost customer, additional cost) we must correct it such that it does not happen again.

Lean looks for better ways of doing things that already work; this is the death knell of the saying If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

Issues

A culture of systematic problem solving.

Faced with the choice between working on a problem solving and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy working on the proof. John GALBRAITH

The Government requires data to be kept on response times of emergency vehicles; not the demand by time and location. One region did some problem solving and as a result collected data on demand. From the analysis they relocated vehicles. Another regional chief on being asked why he didn’t do the same thing, answered it wouldn’t work here. I suspect they were so involved in cheating the system of targets imposed by government they had no time for problem solving.

Wrong measures being used to.

Government KPIs mostly show things are getting better, but we as service users can see they are getting worse.

The National target for arriving at a cat A incident is 8 minutes in 75% of cases. Why 75%? No rational reason. When the target first set, managers argued the clock should only start when he work was under their control. Understandable, but wrong. The measure should reflect the patients need; rather than argue about when the clock starts, better to question the usefulness of the target. What is the purpose of an ambulance? Save life? Or answer in 8 minutes. The basis of the 8 minutes was to address cardiac arrest. Only 2% of calls are for cardiac arrest. Perhaps there is another solution. Or should we classify success as arriving in under 8 minutes and the patient dies and failure as arriving in more than 8 minutes and the patient survives.

Cheating is rife, they even have a name for it in the service, Gaming.

Employees face conflicts when management ask then to achieve targets that focus on one aspect of Quality.

Customer complaints

There is nothing unusual about a new problem leading to a complaint, but less usual is business learning from the mistake. The purpose of complaint recording is to improve product and service to customer, not reduce the times a customer complains.

Repeat complaints are unacceptable.

Complaints are moving increasingly towards litigation; this does not mean you can eliminate complaints, but it does mean you should think more about risk in the process as a basis of improvement work. It is also a motivator for Quality Improvement.

Training

There is evidence to suggest that much of the past training has been ineffective; there has to be a better way of defining who, what, when, how for training. Six-sigma training is widely used in Indian call centres. There is a move towards more service people than manufacturing, applying for membership of CQI.

Creative Solutions

Creative solutions, not old ones used by the competition, are vital if a business is to win.

This is difficult for Quality people as creativity / innovation means inconsistency; one common definition of Quality is eliminating inconsistencies. Genetically, every difference that makes us unique is a mutation, a defect; without that we would all be identical. Often it is the defect that is better than the previous version, so when we find defects in an audit, often they get discarded and an opportunity to improve is lost

Not my problem

Some senior managers play pass the problem; re-organise, pass the costs to another department. Does this really improve Quality?

In the 1980s some multi-nationals left process managers responsible for the Quality of the process for some 18 months after they had been promoted and moved to better things.

In some public sector services, there has been immunity from criminal prosecution; this has now been withdrawn and senior managers go to prison

Lessons Learned

The complexity of processes means the old gurus, experts or managers can no longer be guaranteed to provide an instantaneous solution; this characterised 1960s hedonism.
There is not sufficient time to improve everything; there must be a sensible metric to prioritise.
Some people (especially managers) believe it is not their job to problem solve; we are all responsible for the processes in which we work.
There is no place for problem solving tools until there is a management controlled system in place to prioritise improvement.
Training concepts have to change.
Tools need to evolve with the needs and experience of the employees.
The improvement tools of manufacturing, with small modifications, are very relevant to the Service industries (and hence business processes)
People having solutions before they understand the problem is daft and wasteful, yet many people see it as a means of exhibiting knowledge. The chief cause of problems is solutions… Eric SEVAREID.

Vision

A culture where people want to improve, because that is how their boss became successful.
Teams working on systematic improvement.
Measures based on customer requirements, automatically collected data, provided to the front line for making decisions/improvements
Training based on a Just-In-Time approach; facilitated by Quality.
Complaints seen as a source of improvement ideas.

3. Listen to customers

A whole new industry and science has grown up to help business listen to its customers. Companies like TARP. Customers have such a wide choice that anyone not following the market expectations will suffer.

An important concept, now twenty years old is the Service Profit Chain, first published in Harvard Review 1994, by Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger.

Internal leadership Each level drives the one below.
Internal Quality
Employee satisfaction
Employee loyalty
Employee productivity
ValueCustomer satisfaction
Profitability.

Issues

Surveys that genuinely try to understand customer expectations, not justify the existing or planned service and product. ISO 9000: version 2000 encouraged customer surveys.The fact that Customer Satisfaction was a requirement of ISO9000 did have a negative effect on some business.A typical example NHS public consultation called Making it Better, ran from Jan to April 2006. No other issue in the history of a northern town had ever recorded such an overwhelming response. Over 50,000 residents want to maintain services at the local Hospital. Having done such a big selling job on 'Making it Better' the feedback was NOT what the authority wanted to hear in 2006. As of January 2008, nothing had been heard.My bank, which goes to extraordinary lengths to prevent customers phoning their branch or developing any relationship with staff, actually promotes itself as 'your local bank' and regularly sends out satisfaction surveys. What do they do with the answers?
Quality working more closely with Sales to better understand customer expectationsSelling is a part of the customer process and as such should be scheduled for improvement. To make it as effective as possible, it needs to be consistent, yet flexible to meet the needs of individual customers.A process to analyse and resolve the gap between the reality of available services and product with the expectations of a potential customer is a major challenge.
The use of KPIs that lead to customer satisfactionI can turn up after eight minutes and save someone’s life and it will be counted a failure. I can turn up in less than eight minutes and someone dies and it is counted as a success. Tom Reynolds, London ambulance driver, 2007.

Lessons Learned

To understand expectations is vital, so an effective method to listen to customers must be in place.Never before has the internal customer been so important; we must understand his needs. VisionAutomatic feedback from sales / marketing to help prioritise both the changes and the development to product and services.

4. Value people, teams and a learning culture

Selection of people, the learning culture of the business and the team spirit, will be the major influences on an effective process; this will lead to low cost and satisfied customers.

Competence is a mixture of knowledge and experience, whereas knowledge is generally defined by pieces of paper. In the same way a degree in engineering from Cambridge is different from a degree in media studies from the Falmouth College of Arts, Black Belt qualifications can vary.

Issues

The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable advantage you have; the technology of your industry is probably available to everyone.

Historically, many companies relied on the technology to give them an edge; even new technology today will not give an edge unless it is fully understood and consistently used by the users.

People’s actions / decisions / knowledge provide the critical elements of a business process

When we introduced inspectors, some people making things decided that they no longer had to concern themselves with the correctness of product; that had become the problem of the quality department.

Autocontrol has reversed that process in the manufacturing industry.

Then a similar problem surfaced with business processes. In trying to improve and achieve consistency, procedures and work instructions were introduced. This gave some people the excuse to abdicate responsibility for ensuring a process was carried out in the best way; the creation of an invoice, the monthly reporting process, … We now need to pass the responsibility for business procedures back to those who operate them.

People selected and trained to form a balanced team

When a team is performing at its best, you’ll usually find that each team member has clear responsibilities. Just as importantly, you’ll normally see that every role needed to achieve the team’s goal is being performed fully and well. But often, despite clear roles and responsibilities, a team will fall short of its full potential.

Perhaps some team members don’t complete what you expect them to do.

Perhaps some team members are not quite flexible enough, so things ‘fall between the cracks’.

Maybe someone who is valued for their expert input fails to see the wider picture, and so misses out tasks or steps that others would expect.

Perhaps one team member become frustrated because he or she disagrees with the approach of another team member.

Dr Meredith Belbin famously observed that people in teams tend to assume different “team roles”. He defines a “team role” as “a tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way" and named nine such team roles that underlie team success.

By understanding your team role within a particular team, you can develop your strengths and manage your weaknesses as a team member, and so improve how you contribute to the team.

Team leaders and team development practitioners use the Belbin model to help create more balanced teams. Teams can become unbalanced if all team members have similar styles of behaviour or team roles.

If team members have similar weakness, the team as a whole may tend to have that weakness. If team members have similar team-work strengths, they will compete (rather than co-operate) for the team tasks and responsibilities that best suit their natural styles. So you can use the model with your team to help ensure that necessary team roles are covered, and that potential behavioural tensions or weaknesses among the team member are addressed.

Employees at interface with customer have authority to make big decisions.

By very nature of the process at the interface, customers expect quick response. When they get it wrong, Quality suffers. Competent, experienced trained people required

There have been so many new initiatives in recent years, that they can only have been an academic exercise; they can not lead to a cultural change. BOHICA

Lessons Learned

There is no room for spectators.
Managers must believe through personal positive experiences; not pay lip service
Balanced teams are needed in today’s processes
The succession of new initiatives has delayed cultural change.

Vision

People that are valued (not paid more), part of a team, trained in process understanding (critical stages, ..), and customer understanding.
Skills continually maintained for business processes, like machines; vital as business processes depend on people.

5. Speak with data

The approach to how we improve, has changed and will change as the level of process perfection increases. At a level of 5% defects, speak with data manifested itself as experienced people guessing with a 70% confidence of being right. At 63ppm we need 95%, even 99% confidence. ISO 9000: version 1987 eliminated a lot of variability and waste from undocumented processes. Now we need a level of process understanding which will deliver very low levels of defect; whether that defect is mechanical process or a business process; this demands increased use of data for decisions.

Issues

See no data, hear no data, speak no data.

Some people will say that those who spend time analysing data are not real decision makers. They see it as a waste of time, possibly through a bad experience when using data. Perhaps they have never been correctly taught how to analyse data for decision making. Perhaps they are frightened of being shown up as incompetent. Perhaps it is unfashionable within their business to use data. Poor decisions can be hidden if there is no trail of how the data was analysed to make a decision; it becomes just one of those risky decisions that did not pay off and will hopefully be quickly forgotten. We know the caveman genes in us encourage emotive response to decisions, rather than rational thought.

As long as the data users are in the minority, it will be a tough journey, but that is changing as more people experience continuing success with the use of good data. Today, a common insult in business for non-data users is Morons in a hurry.

The absolute level of risks (as opposed to the RPNs) is increasing; there is less scope for poor decisions.

Customers are more demanding and blame suppliers for smaller and smaller deviations from the perfect product. The litigious society of today is increasing the costs of suppliers who fail to supply to specification. Due diligence can only be used when it has been shown the provider of the product or service truly has demonstrated a real effort to measure the process.

Managers must be more interested in how the decision was made than the decision itself.

Traditionally managers achieved their promotion through experience of working in the processes. Experience led to gurus. Today, the complexity of processes leaves it unlikely that a guru can comprehend the full implications of changing some part of a process. When a manager is told of a new decision, his main concern should be to see the analysis done to arrive at the decision, so he has confidence it is a good decision, rather than become enthusiastic about the technical detail resulting from the decision.

It is not understood, that data has to be collected specially to make key decisions.

Data and control charts are vital to monitor complex business / service processes

Net promoter score in business process

Lessons Learned

All measured quantities are uncertain, with every estimate ask for a range.
Happenstance data is dangerous
What many believe to be a logical decision from a set of data is often flawed because basic statistical calculations are considered not needed.

Vision

Improved education in universities to help make students aware of techniques.
Managers understanding how to interpret output from data analysis.
Automatic data gathering from critical stages of both business and manufacturing processes.
Planned collection of data to answer new questions about the process
Quality managers finding new ways of visually presenting analysis to meet the needs of different groups of employees.
Increased understanding of the process allows new gurus to emerge.

6. Choose managers that lead

Visibly led from the front. Xerox, any promotion beyond middle manager must be a black belt. Keen competition to become a black belt, 11 weeks training, plus two years full time as facilitator with a goal of $½million savings. Anne Mulahy

The pursuit of Quality cannot and should not be externally imposed but rather internally desired.

Issues

All managers, whatever their discipline, need a belief in the benefits of Quality, based on positive experiences.

Already we expect our managers to have many skills and competencies; accounts, interviewing, project management, negotiation, communication, … Quality has become another must have.

Four out of five senior managers are unable to explain the principles of Quality to others.

Survey by BIN; Quality World Jan 2008. This is strange as managers are intelligent people, but if they do not understand principles of business that reduce cost, increase revenue, improve customer satisfaction, it suggests that Quality professionals are failing to communicate.

The trouble with the ostrich syndrome used by many employees is that they forget with your head in the sand, your balls are exposed to a good kick from your boss; then your head rises up both automatically and quickly.

The service industries are putting a huge amount of effort into selection and training of staff, understanding people are the machines of the process. One concern is the work ethic of the young generation; one solution is to choose a different generation.

Do as I say, not as I do.

Any HR man will be able to explain the psychology behind an employee’s actions and that the culture is defined by what is done and not what is said.

The marketing of new fashion-driven skills lead some managers to hope that Quality is only a temporary requirement and not worth learning; next month there will be something different.

If the basics of Quality are understood, then a reasoned decision can be made as to which new skills are worth investigating. Most new fashions are only old skills in new clothing. As most of these fashions are not too demanding, the best solution is to practice them so they become an integral part of the organisation’s culture or let the top team agree whether it is value adding.

Often, poorly conceived use of techniques (normally an excuse for quick cost cutting) leads to errors and waste. This in turn provides the proof that techniques are a waste of time; no it shows managers who pay lip service are a danger. For example, the merger of the Inland Revenue and Customs & Excise called the cost cutting lean processing. It divided old tasks, leaving no-one with ownership; no-one cared anymore.

Quality managers must change.

They can no longer be arrogant, as some became when suddenly finding themselves in positions of importance. They need to do an improved job of integrating Quality into the whole business, without preferring one aspect such as six-sigma, measurement, etc. Europeans do not like the idea of the word Quality, possibly because it is not well understood, but the Japanese find Quality synonymous with Quality.

It is likely that qualiticians frighten other managers because of the all the new tools and systems that they keep talking about. It is showing off and guaranteed to make enemies.

Lessons Learned

Competence is a mix of education and qualification.
Employees are the business element that will define success or failure more than anything else
A senior manager at the top table is needed to manage an integrated system; Quality, Environment, H&S, Hygiene, Social Responsibility, Sustainability, ...
Employees follow by example of actions and misunderstand verbal orders.

Vision

An education system to address the present lack of understanding that exists in managers’ minds.
All managers spend time working in Quality as a part of the standard career path.
Quality strategy and an integrated system is controlled by a senior manager; possibly called Quality Manager.
The Quality manager, a professional, will be a charismatic communicator who can persuade the top team to Think Quality. An improver not a policeman
Managers manage and succeed through applying principles of Quality.

7. Document proceses within a quality system

A system is the foundation of a business; it gives us the rules, gives guidance, helps to avoid accidents, protect the environment and make morals transparent. It is the way we do things. There has been a 10% decline in certified companies in UK. In the Far East there is steady growth, giving an overall increaser of 16% in certified companies over 2006.

9000 (Quality) 14000 (Environment) 18000 (H&S) 22000 (Food Safety)
22399 (Business Continuity Management) 26000 (Corporate Social Responsibility) 27000 (Data security) ??000 carbon footprint, re-engineering

Issues

What value does any ISO standard provide to the business?

There is a difference between basing your system on ISO standards and being certified to an ISO standard.

If you have to debate being certified to ISO 9000, then keep it.

When you can say, A third party audit of our quality system is an avoidable cost. Our understanding of the need to maintain a consistent business process is so good, we are beyond needing an external auditor to check it. Politely tell SGS they are no longer needed, politely tell customers you have moved beyond the stage of ISO 9000.

In 2006, India increased certified companies by 40k to a total of 80k. ISO questioned whether this was being done responsibly and also were disappointed that few were environmentally related.

Does third party auditing identify the effectiveness of the Quality System or only small defects?

If you have a culture that allows people to overrule common sense, then will ISO9000 really help? Chernobyl had procedures, and I am sure they could have bluffed their way through an audit to get ISO 9000. But that culture expected senior people to overrule the procedures to give themselves an easy life.

We need a culture that understands how and why to use a system and is disciplined to use it.

Chernobyl

Positive void system: when bubbles appear in the heat exchanger, the system gives out more heat. Cf negative void which is now the standard.

They had shut down the reactor, put poison rods into the reactor to absorb the radiation. Once shut down it is only safe to restart after a ten day wait, Scientists from Moscow had arrived to do some trials about residual energy on shut down. They were in a hurry to return to Moscow for a holiday. The operators said that there were procedures which said you must not re-start; but they did have experience of making a few discrete adjustments which appeared OK despite it being against procedures, but not all together. The scientists overruled the operators’ authority and re-started the reactor.

Belief by some that a system restricts the entrepreneurs to meet customer requirements

We need an external auditor to motivate the business to get the system in shape.

Look for new managers. You must have managers who use a quality system to improve their business, not just to show a third party auditor they respect an international standard.

The influence of an auditor on your system is insignificant compared with the influence of the manager’s belief.

Who will determine the standards of the future

China, India. A view that China will set the standards for Quality in the future. First they need to understand the needs of their customers. In Oct 07, 3 Chinese counterfeiters were jailed for printing notes with a face value of 500,000 pounds sterling.

China, India and Brazil were elected to the governing council of ISO in 2007. Indian Cricket Board now defines what happens in cricket.

Process mapping is no longer two-dimensional but multi-dimensional.

"The Sarbanes Oxley Act" SARBOX has increased the requirements for improved process understanding and visibility.

Think:

what is the purpose, what is to be achieved
what is the structure, how will it be achieved?
What is the rationale, what is the reasoning behind the process
What are the roles, who is responsible, what are the criteria
What is the order of the events

Principle drives process

Process is elaborated in procedure

Procedure is supported by tools, how, who,

How do we integrate the systems?

Firstly, as more elements of business become formally systemised, 9000 (Quality Management Systems) 14000 (Environment) 18000 (H&S) 22000 (Food Hygiene) 26000 (Corporate Social responsibility), 27000 (Financial Risk management), they must be integrated. Disintegration is not an option.

PAS99 is not a panacea for all standards and fails to show that all an organisations processes can be managed in a single structure.

Data Security

Child benefit data on two disks (25 million children aged 0 to 16 years in UK) , Nat Ins contributions for 15k people, 3 million learner drivers on hard drive, 80 passports per month lost in the post.

Lessons Learned

There must be a link between non-conformances and the risk they present to the business
Too many managers see ISO standards as either something forced on them or a trophy to hang in the reception area; it must be seen as a tool for improvement.
Increasingly, Quality is impacting on a greater part of any business, and a system is needed. The system must be integrated, the alternative is disintegrated.

Vision

Internal audit to a set of criteria defined by the business, carried out by a team whose objective is to standardise and improve.

An integrated management system that defines the way business is carried out in the most effective way for:

the specific collection of processes involved.
the reduction of exposure to risk.
the definition of gaps in employee’s learning.
Corporate social responsibility is visible
Sustainability is addressed
Fraud will be detected