Customers increasingly demand better quality products, service, support and costs. They will go elsewhere, if your organization cannot keep pace with their expectations and requirements. The expectations of other shareholders are equally demanding in terms of increasing profitability and rewards. If businesses stand still, they will lose their competitive edge, so improvements must be made to keep pace with stakeholder demands and expectations; and to be viable and grow.
Process Approach Continuous improvement uses a process approach.This approach assumes that all work is a process that can be described, studied and improved based on customer feedback and data. For example, cycle time measures the time required to complete a process and is a key indicator for process improvement. An integral component of the process approach involves identifying problems or defects in the process, finding their source and then correcting them. Continual Improvement often begins with identifying and resolving problems in the early steps of a process because there is a ripple or process-flow effect.
Improvements in the early steps of a process have a positive effect on later steps in the process. What should be improved? Continual improvement should focus on enablers such as leadership, communication, resources, organization structure, people, and processes - in other words, everything in the organization, in all functions, at all levels. Continual improvement should also lead to better results, such as, price, cost, productivity, time to market, delivery, responsiveness, profit, and customer and employee satisfaction.There has been a tendency in total quality management programs to focus on departmental improvements which do not improve business results overall. Departmental improvements may merely move the constraints or problem somewhere else in the process chain. What continual improvement is not Improvement is not about using a set of tools and techniques.
Improvement is not going through the motions of organizing improvement teams and raining people. Improvement is a result, so it can only be claimed after there has been a beneficial change in an organization's performance.Gradual, incremental, or breakthrough There are three types of improvement. Continuous improvement is gradual, never-ending change, whereas continual improvement is incremental change. Both types of improvements are what the Japanese call "Kamikaze".
Breakthroughs are improvements, but in one giant leap - a step change. However, the method of achievement is the same, but breakthroughs tend to arise out of chance discoveries and could take years before being made (see illustration). Relationship with TTS and ISO 9001 Continual improvement is one aspect of a Total Quality Management philosophy.It is also an element of an ISO 9001 :2000-based quality system since the standard includes requirements for continual improvement (see clause 8.
5. 1 Why is continual improvement important to an organization? All managerial activity is either directed at control or improvement Managers are either devoting their efforts at maintaining performance, preventing or creating change, breakthrough, or improvement. If businesses stand still, they will lose their competitive edge, so improvements must be made to keep pace ND stay in business.When should continual improvement be started? Every system, program, or project should provide for an improvement cycle. Therefore, when an objective has been achieved, work should commence on identifying better ways of doing it.
How should continual improvement be undertaken? There is no improvement without measurement. An organization must establish current performance before embarking on any improvement. If it does not, it will have no baseline from which to determine if its efforts have yielded any improvement.A ten step sequence There are ten steps to undertaking continual improvement: . Determine current performance.
2. Establish a need to improve. 3. Obtain commitment and define the improvement objective.
4. Organism the diagnostic resources. 5. Carry out research and analysis to discover the cause of current performance. 6. Define and test solutions that will accomplish the improvement objective.
7. Produce improvement plans which specify how and by whom the changes will be implemented. 8. Identify and overcome any resistance to the change.
9.Implement the change. 10. Put in place controls to hold new levels of performance, and repeat step one.
Where do the ideas come from? If the organization has identified its critical success factors (that handful of things at which it must be supremely good in order to succeed), then focusing the attention of the continual improvement process onto one or more of these for a defined period might give rise to major improvements. Whose responsibility is it? No one in the organization, from top to bottom, is exempt from the responsibility for improvement.It is a normal component of all employees' jobs to search out ways of improving performance. Furthermore, no one is expected to do this without help and support from others. How does a company organize for improvement? Most continual improvement programs are executed by teams that either diagnose problems, search for solutions, or implement changes. These teams may be within departments or cross-functional.
However, there needs to be a steering group of managers which direct the teams towards their goal, and above all, provides the environment for success. What tools should be used?The portfolio of tools used for continual improvement should be those which enable an organization to execute the ten Steps above. These include: Chickasaws fishbone diagram to examine cause and effect Failure mode and effects analysis to predict failure and prevent its occurrence * Parent analysis to identify the few info ounces on a situation which have the biggest impact * Force field diagram to display the forces for and against change * Charting techniques to demonstrate whether improvement is being achieved Changing the culture Continual improvement is far more than a set of technique uses.For many organizations, it involves a radical change in attitudes. The defenses of the status quo, and resistance to innovation, cannot be treated as normal management behavior. A fear of reprisals for reporting problems has to be placed by congratulating people for identifying an opportunity to improve.
Hoarding of good ideas within departmental walls must be a thing of the past as people share their knowledge and experience in the search for greater collective success. The Importance of Commitment Continual improvement is about the entire organization and everything it does.It has to be a prime concern of executive management and its success depends upon commitment from the top. The commitment must also be highly visible. It is not enough to have a quality policy signed by the chief executive. If executive management does not demonstrate its commitment y doing what it says it will do, they cannot expect others to be committed to the policy.
Reward success The encouragement of people who have initiated improvements, however small, is an important component. This can be done in many ways, from displays on special improvement notice boards to the awarding of prizes.This is an area in which the culture and style of the organization has to be considered. The sudden introduction of a show business style into a staid environment may lead to cynicism rather than effective promotion of improvement. Rewards may, but need not, have a financial component. Dealing with failure It is very common to find that about 12 to 18 months into a continual improvement program it is felt that it is not delivering what was expected.
This is just the time to redouble efforts. It is a long-term haul to change behavior, therefore persistence and extra imaginative effort is the key.Ref: Continuous Improvement Principles I owe. Com http://www. Owe. Com/info_7757807_continuous-improvement- principles.
HTML#ixzz2Fgg9QY3J http://www. Google. Co. UK/ =1 Quality Gurus What is a quality guru? A guru, by definition, is a good person, a wise person and a teacher. A quality IRU should be all of these, plus have a concept and approach to quality within business that has made a major and lasting impact.
The gurus mentioned in this section have done, and continue to do, that, in some cases, even after their death.The gurus There have been three groups of gurus since the sass's: Early CSS Americans who took the messages of quality to Japan Late 1 ass's Japanese who developed new concepts in response to the Americans sass's-sass's Western gurus who followed the Japanese industrial success It is beyond the scope of this site to go into great detail on each of the gurus, heir philosophies, teachings and tools; however, a brief overview of their contribution to the quality journey is given, supported by several references.The ten quality gurus we will be looking at are: * Armband Figment * Mike Makeweight * Joseph Curran * Koru Chickasaws * Genetic Attaching * DRP H. James Harrington Ref: www.
Edit. Gob. UK/q laity/gurus Armband Figment (Born 1922) He is an American quality control expert and businessman. He devised the concept of Total Quality Control, later known as Total Quality Management (TTS). Figment received a bachelor's degree from Union College, his master's degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his Ph. D.
In Economics from MIT.He was Director of Manufacturing Operations at General Electric (1958-1968), and is now President and CEO of General Systems Company Of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, an engineering firm that designs and installs operational systems. Figment wrote several books and served as President of the American Society for Quality (1961-1963). Ref http://en. Wisped.
Org/wick/Armband_V. _Figment See appendix 1 (Page ) for full documentation. Mike Makeweight Facilitated top management of many Fortune 1 000 companies in successfulStrategic Product Planning Sessions, many Kamikaze Events, Office and Manufacturing Simulations, Value Stream Mapping, AS, TEMP, Quick Changeovers, Lean Culture, Mistake-Proofing Helped dozens of companies reduce their Documentation System by 50 80% De over 40 companies, from start to finish, to ISO 9001 based certification on first attempt and assisted countless other companies to do the same. Superhuman In 1 941 , Curran stumbled across the work of Vilified Parent and began to apply the Parent principle to quality issues (for example, 80% of a problem is caused by 20% of the causes).This is also known as "the vital few and the rival many". In later years, Curran preferred "the vital few and the useful many" to signal the remaining 80% of the causes should not be totally ignored.
Ref http://en. Wisped. Org/wick/Joseph_M. _Curran ) for full information.
Koru Chickasaws Born in Tokyo, the oldest of the eight sons of Choir Chickasaws. In 1939 he graduated University of Tokyo with an engineering degree in applied chemistry. His first job was as a naval technical officer (1939-1941) then moved on to work at the Ionians Liquid Fuel Company until 1947.Chickasaws would now start his career as an associate professor at the University of Tokyo.
He then undertook the presidency of the Mashie Institute of Technology in 1978. In 1 949, Chickasaws joined the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers SOUSE) quality control research group. After World War II Japan looked to transform its industrial sector, which in North America was then still perceived as a producer of cheap wind-up toys and poor quality cameras.
