G. K. K. Director AIQM, Delivers Six Sigma Lecture Part - 1

Tweet

Improving Internal Communication as required by ISO 9001 QMS

by Denise E. Robitaille 

The nuns at St. Anthony’s Catholic school used to tell a cautionary tale of a woman who’d spread a vile bit of gossip about her neighbor. Horrified by the consequences of her actions, she went to church to confess her transgression. She explained to her priest that she regretted the gossip and wished to confess, atone for her sin and make reparation. The priest granted absolution and then assigned her the following task:

“Take a pillow and climb to the top of the steeple,” he said. “When you reach the bell tower, rip open the pillow and scatter the feathers to the wind. After you’ve finished, come back to see me.” 

The contrite penitent did as she was told. When she finished, she descended and went to the priest. “Now, go and gather all the feathers,” he told her.

“But that would be impossible,” she exclaimed. “I could never find them all.” 

“That’s true,” he replied. “In the same way, it’s impossible for you to fully repair the damage that your gossip has done.”

This parable demonstrates both the intricacy of communication and the exponential consequences of losing control over this fundamental element of our shared humanity. What we say (or don’t say), the care with which we target our listener, the veracity of the content and the accountability we assume for the actions that ensue are all issues that we must control. 

The costs of inadequate communication

 
Communication is the means by which we inform one another, give instructions, exchange ideas, grant permission, conduct commerce, shout warnings and express satisfaction, etc. Implicit in any of our verbal or written interchanges is a presumption that the information is reliable both in substance and authority. We must be confident that we can trust the message and that the person who composes it is both qualified to communicate the message and in some way accountable for its content. 

Well-controlled communications are accurate, timely, complete, directed to all appropriate or required recipients, and crafted in a way that’s understood by the intended audience. 

Communications are incomplete until the recipient confirms that the messages have been received. They’re of limited value if the recipient doesn’t fully comprehend what’s being communicated, and they’re worse than useless if the information is wrong.

Within the context of ISO 9001 QMS, failing to control internal communication engenders the following risks:

• Incorrect information might be disseminated.
• Updated information might not be available in a timely manner.
• Information might be correct and timely but inaccessible.
• Interested parties might be inadvertently omitted from a distribution  list.
• Recipients might misunderstand or misinterpret what’s being communicated.

Examples of probable outcomes from these failures include:

• A customer’s concession to a deviation never gets acted upon.
• The latest revision of a specification doesn’t go to production.
• Modified quality objectives aren’t shared with employees.
• Revised safety protocols aren’t implemented.
• Material is purchased from a disqualified supplier.
• Operators miss an important training session.
• Customer complaints don’t get appropriate attention.
• New-product rollout is delayed because of multiple miscommunications.

The ultimate consequence in all instances is a breakdown of one or more processes that will adversely affect your ability to fulfill customer requirements. In some cases, poor communication guarantees you’ll ship the customer the wrong item or fail to make on-time delivery.

If you don’t control your internal communications, you don’t know where messages are going. You lose the means of knowing what actions were taken by those who received your messages. You have no way of tracing or retrieving them if the information is wrong. You don’t know if the data originated from a reliable or authorized source. And you can’t even be sure that everyone is hearing the same thing.

Failing to establish effective internal communication creates a systemic breakdown comparable to a problem with your document control process or any other feature that pervades your organization. For example, the relationship between communication and document control is that the documentation describes the requirement, and communication is the conduit for getting it to the appropriate process owner. If you have problems with document control, you could communicate the wrong specification. The input to your communication process is directly influenced by the data’s integrity; therefore, you must ensure that the content is factual.

The other aspect of communication to consider is the relationship between sender and receiver. A message’s author is responsible for ensuring that the intended audience will understand the language and format. He or she must also make the message accessible. Posting an important notice on a server that only a small population is authorized to access is nearly equivalent to not communicating at all.

Establishing appropriate channels

 
In order for an organization to control its internal communications adequately, there must be consensus as to process, protocols, authorizations and records.

How do you communicate a change to a customer order? Who has the authority to tell you to change your production schedule? Who must know about a revision to a subassembly? Who lets salespeople know if a customer’s order will be late? How does the company ensure that all affected functions sign off on the organization’s capacity to service a new contract? Whom do you tell about customer complaints? Where and when do people go for companywide notifications?

Clause 5.5.3, Internal communication, is one of the important requirements in ISO 9001. Good internal communication has always been a prerequisite for organizational efficiency--especially across departmental boundaries.

It is not necessary to write a procedure about how you control internal communications. However, it is required that communications relevant to your quality system activities are adequately controlled to facilitate the fulfillment of organizational goals. Your communications conduits must work for you. 

For the purpose of your ISO 9001 registration, it’s your registrar’s responsibility to assess the implementation of your internal communication methods as they relate to your company’s quality policy, objectives and procedures. It must be evident to the auditor that your mechanisms for communicating information are consistently applied, adequately controlled and effective.

A typical question might be, “Does the e-mail system for schedule change notifications work?” To answer that, an auditor might look upstream for issues that prompted a schedule change and then look downstream to see if they were resolved in a timely manner. 

For example, a customer might have sent an e-mail stating, “Switch purchase orders 22345 and 22361 on the schedule because we’ve had a change in projections.” Your accepted protocol is to e-mail the scheduler, flag the message as urgent and wait for a confirmation. The auditor would follow the trail from the customer request to the evidence indicating what was ultimately shipped out. If the schedule wasn’t revised soon enough to switch the orders, the customer probably didn’t get the needed parts. 

Conversely, if things happened as requested, there’s verification that the company has adequate control of this particular communication conduit. This is one of many examples of using an alternative to a documented procedure to define and control a process.

Communication as process

 
Communication is a process. In keeping with the process approach, it’s appropriate to apply the inherent concepts of input and output to this group of activities. The input is the information that creates the need for the communication. The nature of the information determines the method and flow. The output of the process is the successful transmission. The message content creates input for the next step in the series of processes. If the input (i.e., message) is, “Part X73 is going to be late; skip to the next job,” then the output (or response) might be: “OK, confirmed. Will post Job 4876 next.” The messages’ traceability ensures that requirements--even when they change frequently in a volatile market--are controlled and effectively communicated. 

When you consider internal communication as a process, you can begin to ascribe to it some of the same features you apply to other quality management system processes. Let’s look at them individually. 

Definition 

 
Consider the methods and nature of your communications. Types of communications might include:

 

• Customer concessions
• Changes to work instructions
• Revisions to customer specifications
• Rescheduling
• Project status
• Training requirements
• Objectives
• Process deviations
• Changes to supplier qualifications
• Personnel assignment
• Segregation of material

The methods you’ll use to communicate are equally diverse and might include:
Color-coding or other nonverbal status indicators

 

• Signatures
• E-mails
• Meetings
• Bulletin/white boards
• Engineering change notice forms
• Internal audits
• Lockout/tag-out protocols
• Memos
• Physical placement (e.g., finished goods on marked shelf)
• Newsletters
• Threaded discussions
• Tags

Even if you don’t have a defined procedure, you must have consensus on the communication conduits. Designers must know where on the server they can consistently find the latest updates to customer specifications. Operators must demonstrate consistent awareness that a red tag means a job has been rejected and a yellow one means it’s awaiting inspection. Employees must know that the cafeteria bulletin board is where they sign up for training sessions. Whatever communication method you use must be uniformly practiced in order to be adequate and effective.

Responsibility 

Who’s responsible for making sure information gets to the appropriate recipients? Who’s authorized to initiate certain messages, such as production schedule changes? Who must receive the information? Does the recipient have to respond? Who should archive the messages? Who handles your e-mail system? 

Resources

Does the organization provide the means for effective communication to occur? Are there bulletin boards, adequate access to computer terminals or e-mail, suggestion boxes or readily available forms? Sometimes breakdowns occur simply because the organizational culture doesn’t foster communication. People must be able to express concerns and ideas as well as information. Are supervisors intimidating or inaccessible? 

Training

Do people know how to use the e-mail system? Do they know how to use the various forms that are utilized to communicate requirements? Do they know who to ask if they don’t understand the nature of a message? Do people know the protocol or rules for contacting people at other facilities or remote locations? Does the company offer tuition assistance for “English as a second language” courses?

Implementation and verification

 
Do your employees consistently use the established methods to communicate? Are they communicating at all? 

It’s necessary to verify that the process is effective in fulfilling the requirement.

 
As described earlier, it’s possible to assess the extent to which communication methods are working by reviewing a message’s outcome and determining if it resulted in the desired action. If the document revision got to the operator, if the supervisor confirmed that the equipment maintenance schedule was updated or if the customer’s complaint was acted upon in a timely manner, then you have verification that your internal communication process is effective.

Records

 
The same rules apply to this process as to any other. Records of requisite communications provide evidence. The ability to produce an amended contract, for example, isn’t just a good QMS practice; it can also be the means of avoiding litigation. Records of communications can also help you understand problems and breakdowns. When doing a root cause analysis, it’s helpful to know when messages were sent and to whom. It might be that the revised requirements were sent but weren’t available to the person who needed them. Or there might have been a delay with a communication. If there’s a misunderstanding about the message, a record affords you the opportunity to reassess the format and improve the way you craft subsequent communications. 

Words into goals 

 
Internal communication is the link between requirements and the people who must fulfil them. Commitment to consistent and effective communication is one of the tools you use to empower individuals to fulfil organizational goals.

Tweet

STRATEGIC QUALITY PLANNING AND DEPLOYMENT:

By Joseph A. De Feo 

Strategic quality planning (SQP) is a systematic approach to defining long-term business goals, including goals to improve quality and the means (i.e., the plans) to achieve them. Many organizations have created a vision “to be the best,” toward a goal of outperforming competitors. Many of these organizations fall short in achieving this vision. Most do not align, or have difficulty aligning, their performance excellence initiatives like lean and Six Sigma to the annual business plan. This leads to lack of resources to complete projects, which in turn makes them hard to justify.

To achieve a vision it is necessary to align the annual goals to your major change initiatives or quality programs and integrate them into the strategic plan. This will ensure the new focus becomes part of the plan and sustainable.

Japanese quality leaders refer to this process as hoshin kanri or “policy deployment. Ho, shin, kan, and ri are actually four words that loosely translate to “focus, direction, alignment, and reason.”

Focus by creating goals that provide direction and alignment of the resources needed from the organization to meet those goals and the reasons for selection them. The reasons force management to understand why it is selecting these goals.

The potential benefits of strategic quality planning and deployment include:

• Clarification of goals
• Achievability of goals
• Scheduled reduction of chronic wastes and improved quality of products and services
• Better or new focus on customers

Strategic quality planning is the systematic process by which an organization defines its long-term goals with respect to quality and customers, and integrates them into a cohesive business plan. It enables an organization to execute organizational breakthroughs to achieve a competitive advantage and quality leadership.

The approach to providing organization wide financial goals has evolved into a more robust strategic plan, incorporating these goals into a hierarchy that includes the voice of the customer. A structured methodology must include a provision of rewards, universal participation, a common language, and training.

Launching a strategic plan

Creating a strategic plan requires that leaders be personally involved, eliminating the atmosphere of blame, and making decisions on the best available data. The strategic deployment process requires incorporating the customer focus. The elements needed are generally alike for all organizations. The ones in most widespread use tend to be:

• Mission
• Vision
• Values
• Policy

The mission is the reason for the organization’s existence. The vision is the desired future state of the organization. Values are what the organization stands for, and they tie into strategies, which are the means to achieve the vision. Policies represent a guide to managerial action, guiding day-to-day decision-making. And finally, the deployment plan is what turns vision into action.

Developing the plan

Strategic deployment begins with a customer-focused vision, which should define the benefits that can be expected. Good vision statements should be compelling and shared throughout the organization. But vision statements are only words—a reminder of what the organization is pursuing, which must be carried out through actions. When forming a vision, it’s important not to focus exclusively on shareholders, to properly explain the vision to everyone involved, and not to create a vision too easy or difficult to achieve.

A mission is often confused with a vision, but a mission statement should clarify an organization’s purpose. Together, a vision and mission provide an agreed-upon direction, which can be used as a basis for decision-making.

To convert the vision into an achievable plan, it must be broken into key strategies. Responsibility for them must be distributed to key executives. To determine what the strategies should be, five areas must be assessed:

• Customer loyalty and satisfaction
• Costs related to poor quality of products or processes
• Organization’s culture
• Business processes
• Competitive benchmarking

Each of these areas can form the basis for a balanced business scorecard. The key strategies can be modified to reflect long-term goals. An organization must set specific strategic goals that must be achieved for the broad strategy to be a success. Seven areas must be addressed to ensure that the proper goals are established:

• Product performance
• Competitive performance
• Business improvement
• Cost of poor quality
• Performance of business processes
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty and retention

Goals that affect product salability and revenue generation should be based primarily on meeting or exceeding marketplace quality. A widely used basis for setting goals has been historical performance.

Corporate values reflect an organization’s culture. Some organizations create value statements to further define themselves. Values are what an organization stands for, and must be supported with actions from management lest their publication create cynicism.

Policy declarations are a necessity during a period of major change. Most declare the intention to meet the needs of customers, and include language relative to competitiveness in quality. Some include specific reference to internal customers, or indicate that the improvement should extend to all phases of the business. Enforcement of new policies is a problem due to the relative newness of documented quality policies. Sometimes, an audit process is mandated to ensure the policy is carried out.

A fundamental step in establishing any strategic plan is the participation of upper management. The executives are responsible for ensuring all business units have a similar council at the subordinate levels of the organization. If a council is not in place, the organization should create one.

Once the strategic goals have been agreed upon, they must be subdivided and communicated to lower levels. Those who are assigned responsibility must determine the needed resources and communicate this to higher levels. The deployment process starts by identifying the needs of the organization.

Measuring progress

There are several reasons why an organized approach to measuring performance is necessary:

• Performance measures indicate the degree of accomplishment of objectives
• Performance measures are needed to monitor the improvement process
• Performance measures are required for periodic reviews by management

Once goals have been broken down into sub-goals, key measures need to be established. The best measures of the strategic planning process are simple, quantitative, and graphic. As goals are set and deployed, the means to achieve them must be analyzed to ensure they satisfy the objective they support. Once the system is in place, it must be reviewed periodically to ensure that goals are being met.

A formal, efficient review process will increase the probability of reaching the goals. The review process looks at gaps between what has been achieved and the target. Frequent measurements of progress displayed in graphic form help identify the gaps in need of attention. Success in closing those gaps depends on a formal feedback loop with clear responsibility and authority for acting on those differences.

Pursuing too many objectives at the same time will dilute the results. Trying to plan without adequate data can create an unachievable plan. If leaders delegate too much, there will be a lack of direction. The biggest disruption caused by strategic planning is created by imposing a structured approach on those who prefer not to have it. Resistance will be evident at the outset. Therefore, the most important prerequisite is the creation of an environment conducive to change.

Tweet

"A Lean Office Eliminates Waste and Saves Time" An Article By Willie L. Carter

Lean goes way beyond the shop floor:

Higher customer expectations, cost-cutting pressures, thinner margins, and shorter lead times are some of the daily challenges that organizations face. A management system built around lean processes enables companies to achieve operational excellence, while providing flexibility in the way processes are managed.

Organizations need robust, waste-free, flexible office processes that meet their customer needs and help them survive in the global marketplace. 

Considering that 60 to 80 percent of all costs related to meeting customer demand are administrative or office-related functions, it doesn’t take rocket science to conclude that applying lean principles to streamline and eliminate waste from your office and administrative processes will result in bottom-line savings. 

The benefits of a lean office

A lean office management system can affect administrative processes at all levels of your organization. 

Enterprise-level processes—The processes that touch your external customers and suppliers: order entry, customer service, accounts payable, accounts receivables, marketing/sales, research and development, product development, and distribution. Lean management tools can streamline and speed up these processes. 

Organizational-level processes—The key support processes in your organization: information technology, human resources, engineering, and purchasing. Lean will streamline these processes and improve process efficiency. 

Department-level activities—Lean reduces activities that add time but little or no value. It can help create flow at the pull of the customer, reduce hand-offs, and improve departmental quality.
Individual-level tasks—Lean can reduce the paperwork, manual entries, and errors within standardized work procedures; help improve workplace organization; and clarify individual roles and responsibilities. 

Getting started

Before applying lean tools to the office environment, we must understand the flow of work. Just as we map the value stream and focus on reducing lead time and eliminating waste in manufacturing, we must map administrative processes to better understand them and eliminate waste. 

Processes such as order entry, quoting, planning, purchasing, product development, and others are full of waste. As a matter of fact, 75 to 90 percent of the steps in service and administrative processes add no value—the lean definition of waste. These wasteful steps cause delays and customer dissatisfaction.

Because one of the key principles of lean thinking is to minimize the time between the receipt of a customer order and fulfilment of that order, it's crucial to look at the entire lead time. To see the waste in these processes, we must map them. After we identify the waste (non-value-added steps) and what needs to be worked on, we can apply the traditional lean tools such as pull systems, point-of-use storage, continuous flow, 5S, visual controls, and mistake proofing. 

Second, you must collect data. If you are like most organizations, you collect very limited data on your administrative processes. Office lean is not like manufacturing lean—it is based on data-driven decision making. For office and administrative processes, determining what data to include depends on the questions about your value stream you want answered and how you define the product or service produced by these processes. For example, if your objective is to reduce the number of engineering change orders (ECNs), it would be helpful to define ECNs as the product and identify the total number of ECNs issued, cycle time and queue time for processing, and total cycle time. From this information, you can determine where constraints most likely occur and can eliminate areas of waste in your “future state” process. 

Examples of lean office applications

A steel fabricator’s value-stream map indicated that out of a total lead time of 22 weeks, only one week was spent doing true value-added work. This steel fabricator found that a large part of the non-value-added lead time was identified as “waiting for approval.” Approvals were built into many stages of the order fulfilment process, but were the responsibility of management staff, which was often unavailable. The steel fabricator standardized the work procedures to eliminate the need for many of the approvals and reduced its lead time by two weeks. 

In reviewing the order entry process for a client, we found that a significant amount of time was used to acknowledge an order. Whenever an order was entered, an acknowledgement was automatically printed and then manually sorted and mailed to each customer. The first question we asked was, “Did the customer really want these acknowledgments; in other words, does it add value?” It turned out that only a few of their customers wanted an acknowledgement, and those that did said they would accept an e-mail response. The client changed their order processing system to code any customer seeking an acknowledgement, and then automatically acknowledged these customers via e-mail at the end of the order entry process. This resulted in freeing up overworked office staff to allow them to spend more time on value-added activities. 

A loudspeaker manufacturer discovered that much of its lead time was attributed to delays in obtaining customer approvals during the design and prototype cycle. There was no effective means of managing the customer approval process. It seemed that once the information was given to the customer, it disappeared into a "black hole.” We suggested to the client that they develop a visual management system (a centrally located schedule board) that shows the status of every job in-house. This provided visibility for every step of the process and reduced lead time in the design and prototype process by 50 percent. 

As you can see by these examples, lean solutions are surprisingly simple and don't require great capital expenditure. 

Lean is a proven, systematic approach for eliminating or minimizing waste that results in the production of goods or services at the lowest possible cost. It goes beyond the shop floor. Lean is every system, every process, and every employee in the company. ________________________________________________________________
Willie L. Carter is the president of Quantum Associates Inc., Northbrook, Illinois (USA)

Tweet

Self-Discipline and Consistent Quality are Inseparable Twins.

Self-Discipline  and Consistent Quality are Inseparable Twins.

As a quality consultant, I often hear these words:

•  “You see our business is very different, will ISO 9001 work for us?”
•  “Will Six Sigma work in our country?”
•  “Lean management might work well for Japanese firms, but will these  tools work for us?”

My answer is “Yes, if the processes are performed right, the results are surely going to be right”. So, nature of the product or nature of the business or country in which we conduct the business is not a critical issue. The focus needs to be on performing the processes correctly.

Lets consider a simple example. I have to reach office daily at 8.30 am. I know that to reach at 8.30 am, without stressful driving, I must leave my house at 7.45 am. Then, doing my process right would mean that I must wake up at 6.45 am so that I can leave my house at 7.45 am. If I want to spend 30 minutes on reading the newspaper before leaving for office, then I must wake up at 6.15 am. And, if I have to wake up early I must sleep early. (If I sleep late, I get up late, I leave my house late and there is every chance that I will reach my office late).

Another example would be of a student who is a top-performer in school. It is generally seen that such a student continues to perform well in higher studies, irrespective of whether he pursues a career in engineering or management or accountancy. Why is it so? This is because he has developed certain practices (or way of doing things) which ensure that he continues to achieve good performance till the end of is studies.

ISO 9001 or Six Sigma or Lean Management are all methodologies that help us to improve processes and standardize the ‘way of doing things’. Once we standardize a process then if we keep repeating it in the same manner, we are should get the same (consistent) results again and again. But why does this not always happen this way? Why do mistakes still occur? Does the fault lie with the ISO 9001 system or with Six Sigma or with the tools of Lean Management?

Not really! All these systems / methodologies work on building preventions in the processes and there is a definite logic in the way they work. Then where does the problem lie? Repeated studies show that the problem does not lie in finding solutions to preventing problems, nor is it really difficult to find ways to improve processes. The problem lies in sustaining the improvement.

In other words establishing a new system or improving a process is not the challenge. The real challenge lies in sustaining the improved system / process. For this reason we bring in Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and audits. But still, we observe non-compliance during the audits. Why does this happen?

In most cases where a set of procedures has been established, it is seen that mistakes occur mainly because “someone overlooked a step in the procedure”. Even the “best system or ideal process” could end up in mistakes if people performing the process do not adhere to the SOPs. We all understand that it is unsafe to talk on the mobile phone while driving. We also know that many car accidents do occur due to the driver speaking on the mobile phone, yet we overlook the procedure (and maybe even the law)!

If we have to sustain the performance of improved / standardized processes, what is needed most is “self-discipline”. The self-discipline that helps us to overcome the urge to adopt a short-cut in our work and the self-discipline to stick to doing things as defined in the SOP.

It is a proven fact that out of a thousand principles for success, the one quality that helps an individual to succeed is the habit of self-discipline. The same is true for organizations. Organizations run and sustain on the basis of self-discipline.

Often the cultural or political climate around us discourages us from being self-disciplined. People tend to think “when everyone else is indisciplined, why should I follow discipline?” “Everyone throws litter around, so why shouldn't I?” But, if everyone in an organization or in a country starts thinking this way where will we reach? And what is the use of standardizing processes / systems if we do not possess the self-discipline to follow them?

Toyota has been a rare example of an automobile company that made profit consistently for 50 years!! Then what has gone wrong with Toyota now? Why did they have to announce a large number of recalls?

In the words of their CEO Mr. Akio Toyoda, “Toyota's priority has traditionally been the following: First; Safety, Second; Quality, and Third; Volume. These priorities became confused, and we were not able to stop, think, and make improvements as much as we were able to before…….. We pursued growth over the speed at which we were able to develop our people and our organization, and we should sincerely be mindful of that. I regret that this has resulted in the safety issues described in the recalls we face today”.

Toyoda may express regret but the question is where did Toyota go wrong as an organization? They were very small when they started. They strictly followed the “14 Toyota Principles” for 50 years and went on to be known as the world’s best car company. But in the quest for fast results their managers and dealer network seem to have ignored some of the time-tested principles like ‘long-term philosophy’, ‘stopping to fix problems’, and ‘do not let problems remain hidden”.  The price Toyota had to pay for this ‘lack of self-discipline’ in following their established principles is anybody’s guess.

At times, I have seen people working in large reputed organizations operating under beliefs like “I am a knowledge worker, all these rules / SOPs are not meant for people like me” or  “I am a senior person, these rules / SOPs are meant for the juniors”. Also there are instances, when a senior manager suggests that “we bend the rule, just in this case”. What these persons overlook is that juniors usually consider the seniors and the knowledge workers as “role models” and they very soon copy what they learn from the role models.

For example, our office / factory procedure requires that my bag is checked while entering or leaving the premises. Then I may be the CEO or the Managing Director or the Security Officer, I must stop and get my bag checked. This kind of example-setting (and respect for procedures) demonstrated by the seniors goes a long way in conveying the message to everyone else in the organization. 

It would therefore be evident that if our organization desires to deliver consistent performance on an on-going basis, the managers must create a culture for strict adherence to procedures and a strong sense of self-discipline. If Toyota could fail after 50 years of consistent performance, this could happen to any one of us!

The Japanese have referred to self-discipline as the “Fifth S” in the 5-S habits of good housekeeping. But when it comes to ensuring consistency in quality, we can say that self-discipline is the “First S” and it applies to each and every member of the organization. If we wish to achieve consistent / sustained performance over a long period of time, the foremost requirement is to create a culture of self-discipline throughout the organization.

Tweet

QUALITY ISSUES IN EDUCATION - ARTICLE 03

Anil Sharma from Kanpur was very keen to qualify as a software engineer. He was advised by the counsellor of a private university to join their four year degree course which would give him excellent opportunities in the future. Anil spent rupees five lakhs on the course fees and another four lakhs on stay and food arrangements, in Navi Mumbai, during the four years. He worked very hard and secured excellent grades. When he realised that placements were not coming forth, he started trying for admission to a post-graduate course.

He was totally disappointed to learn that he was not eligible for such admission because the private university was not a recognized one. Beena Wagh joined an autonomous MBA course of 2 years duration. Due to shortage of faculty, students (boys and girls) had no option but to attend lectures at the unearthly hours of 10.00 pm to 2.00 am! Forget the quality, even the safety of the children was not considered by the management.

Ramesh Bhatia joined a premier institute through a competitive examination. The faculty at the institute was highly qualified, but many of them failed to deliver the contents in a manner that the students could  understand. Some of the teachers were not even audible beyond the third row of the class!

Sunita Joshi joined a university recognized MCM course. Although the computer hardware was available as per the university norms, many of the required software were not available leading to gross under-utilization of the resources.

Above instances are just a few examples that show the way educational activities are being managed in India. Despite the efforts of bodies like the Education Boards, the UGC and AICTE to regulate the quality of educational activities, many schools and colleges get away with inefficient and ineffective working as demand exceeds supply.

We can define Quality as: “Achieving satisfaction of customer through giving him value for the money he spends and fulfilling all his needs and expectations”. Surprisingly many educationists still believe that students are not their customers. The attitude is one of autocratic-benevolence and the issue of trying to achieve customer satisfaction at student level is often ignored as “not applicable in our case” 

Some of the typical quality-related issues that lead to dissatisfaction of the parents and students are:

• Course contents / curriculum do not have linkage with the needs of trade and industry,
• Lack of in-depth knowledge of the subject by the faculty,
• Lack of faculty’s ability to make the student understand the subject,
• Effectiveness of the examination-system as a means of testing the student’s knowledge is questionable,
• Absence of a helpful approach by the administration,
• Transparent communication with the students and parents is missing, Ill-equipped library and laboratories,
• Infrastructure is inadequate to meet the students’ requirements,
• Institution is not recognized / accredited,
• Foreign universities that charge high fees although they do not follow any standards, nor do they enjoy any kind of reputation in their own country.
• Cumbersome process of admission,
• Need for good housekeeping and proper maintenance of records,
• Not offering guidance / assistance to students in respect of placement or career-counselling,
• Absence of a mechanism to ensure training and up-gradation of the faculty and other personnel,
• Not involving students and parents in improvement of the institution’s processes.

In the absence of focus on such quality issues, we cannot expect that the students and parents will be satisfied customers. The concept of managing quality in service businesses like  education, banking and insurance has come much later than in the manufacturing

organizations. Even in manufacturing organizations, the Americans and Europeans have adopted this concept much later than the Japanese. Indeed, the secret behind Japan’s astounding success after the 1950’s was the adoption of quality management principles of the

Quality Gurus (mostly Americans) like Dr. Deming and Dr. Juran. In the 1970’s, the Japanese company Matsushita bought a color TV plant that was earlier being run by Motorola. Prior to takeover by the Japanese management, the average rate of defects per TV, was 2.2 per year. Three years later the defect rate had dropped to an average of 0.03 per TV, per year.

What would have been the investment to achieve this change?

The major efforts put in by the Japanese management included modification of the product designs to reduce chances of field-failures, changing the manufacturing processes to reduce defect generation and sourcing components from more reliable suppliers. Matsushita did not go in for a complicated technology, nor did they change the workforce. All they did was to use the concepts of quality management propagated by Dr. W. Edwards Deming and Dr. Joseph Juran. These concepts were, years later, formalized as the eight principles of quality  management and adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Geneva and by Motorola who developed the “Six Sigma Management System”

The Six Sigma Management System teaches us to use the process approach for managing quality. The process approach looks at every activity as management of inputs in such a manner that you can achieve the desired output. For example, a school wishes to achieve 100% pass results in the Board examinations. To achieve this output, the management must identify the key input factors that need to be managed such as capability of the teachers, hours of practice put in by the students, selection of the right books, etc. They may also study the best practices for the same process in other successful schools and adopt these to make their internal-processes more effective.

Another important principle that Six Sigma uses is based on Dr. Deming’s philosophy that every employee in the organization is responsible for quality and ultimate responsibility is that of the top management. So, in the case of an educational institution, not only the faculty and staff but also the students and the parents have a role to play in improving the quality of the institution’s processes.

Using tools like collection of data to understand processes, brainstorming in cross-functional teams to arrive at root causes of problems, building preventions in processes to minimize mistakes / defects in a proactive manner, deep involvement of senior management in identifying pain areas of the organization and a very strong commitment to achieve customer satisfaction are some of the most important elements on which a Six Sigma management system is based.

Any school / college / institute can use the concepts and tools of Six Sigma, to improve the effectiveness of their processes which would result in increased satisfaction of the children and parents and higher revenues for the organization.

To Read More Click Here

______________________________________________________________

G.K.K. Singh (Nickname: GKPK) is a B.Tech and Silver Medalist (IITBombay), MBA (IIM-Calcutta), IRCA-UK Lead Auditor, Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Director of Asian Institute of Quality Management - Pune. He can reached at: director@aiqmindia.com

Tweet

Six Sigma - Lean Six Sigma Management System - ARTICLE 02

Organization’s Route to Achieving its Strategic Management and Profitability Goals The “Balanced Scorecard” approach to strategic management was developed in the early 1990's by Drs. Robert Kaplan (Harvard Business School) and David Norton. It is an effective approach that enables organizations to clarify their vision and long-term strategy and translate these into action.

It incorporates performance management dashboards that focus on four indicators (perspectives) to monitor progress in respect of achieving the organization's strategic goals. 

The four perspectives are:

• The Learning and Growth Perspective.
• The Business Process Perspective.
• The Customer Perspective.
• The Financial Perspective.

Many organizations have under-rated the Balanced Scorecard approach although the fault might lie in the manner in which it has been implemented. Blending the use of Lean Six Sigma with Balanced Scorecard can help an organization to achieve its strategic management goals by building on some key elements of Lean Six Sigma such as:

• Customer-defined quality.
• Empowering employees to work with a proactive approach.
• Encouraging employees to work in cross-functional teams to deliver value to external and internal customers.
• Measuring, improving and monitoring the parameters that are critical to process performance.
• Achieving continual improvement and breakthrough improvement in the organization’s business and technical processes.

In the recent economic slowdown, a blanket solution adopted by many organizations was to lay off employees. Although this may have resulted in short-term savings, such organizations  sacrificed their ‘only appreciating assets’ in the process.

On the other hand, following long-term gains could have been achieved by implementing lean six sigma projects in the organization’s strategic areas of business:

• Costs that the organization incurs daily due to mistakes / defects at the level of internal and external customers reduce sharply.
• Hidden costs related to loss of customer confidence and legal claims, associated with such mistakes / defects are eliminated. Needless to mention, these costs can be enormous at times.
• Employees stop hiding mistakes and learn to build “prevention” in their business and technical processes thereby improving the capability of these processes.
• Utilization of employee-wisdom and ability to work in teams leads to optimum solutions for the organization’s problems.
• People start recognizing the seven types of waste, commonly identified in “Lean Management Practices” and work towards elimination of such wastes.
• “Value Stream Processing Mapping” is used to increase efficiency of the business processes by eliminating the “non-value adding” steps.
• Organization enhances its ability to offer better products and services, delivered faster and at lower cost.

Due to these benefits, Lean Six Sigma is today being adopted by number of organizations worldwide. According to one estimate nearly 60 % of Fortune-500 companies are using Lean Six Sigma and that figure rises to 82% when we look at just the Fortune-100 companies. In fact organizations like GE (General Electric) have mandated that all management level persons have to be at least six sigma green belt qualified.

At times I come across senior managers who look at Lean Six Sigma methodologies as another set of tools to improve quality. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth. On the contrary, Lean Six Sigma is a very powerful management system that can lead the organization to achieve its strategic management goals and profitability goals on an on-going basis.

______________________________________________________________________

G.K.K. Singh (Nickname: GKPK) is a B.Tech and Silver Medalist (IIT-Bombay), MBA (IIM-Calcutta), IRCA-UK Lead Auditor, Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Director of Asian Institute of Quality Management - Pune. He can reached at: director@aiqmindia.com

Tweet

SIX SIGMA BASICS - ARTICLE 01

The traditional way of looking at quality has been that “quality cannot be measured”, and “error in work is inevitable”.3FF8QH42BN88

At the end of the second world war, the quality of products manufactured in Japan was atrocious. At this juncture, the Japanese decided to change this scenario. They visited many industries in USA to study their approach to quality. They also invited experts like Dr. Deming and Dr. Juran to help them. These experts focused on enlightening the top management about their responsibility in respect of quality and training engineers on tools like statistical process control and design of experiments. Their efforts resulted in spectacular improvements and by 1980 even the American citizens preferred to buy Japanese products due to better quality offered by them at a more competitive price.

By 1985, survival became a major issue for many American organizations against the onslaught of Japanese competition. One such organization which was at great risk was Motorola. In an effort for survival, Motorola evolved and implemented the six sigma management system for the first time in the world.

This system of management-included lessons learnt from the successes achieved by Dr. Deming and Dr. Juran in Japan as also a methodology of quantifying quality. Till such time, quality was considered as “unmeasureable” and only talked of in terms of “excellent”, “world-class”, etc. The six-sigma management system makes it possible to calculate quality of each and every process in the organization. It is believed that if you want to improve any process we should first know its present level of quality. Six Sigma methodology makes this possible.

Key Themes in Six Sigma:

Every functional area (department) is viewed as a supplier to another department whose requirements must be satisfied. So, if we want to improve any process, our starting point is to find who is the customer for our process and what are his requirements from the process. This could be an internal customer for an HR process or an external customer for a logistics process.

For example, one of the internal customers for an HR Manager is the Production Manager or the Operations Manager. A critical requirement of this internal customer is that vacancies must be filled within, say, 45 days from time of placing the request. Another requirement would be that induction-training of new employees results in their settling fast on the job. If the HR Manager has identified these requirements of his internal customers, then he is more likely to fulfill them.

Each and every activity in the organization is viewed as a process represented by the function Y = f(X1, X2, X3,;;Xn), where Y is the output (result) to be achieved from that activity. The X1, X2, X3 ;;;Xn are viewed as inputs to the process. In six sigma, we use statistical methods to find out what would be the optimum values of the inputs X1, X2, X3, ;;;. Xn, which would help us to achieve the most effective result. By repeating these values for the inputs, we can be assured of the same (consistent) output from the process. In the above example, building a data bank would be an important X1 as input to the recruitment process.

In today’s environment of fierce competition, an external customer needs to be satisfied on various counts which include: providing the required specifications, giving prompt support before and after the sale, pricing the product competitively and meeting the timelines specified by the customer. All these outputs are possible only if a boundaryless cooperation exists between the different departments. Thus, six sigma lays very heavy emphasis on cross-functional cooperation without which it is very difficult to deliver value to customer.

Six Sigma methodology stresses the need to improve consistency in performance of our processes thereby reducing the defects / mistakes. This is achieved by working in a proactive manner and visualizing “what are the defects / mistakes that occur in this process”? What preventions can we build in our process so that the defects / mistakes do not occur?

“Lean management” which was developed by Toyota is now considered as a part of six sigma methodologies. It requires employees to question existing practices and ways of doing tasks, with the idea of reducing the idle-time and other wastes in the processes.

Due to this, the terminology “Lean Six Sigma” has been evolved. In short Six Sigma methodologies help us to reduce the defects / mistakes so that our process becomes more effective. Lean management helps us to reduce waste so that our process  becomes more efficient.

Six sigma implementation is always carried out in teams who work on projects with unknown solutions. Typically, the senior management selects areas of pain for the organization and these are taken up as projects by teams consisting of a Champion, a Black Belt and a number of Green Belts. (Reportedly, these titles were coined by a Motorola improvement expert with a passion for karate).

Every project must result in reduction of errors / defects, or elimination of waste, or increase of customer satisfaction ultimately ending in profit-improvement for the organization. Six Sigma methodology relies on a number of tools and technique like flow-charts, process-maps, pareto analysis, root-cause analysis, risk-assessment, risk reduction, hypothesis-testing, building prevention in processes, and establishing co-relation for a better understanding of the  organization’s process.

It uses DMAIC as a proven-framework for problem-solving and process-improvement:

Define:

• The problem statement,
• The goal statement,
• The scope of the process-improvement project,
• Form the project team,
• Finalize date-wise plan for the process-improvement project.

Measure:
You cannot improve anything that you cannot measure. To know where we want to go, we must know where we are today. So, this phase involves:

• Decide how you will measure current performance,
• Calibrate the measurement system,
• Measure current performance

Analyze: 
In this phase, we analyze the data related to current performance of the process, such as:

• Root causes that lead to occurrence of defects / mistakes,
• Causes of variation in the process – why we are not being able to achieve consistency,
• Causes that lead to waste and re-work in the process,
• Likely solutions that would help us to remove the above causes

Improve:
This phase involves:

• Brainstorming, to arrive at the best solution,
• Risk-assessment & risk-reduction in respect of the chosen solution, before  implementation,
• Implementing the chosen solution,
• Verifying and validating for the improvement.

Control:

Greatest challenge after an improvement is to sustain the improvement. Control phase is to ensure sustenance of the improvement achieved. It involves aspects like:

• Documenting the changes made in the process
• Training people on the changes
• Using Control Charts to monitor the process performance on an on-going basis.

Most six sigma projects end in profit improvement and this is one of the measurements of process-improvement because whenever we reduce defects / re-work or wastage, it should result in savings / contribution to profit-improvement.

In recent years, adoption of Six Sigma Management System has increased phenomenally. Today 53 % of Fortune-500 companies are using Six Sigma –and that figure rises to 82 % when you look at just the Fortune-100.

It is seen that if an organization invests time and money on six sigma training and implementation, it usually ends up in achieving savings, which would be 20 to 50 times of the investment made. Moreover, with reduction of defects, the frustration of internal stakeholders drops and satisfaction of external customers improves drastically.

_____________________________________________________________________
G.K.K. Singh (Nickname: GKPK) is a B.Tech and Silver Medalist (IIT-Bombay), MBA
(IIM-Calcutta), IRCA-UK Lead Auditor, Six Sigma Master Black Belt and Director of
Asian Institute of Quality Management - Pune. He can reached at: director@aiqmindia.com Tweet