Various articles for Quality and Management

 QUALITY GURUS

                       

In a previous article we talked about the scientist of quality gurus, Dr.. Deming, now will be talking about another scientist he is......

Joseph M. Juran

24 Dec 1904 -Dr.Joseph Juran born in Romania,and 1951 - publishing "Quality Control Handbook"

mid 50's - Like Demning, travelled to Japan to conduct top and middle level executive seminars

the chairman emeritus of the Juran Instituite and an ASQC Honorary member. Since 1924, Juran has pursued a variety career in management as an engineer, executive, government administrator, university professor, labour arbitrator, corporate director, and consultant. Specialising in managing for quality, he has authored hundreds of papers and 12 books, including Juran's Quality control handbook , Quality Planning and Analysis, and Juran on Leadership for Quality.

Juran's trilogy:

is an approach to cross functional management that is composed of three managerial processes: planning, control, and improvement

Quality planning: 
This is the activity of developing the products and processes required to meet customer's needs. It involves a series of universal steps which can be abbreviated as follows:

• Establish quality goals
• Identify the customers- those who will be impacted by the efforts to meet the goal.
• Determine the customers' needs
• Develop product features that respond to customers' needs
• Develop processes that are able to produce those product features
• Establish process controls, and transfer the resulting plans to the operating forces

Quality control: 
This process consists of the following steps:

• Evaluate actual quality performance
• Compare actual performance to quality goals
• Act on the difference

Quality improvement: 
This process is the means of raising quality performance to unprecedented levels ("breakthrough"). The methodology consists of a series of universal steps:

• Establish the infrastructure needed to secure annual quality improvement.
• Identify the specific needs for improvement -the improvement projects
• For each project establish a project team with clear responsibility for bringing the project to a successful conclusion
• Provide the resource, motivation, and training needed by the team to:
  1.Diagnose the cause
  2.Stimulate establishment of remedies
  3.Establish controls to hold the gains

Cost of quality: 
The cost of quality, or not getting it right first time, Juran maintained should be recorded and analyzed and classified into failure costs, appraisal costs and prevention costs.

• Failure costs
  Scrap, rework, corrective actions, warranty claims, customer complaints and loss of custom
• Appraisal costs
  Inspection, compliance auditing and investigations
• Prevention costs
  Training, preventive auditing and process improvement implementation

Juran proposes 10 steps to quality improvement:

1. Build awareness of the need and opportunity to improve
2. Set goals for that improvement
3. Create plans to reach the goals
4. Provide training
5. Conduct projects to solve problems
6. Report on progress
7. Give recognition for success
8. Communicate results
9. Keep score
10. Maintain momentum

Total Quality Management

TQM

TQM

DEFINITION:

  Total Quality Management (TQM) is an enhancement to the traditional way of doing

business. It is a proven technique to guarantee survival in world-class competition. Only 

by changing the actions of management will the culture and actions of an entire organization 

be transformed. TQM is for the most part common sense. Analyzing these words.

Total — made up of the whole

Quality — Degree of Excellence a Product or Service provides

Management — Act, art or manner of handling, controlling, directing etc.

TQM CONCEPTS:

The above principles are bandied freely around in the above discussion. Its worth

dwelling with each for a moment.

Be customer–focused means everything you do will be done by placing the customer

in the centre. The company should regularly check customer’s attitudes. This will include the external and internal customer concept.

Do it right first time so that there is no rework. This essentially means cutting down

on the amount of defective work.

Constantly improve, this allows the company gradually to get better. One of the

axioms use by TQM people is ‘‘A 5% improvement in 100% of the areas is easier than a

100% improvement in 5% of the areas.

Quality is an attitude The attidue is what differentiates between excellence and

mediocracy. Therefore it’s very important to change the attitude of the entire workforce

i.e., basically the way the company works company’s work culture.

Telling the staff what is going on means keeping the entire workforce informed

about he general direction the company is headed in typically this includes them briefings,one of the main elements to TQM.

Training and education of the workforce is a vital ingredient, as untrained staff tend

to commit mistakes. Enlarging the skill base of the staff essentially makes them do a wider range of jobs and do them better. In the new system of working under TQM educating the staff is one of the principles.

Measurement of work allows the company to make decisions based on facts, it also

helps them to maintain standards and keep processes with in the agreed tolerance levels.

The involvement of senior management is essential. The lack of which will cause the

TQM program to fail.

Getting employees to make decision on the spot so that the customer does not face

any inconvenience in empowering the employees.

Mailing it a good place to work. In many an organisation there exists a lot of fear in

the staff. The fear of the boss, fear of mistakes of being sacked. TQM program is any

company filled with fear cannot work, therefore fear has to be driven out of the company before starting of TQM program.

Introduce team working, its boosts employee morale. It also reduces conflict among

the staff. It reduces the role of authority and responsibility, and it provides better more

balanced solutions. In a lot of companies teamwork is discouraged, so TQM programs

must encourage it.

Organise by process, not by function. This concentrates on getting the product to

the customer by reducing the barriers between the different departments.

BASIC APPROACH

TQM requires six basic concepts :

1. A committed and involved management to provide long-term top-to-bottom organizational support.

2. An unwavering focus on the customer, both internally and externally.

3. Effective involvement and utilization of the entire work force.

4. Continuous improvement of the business and production process.

5. Treating suppliers as partners.

6. Establish performance measures for the processes.

There concepts outline an Excellent way to run an organization. A brief paragraph

on each of them is given here.

1. Management must participate in the quality program. A quality council must be

established to develop a clear vision, set long-term goals and direct the program. Managers participate on quality improvement teams and also as coaches to other teams. TQM is a continual activity that must be entrenched in the culture it is not just a one-shot program. TQM must be communicated to all people.

2. The key to an effective TQM program is its focus on the customer. An excellent

place to start is by satisfying internal customers. We must listen to the ‘‘Voice of the

customer’’ and emphasize design quality and defect prevention.

3. TQM is an organization–wide challenge that is everyone’s responsibility. All

personnel must be trained in TQM, statistical process control (SPC) and other appropriate quality improvement skills so they can effectively participate on project teams. People must come to work not only to do their jobs, but also to think about how to improve their jobs, people must be empowered at the lowest possible level to perform processes in an optimum manner.

4. There must be a continue striving to improve all business and production processes.

Quality improvement projects, such as on-time delivery, order-entry efficiency, billing

error rate, customer satisfaction, cycle time, scrap reduction and supplier management

are good places to begin.

5. On the average 40% of the sales is purchased product or service, therefore, the

supplier quality must be outstanding. The focus should be on quality and life cycle costs rather than price. Suppliers should be few in number so that true partnering can occur.

6. Performance measures such as uptime, percent non-conforming, absentecism

and customer satisfaction should be determined for each functional area.

Quantitative data are necessary to measure the continuous quality improvement 

activity.

Quality Management Systems

QUALITY SYSTEMS are made up of the quality organization and the written guidelines used to define the quality organization as they relate to the rest of the organization. Quality systems are the result of the quality policy established by the executive management team. The two most important elements of quality systems are the quality manual and the organization's standard operating procedures. When developing the quality manual, it is recommended that attention be paid to following the guidelines established by the ANSU ASQC Q9000-1, Q9001-1, Q9002-1, Q9003-1, and Q9004-1 standards. These are the American equivalents to the ISO 9000 series of quality standards. The ANSI/ASQC standards are available from the American Society for Quality Control,611 East Wisconsin Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53202 and from ASTM. Even if the organization has no intention of applying for ISO registration, the quality guidelines in the ANSI/ASQC Q9000-1 series of quality systems are among the best available to control quality.

Six Sigma

Six Sigma Overview

1.1 What is Six Sigma?

Sigma ( σ) is a letter in the Greek alphabet that has become

the statistical symbol and metric of process variation. The

sigma scale of measure is perfectly correlated to such characteristics

as defects-per-unit, parts-per-million defectives, and

the probability of a failure. Six is the number of sigma measured

in a process, when the variation around the target is

such that only 3.4 outputs out of one million are defects under

the assumption that the process average may drift over the

long term by as much as 1.5 standard deviations.

Six Sigma may be defined in several ways. Tomkins (1997)

defines Six Sigma to be “a program aimed at the near-elimination

of defects from every product, process and transaction.”

Harry (1998) defines Six Sigma to be “a strategic initiative

to boost profitability, increase market share and

improve customer satisfaction through statistical tools that

can lead to breakthrough quantum gains in quality.”

Six Sigma was launched by Motorola in 1987. It was the

result of a series of changes in the quality area starting in the

late 1970s, with ambitious ten-fold improvement drives. The

top-level management along with CEO Robert Galvin developed

a concept called Six Sigma. After some internal pilot

implementations, Galvin, in 1987, formulated the goal of

“achieving Six-Sigma capability by 1992” in a memo to all

Motorola employees (Bhote, 1989). The results in terms of

reduction in process variation were on-track and cost savings

totalled US$13 billion and improvement in labor productivity

achieved 204% increase over the period 1987–1997

(Losianowycz, 1999).

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Quality costs

Manufacturing a quality product, providing a quality service, or doing a quality job – one

with a high degree of customer satisfaction – is not enough. The cost of achieving these goals

must be carefully managed, so that the long-term effect on the business or organization is a

desirable one. These costs are a true measure of the quality effort. A competitive product or

service based on a balance between quality and cost factors is the principal goal of responsible

management and may be aided by a competent analysis of the costs of quality (COQ).

The analysis of quality-related costs is a significant management tool that provides:

- A method of assessing the effectiveness of the management of quality.

- A means of determining problem areas, opportunities, savings, and action priorities.

The costs of quality are no different from any other costs. Like the costs of maintenance,

design, sales, production/operations, and other activities, they can be budgeted, measured

and analyzed.

Having specified the quality of design, the operating units have the task of matching it. The

necessary activities will incur costs that may be separated into prevention costs, appraisal

costs and failure costs, the so-called P-A-F model first presented by Feigenbaum. Failure

costs can be further split into those resulting from internal and external failure.

Prevention costs:

These are associated with the design, implementation and maintenance of the quality

management system. Prevention costs are planned and are incurred before actual operation.

Appraisal costs:

These costs are associated with the supplier’s and customer’s evaluation of purchased

materials, processes, intermediates, products and services to assure conformance with the 

specified requirements.

Internal failure costs:

These costs occur when the results of work fail to reach designed quality standards and are detected before transfer to the customer takes place.

External failure costs:

These costs occur when products or services fail to reach design quality standards but are not detected until after transfer to the consumer.

Quality Planning

Quality is:

1. When a product is consistently represented.

2. An attitude of excellence with an objective of error-free

performance shared by all employees.

3. Achieved through dedicated and Skilled employees, modem facilities, controlled manufacturing processes, continuing education, and a positive work environment.

4. Directly related to superior value and performance and is provided to customers in terms of productivity improvements, reduced operating costs, and outstanding service.

 Quality is simply defined as: providing goods and services that meet or exceed customer

requirements.

- To provide goods and services that meet this definition, the executives of the organization must have a strategic plan to lead the company along this path. The plan should contain

both long-term and short-term objectives. The window for long-term objectives should be no more than four years and preferably three years. The world changes so fast that planning more than four years ahead is not practical. Markets change at almost a constant pace. Customers' requirements do the same.

A long-term strategic plan should consist of four main programs.  There should be: (1) a program for futuristic quality  planning, (2) a program for service and product improvement,  (3) a program for employee involvement and education, and (4) a program for business systems. 

These programs require a mission statement so that the goals of the  program are understood. As with the quality policy statement, the mission statements for these programs should be 

short and to the point. This gives precise direction to steering committees implementing these programs. Mission statements for the programs I recommend are:

1. Futuristic quality planning-Develop and drive business  decisions that utilize quality tools and concepts to assure 

the successful introduction and implementation of new 

products, processes, and services to our customers.

2. Service and product improvement--Develop and implement programs to improve office and manufacturing operations, 

processes, and systems leading to improvements 

and consistency in service and products, and reductions 

in internal waste.

3. Employee involvement and education-Utilize the inherent knowledge and expertise of our employees to identify and 

participate in opportunities for improvement, and provide 

appropriate education as needed in support of these goals.

4. Business systems--Develop and manage the business systems required to assure quality, improve operations, and 

support our internal and external customers.

These programs require further definition to understandhow they are applied to effect continuous improvement.

Quality Improvement

What is Quality Improvement ?

  Quality Improvement is a formal approach to the analysis of performance and systematic efforts to improve it.

Quality Improvement –  involves both prospective and retrospective reviews. It is aimed at improvement -- measuring where you are, and figuring out ways to make things better. It specifically attempts to avoid attributing blame, and to create systems to prevent errors from happening. Quality Improvement activities can be very helpful in improving how things work. Trying to find where the “defect” in the system is, and figuring out new ways to do things can be challenging and fun.