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.

Quality circle

A quality circle is a small group of between three and 12 people who do the same or similar work, voluntarily meeting together regularly for about one hour per week in paid time, usually under the leadership of their own supervisor, and trained to identify, analyse and solve some of the problems in their work, presenting solutions to management and, where possible, implementing solutions themselves.

The idea of the quality circle was first introduced by a number of large Japanese firms in a systematic attempt to involve all their employees, at every level, in their organisation’s drive for quality.

There are two main tasks assigned to quality circles: the identification of problems; and the suggestion of solutions. A secondary aim is to boost the morale of the group through attendance at the meetings and the formal opportunity to discuss work-related issues. Meetings are held in an organised way. A chairman is appointed on a rotating basis and an agenda is prepared. Minutes are also taken. They serve as a useful means of following up proposals and their implementation. The success of quality circles has been found to depend crucially on the amount of support they get from senior management, and on the amount of training that the participants are given in the ways and aims of the circles.

Kaoru Ishikawa, a professor at Tokyo University who died in 1989, is attributed with much of the development of the idea of quality circles. They created great excitement in the West in the 1980s, at a time when every Japanese management technique was treated with great respect. Many firms in Europe and the United States set them up, including Westinghouse and Hewlett-Packard. It was claimed at one time in the 1980s that there were as many as 10m people participating in quality circles in Japanese industry alone.

However, the method also came in for a good deal of criticism. Even Joseph Juran, one of the two American post-war germinators of the quality idea (the other was W. Edwards Deming), considered that quality circles were pretty useless if the company’s management was not trained in the more general principles of total quality management.

   Others criticised the way in which the idea was transferred from one culture to another without any attempt to tailor it to local traditions. It may, such critics suggested, be well suited to Japan’s participative workforce, but in more individualistic western societies it became a formalised hunt for people to blame for the problems that it identified. The original intention was for it to be a collective search for a solution to those problems.

   Quality circles fell from grace as they were thought to be failing to live up to their promise. A study in 1988 found that 80% of a sample of large companies in the West that had introduced quality circles in the early 1980s had abandoned them before the end of the decade. In his book “Quality: A Critical Introduction”, John Beckford quotes the example of a western retailer that took almost every wrong step in the book. These included:

• training only managers to run quality circles, and not the staff in the retail outlets who were expected to participate in them;

• setting up circles where managers appointed themselves as leaders and made their secretaries keep the minutes. This maintained the existing hierarchy which quality circles are supposed to break out of;

• expecting staff to attend meetings outside working hours and without pay;

• ignoring real problems raised by the staff (about, for example, the outlets’ opening hours) and focusing on trivia (were there enough ashtrays in the customer reception area).

Benchmarking

Benchmarking is the process of comparing one's business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and/or best practices from other industries. Dimensions typically measured are quality, time, and cost. Improvements from learning mean doing things better, faster, and cheaper. 

Benchmarking involves management identifying the best firms in their industry, or any other industry where similar processes exist, and comparing the results and processes of those studied (the "targets") to one's own results and processes to learn how well the targets perform and, more importantly, how they do it. 

The term benchmarking was first used by cobblers to measure people's feet for shoes. They would place someone's foot on a "bench" and mark it out to make the pattern for the shoes. Benchmarking is most used to measure performance using a specific indicator (cost per unit of measure, productivity per unit of measure, cycle time of x per unit of measure or defects per unit of measure) resulting in a metric of performance that is then compared to others. 

Also referred to as "best practice benchmarking" or "process benchmarking", it is a process used in management and particularly strategic management, in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best practice companies' processes, usually within a peer group defined for the purposes of comparison. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to make improvements or adapt specific best practices, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often treated as a continuous process in which organizations continually seek to improve their practices.

Popularity and benefits from benchmarking

In 2008, a comprehensive survey on benchmarking was commissioned by The Global Benchmarking Network, a network of benchmarking centers representing 22 countries. Over 450 organizations responded from over 40 countries. The results showed that:

1.     Mission and Vision Statements and Customer (Client) Surveys are the most used (by 77% of organisations) of 20 improvement tools, followed by SWOT analysis(72%), and Informal Benchmarking (68%). Performance Benchmarking was used by (49%) and Best Practice Benchmarking by (39%).

2.     The tools that are likely to increase in popularity the most over the next three years are Performance Benchmarking, Informal Benchmarking, SWOT, and Best Practice Benchmarking. Over 60% of organizations that are not currently using these tools indicated they are likely to use them in the next three years.

Collaborative benchmarking

Benchmarking, was originally invented as a formal process by Rank Xerox, is usually carried out by individual companies. Sometimes it may be carried out collaboratively by groups of companies (e.g. subsidiaries of a multinational in different countries). One example is that of the Dutch municipally-owned water supply companies, which have carried out a voluntary collaborative benchmarking process since 1997 through their industry association. Another example is the UK construction industry which has carried out benchmarking since the late 1990s again through its industry association and with financial support from the UK Government.

Procedure

There is no single benchmarking process that has been universally adopted. The wide appeal and acceptance of benchmarking has led to various benchmarking methodologies emerging. The seminal book on benchmarking is Boxwell's Benchmarking for Competitive Advantage published by McGraw-Hill in 1994.  It has withstood the test of time and is still a relevant read. The first book on benchmarking, written and published by Kaiser Associates, is a practical guide and offers a 7-step approach. Robert Camp (who wrote one of the earliest books on benchmarking in 1989)  developed a 12-stage approach to benchmarking.

The 12 stage methodology consisted of 1. Select subject ahead 2. Define the process 3. Identify potential partners 4. Identify data sources 5. Collect data and select partners 6. Determine the gap 7. Establish process differences 8. Target future performance 9. Communicate 10. Adjust goal 11. Implement 12. Review/recalibrate.

The following is an example of a typical benchmarking methodology:

1.     Identify your problem areas - Because benchmarking can be applied to any business process or function, a range of research techniques may be required. They include: informal conversations with customers, employees, or suppliers; exploratory research techniques such as focus groups; or in-depth marketing research, quantitative research, surveys, questionnaires, re-engineering analysis, process mapping, quality control variance reports, or financial ratio analysis. Before embarking on comparison with other organizations it is essential that you know your own organization's function, processes; base lining performance provides a point against which improvement effort can be measured.

2.     Identify other industries that have similar processes - For instance if one were interested in improving hand offs in addiction treatment he/she would try to identify other fields that also have hand off challenges. These could include air traffic control, cell phone switching between towers, transfer of patients from surgery to recovery rooms.

3.     Identify organizations that are leaders in these areas - Look for the very best in any industry and in any country. Consult customers, suppliers, financial analysts, trade associations, and magazines to determine which companies are worthy of study.

4.     Survey companies for measures and practices - Companies target specific business processes using detailed surveys of measures and practices used to identify business process alternatives and leading companies. Surveys are typically masked to protect confidential data by neutral associations and consultants.

5.     Visit the "best practice" companies to identify leading edge practices - Companies typically agree to mutually exchange information beneficial to all parties in a benchmarking group and share the results within the group.

6.     Implement new and improved business practices - Take the leading edge practices and develop implementation plans which include identification of specific opportunities, funding the project and selling the ideas to the organization for the purpose of gaining demonstrated value from the process.

Cost of benchmarking

The three main types of costs in benchmarking are:

• Visit Costs - This includes hotel rooms, travel costs, meals, a token gift, and lost labor time.
• Time Costs - Members of the benchmarking team will be investing time in researching problems, finding exceptional companies to study, visits, and implementation. This will take them away from their regular tasks for part of each day so additional staff might be required.
• Benchmarking Database Costs - Organizations that institutionalize benchmarking into their daily procedures find it is useful to create and maintain a database of best practices and the companies associated with each best practice now.

The cost of benchmarking can substantially be reduced through utilizing the many internet resources that have sprung up over the last few years. These aim to capture benchmarks and best practices from organizations, business sectors and countries to make the benchmarking process much quicker and cheaper.

Technical Benchmarking/Product Benchmarking

The technique initially used to compare existing corporate strategies with a view to achieving the best possible performance in new situations (see above), has recently been extended to the comparison of technical products. This process is usually referred to as "Technical Benchmarking" or "Product Benchmarking". Its use is particularly well developed within the automotive industry ("Automotive Benchmarking"), where it is vital to design products that match precise user expectations, at minimum possible cost, by applying the best technologies available worldwide. Many data are obtained by fully disassembling existing cars and their systems. Such analyses were initially carried out in-house by car makers and their suppliers. However, as they are expensive, they are increasingly outsourced to companies specialized in this area. Indeed, outsourcing has enabled a drastic decrease in costs for each company (by cost sharing) and the development of very efficient tools (standards, software).

Types of benchmarking

• Process benchmarking - the initiating firm focuses its observation and investigation of business processes with a goal of identifying and observing the best practices from one or more benchmark firms. Activity analysis will be required where the objective is to benchmark cost and efficiency; increasingly applied to back-office processes where outsourcing may be a consideration.
• Financial benchmarking - performing a financial analysis and comparing the results in an effort to assess your overall competitiveness and productivity.
• Benchmarking from an investor perspective- extending the benchmarking universe to also compare to peer companies that can be considered alternative investment opportunities from the perspective of an investor.
• Performance benchmarking - allows the initiator firm to assess their competitive position by comparing products and services with those of target firms.
• Product benchmarking - the process of designing new products or upgrades to current ones. This process can sometimes involve reverse engineering which is taking apart competitors products to find strengths and weaknesses.
• Strategic benchmarking - involves observing how others compete. This type is usually not industry specific, meaning it is best to look at other industries.
• Functional benchmarking - a company will focus its benchmarking on a single function to improve the operation of that particular function. Complex functions such as Human Resources, Finance and Accounting and Information and Communication Technology are unlikely to be directly comparable in cost and efficiency terms and may need to be disaggregated into processes to make valid comparison.
• Best-in-class benchmarking - involves studying the leading competitor or the company that best carries out a specific function.
• Operational benchmarking - embraces everything from staffing and productivity to office flow and analysis of procedures performed.

Metric Benchmarking

Another approach to making comparisons involves using more aggregative cost or production information to identify strong and weak performing units. The two most common forms of quantitative analysis used in metric benchmarking are data envelope analysis (DEA) and regression analysis. DEA estimates the cost level an efficient firm should be able to achieve in a particular market. In infrastructure regulation, DEA can be used to reward companies/operators whose costs are near the efficient frontier with additional profits. Regression analysis estimates what the average firm should be able to achieve. With regression analysis firms that performed better than average can be rewarded while firms that performed worse than average can be penalized. Such benchmarking studies are used to create yardstick comparisons, allowing outsiders to evaluate the performance of operators in an industry. A variety of advanced statistical techniques, including stochastic frontier analysis, have been utilized to identify high performers and weak performers in a number of industries, including applications to schools, hospitals, water utilities, and electric utilities.

One of the biggest challenges for Metric Benchmarking is the variety of metric definitions used by different companies and/or divisions. Metrics definitions may also change over time within the same organization due to changes in leadership and priorities. The most useful comparisons can be made when metrics definitions are common between compared units and do not change over time so improvements can be verified.