1. Quality: A Continuing Revolution Flashcards
1
Q
High points of chapter 1
QUALITY: A CONTINUING REVOLUTION
A
- The purpose of this chapter is to provide a “lessons learned” perspective on making quality happen.
- Human needs for quality have existed since the dawn of history.
- Over the centuries the strategies of managing for quality have undergone continuing change in response to a continuing procession of changing political, social, and economic forces.
- During this progression of events, upper management became detached from the process of managing for quality.
- The Japanese revolution in quality was based on the creation of unprecedented strategies:
- Upper management in charge
- Training for all functions, at all levels
- Quality improvement at a continuing, revolutionary pace
- Work-force participation through QC circles
- The phenomenon of life behind the quality dike requires that we provide good quality to shield society against service interruptions and to guard againts disasters.
- Quality competitiveness for the years ahead requires a new basic approach.
2
Q
High points of chapter 2
HOW TO THINK ABOUT QUALITY
A
- A hidden obstacle to unity in managing for quality is differences in premises, concepts, and even in the meaning of key words.
- Quality is fitness for use
- The basic definition branches into:
- Quality consists of those product features that meet customer needs
- Quality consists of freedom from deficiencies
- Product features provide customer satisfaction; the major effect is on sales income.
- Product deficiences create customer dissatisfaction; the major effect is on costs.
- Product is the output of any process.
- Product inclues goods and services.
- A customer is anyone who is affected by the product or process.
- Customers may be external or internal
- Product satisfaction and product dissatisfaction are not opposites.
- Measures of deficiencies are usually expressed in terms of a fraction:
- QUALITY = (frequency of deficiencies) / (opportunity for deficiencies)
- Evaluation of product features starts by asking customers how they evaluate quality.
- Managing for quality is carried out by a trilogy of three managerial processes: quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement.
- Each of the processes of the trilogy is carried out by a universal sequence of steps.
TASKS FOR UPPER MANAGERS
- Assure that the company’s manuals and training materials include clear definitions of the world ‘quality’ and of the subsidiary terminology.
3
Q
High points of chapter 3
QUALITY IMPROVEMENT
A
- As used here, “improvement” means the organized creation of beneficial change, the attainment of unprecedented levels of performance.
- The most decisive factor in the competition for quality leadership is the rate of quality improvement.
- The low rate of improvement releative to product deficiencies is largely traceable to the absence of an organizational structure for making such improvements.
- The major wastes are interdepartmental in nature.
- These major wastes are huge. In the United States, probably about a third of what is done consists of redoing what was done previously, because of quality deficiencies.
- Quality improvement should not be on a voluntary basis; it should somehow be mandated.
- All quality improvement takes place project by project and in no other way.
- The return on investment in quality improvement is among the highest available to managers.
- Quality improvement is not capital intensive.
- Quality improvement does not come free.
- To get full scale into annual quality improvement adds about 10% to the work load of the entire management team, including the upper managers.
- The first step in mobilizing for projects collectively is to establish a quality council.
- Quality councils are well advised to anticipate the troublesome questions and, to the extent feasible, provide answers at the time of announcing the intention to go into annualy quality improvement.
- The first project should be a winner.
- All knowledge advances by theory- by affirming or denying the validity of theories.
- Failure to include quality improvement in the performance evaluation system sends a strong signal to the operating managers: quality improvement has low priority.
- Typically it has taken several years to establish quality improvement as a continuing, integral part of a company’s business plan.
- It is not enough to establish policies, create awareness, and then leave all else to subordinates.
- To convince subordinates that quality improvement is intended to go on and on requires that unprecedented deeds be carried out by upper managers.
4
Q
Tasks for upper managers
CHAPTER 3: QUALITY IMPROVEMENT
A
- Upper managers are well advised to secure, within their own companies, the estimates needed to compare
- (A) the potential return on investment in improvement with
- (B) the potential return from other opportunities of investment
- If no quality council is in existence, the upper managers should create one.
- Upper managers should personally become the leaders and members of the senior quality-improvement councils.
- Upper managers should see to it that each quality council prepares and publishes a statement of its responsibilities.
- Upper managesr should direct that nominations for projects be addressed to all products and processes, business as well as manufacture- that is, big Q rather than little q.
- Upper managers should personally participate in the review of progress on improvement, and they should
- Establish quality goals
- Provide resources
- Review progress
- Give recognition
- Revise the reward system
- Serve on project teams
- Face up to employee apprehensions
5
Q
High points of chapter 4
QUALITY PLANNING
A
- To stop the production of new alligators requires sutting down the malignant hatchery.
- Nothing short of leadership by the upper managers can shut down the alligator hatchery.
- Most quality planning is done by experienced amateurs- people who have never been trained in the concepts, methods, skills, and tools of planning for quality.
- The emerging consensus is that the planners (the experienced amateurs) should themselves become proficient in using the methods and tools of modern quality planning.
- The backbone of a structured approach to quality planning is the quality-planning roadmap.
- A customer is a cast of characters.
- We have reached a point that requires a degree of direct involvement of upper managers with the overall quality-planning process and with specific steps in that process.
- The customers’ needs may be unstated; they may seem ‘unreal’. Yet they must be discovered and acted on.
- As a minimum we need answers to the following questions:
- Which product features are of major importance to you?
- With respect to these key features, how does our product compare to that of our competitors?
- What is the significance of these quality differences to you, in money in in other ways that might be important to you?
- Market research should also be extended to former clients and nonclients.
- Customers’ needs are a moving target.
- The basic remedy for quality planning by amateurs is to train the amateurs to become professionals.
- The major obstacle to arriving at the optimum has been the urge to suboptimize.
- The spreadsheet does not provide answers; it is primarily a depository for answers.
- In the case of process development, a major aid for prediction is process capability: the inherent ability of a process to carry out its intended mission.
- Human use of the concept of lessons learned has been decisive in human dominance over all other animal species.
- The launching of new products desperately needs application of the Santayana review.
6
Q
Tasks for upper managers chapter 4
QUALITY PLANNING
A
- The leadership for change in quality planning must come from the upper managers.
- The leadership for training planners must also come from the upper managers.
- Upper managers should assure that the methods in use for identifying customers are able to provide the inputs essential for subsequent product and process development.
- Upper managers should create project teams whose missions are directed toward establishing the needed glossaries, standardization, and measurement.
- Upper managers should assure that product developers become trained in the use of modern methods of quality planning for product development.
- Upper management should assure that the product-development process includes effective safeguards against suboptimization.
- Upper managers should assure that the practice of carryover of prior designs has adequate safeguards to prevent the carryover of failure-prone features.
- Upper managers should assure that the product-development process provides and adequate response to the effects of proliferation.
- Upper management should become knowledgeable about the growing role of the process-capability concept and the methodology behind the concept.
- Upper managers should take steps to establish the organizational machinery needed to apply the Santayana review to selected critical macroprocesses.
7
Q
High points for chapter 5
QUALITY CONTROL
A
- All company employees, from the chief executive officer down the the workers, are active in quality control, and all make use of the feedback loop.
- The concept of self-control is also universal. It applies to everyone in the company, from the CEO to the worker level, inclusive.
- Self-control is a necessary prerequisite to motivation.
- It is risky for managers to hold workers “responsible” for quality unless the workers are in a state of self-control.
- Managers should understand the existence, nature, and extent of human errors, including their own.
- The optimum solution for acquiring in depth knowledge of the relationships between process variables and product results is to train the planners in how to use statistical design of experiments.
- The proper sequence in managing is first to establish the goals and then to plan how to meet those goals, including the choice of the appropriate tools.
- Measures of progress should be designed to evaluate the effect on operating results, such as improvement in product performance and customer satisfaction, and reduction in cost of poor quality.
8
Q
Tasks for upper managers chapter 5
QUALITY CONTROL
A
- Upper managers, as part of their auditing of managing for quality, should assure that allocation of responsibility for producing non-confirming products at the worker level is in accordance with the state of worker controllability.
- Upper management’s auditing of the quality-control process should include an examination of the provisions that have been made to deal with human sensing errors.
- During its auditing of the quality control process, upper management should assure that the organization machinery for planning the quality information system includes the customers as well as the suppliers.
- During its auditing of the quality-planning process, upper management should assure that the training of planners in the statistical design of experiments is sufficient to enable them to optimize performance and to provide the operating forces with process-adjustment capability.
- Upper management should insist that clear criteria be established as guides to actions on cases of nonconformance.
- Upper management should, as part of their audit of the quality system, assure that decisions on disposition of nonconforming products are made by persons with the information needed to balance the considerations of cost and customer satisfaction.
- Upper managers should be on the alert to assure that the statistical tools do not become an end of themselves.
- Upper management should exercise control over the quality-control SYSTEM by:
- Mandating creation of a quality control manual
- Establishing the criteria to be met by the manual
- Approving the final draft
- Audting periodically the up-to-dateness of the manual and the state of conformance.
9
Q
High points of chapter 6
STRATEGIC QUALITY MANAGEMENT
A
- Strategic quality management is a systematic approach for setting and meeting quality goals throughout the company.
- Triangle image, split horizontally in three
- Top: SQM
- Middle: Operational quality management
- The work force and quality
- Triangle image, split horizontally in three
- This chapter is central to the entire subject of making quality happen.
- Establishing company-wide quality management involves profound changes, some of which may be unwelcome.
- The “supercause” of the deficiencies of the past is the lack of a systematic, structured approach such as already exists in managing for finance.
- Companies are normally unable to move in a new direction across a broad front. Instead they move in single file.
- A fundamental step in establishment of SQM is the creation of the quality council (committee, etc).
- Goals for features that affect product salability should be based primarily on the market: on meeting or exceeding marketplace quality.
- The two-way communication feature of the deployment process (a Japanese term is “catch ball”) has turned out to be an important aid in getting results.
- Those who are apprehensive about “corporate interference” should note that SQM provides a channel for dealing with the problem of securing resources.
- The choice of control subjects must be tailored specifically to each company’s needs.
- In the absence of accounting data, companies can use estimates to provide upper managers with approximate information as to the total cost of poor quality and as to which are the major areas of concentration.
- The quality council has the ultimate responsibility for designing a report package for upper managers.
- The auditors who conduct technological audits seldom have the managerial experience and training needed to conduct business-oriented quality audits.
- Appointment to the role of quality manager should be to someone who is able to grasp the role conceptually and who in addition is willing to put forth the effort needed to become qualified to carry it out.
- Resources are a price to be paid for meeting the goals.
- The reward system (merit rating, bonuses, etc) not only serves its basic purpose of rewarding human performance; it also serves to inform all concerned of the upper managers’ priorities.
- Approaches based solely on exhortation are doomed to failure because they lack the substantive content needed to compete with the existing order.
- Whether the upper managers should take the company into SQM is a unique decision for each company.
10
Q
Tasks for upper managers chapter 6
STRATEGIC QUALITY MANAGEMENT
A
- If the needed quality councils are not already in existence, the UMs must create them.
- UM should take steps to assure that the quality-policy statements are updated.
- UMs should serve as a source of nominations for strategic quality goals.
- Goals for cases of chronically high cost of poor quality should be based on planned breakthroughs using the quality-improvement process.
- In deploying goals that involve macroprocesses, the UMs should squarely face the question: deployment to whom?
- UMs should place on the agenda of the quality council the question: What quality control subjects warrant UMs personal attention?
- UM’s roles in SQM include:
- Serving on the quality council
- Participating in policy formation
- Participating in goal setting and deployment
- Providing the needed resources
- Establishing the organizational infrastructure
- Reviewing progress
- Giving recognition
- Revising the reward system
11
Q
High points of chapter 7
OPERATIONAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT
A
- Planning for macroprocesses requires some form of team approach.
- Planners who are trained in quality-oriented expertise have outperformed planners who must secure the needed expertise from quality specialists.
- For many macroprocesses, responsibility for quality control is vague, that is, no one owns the macroprocess.
- UMs should not wait for an evolutionary process to develop performance reports for macroprocesses.
- UM auditing is one way to break up deadlocks with respect to poor performance of macroprocesses.
- During UM auditing of the product development process, the most critical focus should be on the adequacy of the early warning system.
- Failure to conduct Santayana reviews in depth can result in overlooking the major opportunities for improvement.
- UMs should be alert to assure that, when the opportunities are similiar, the priority should go to projects that are not captial intensive.
- A major part of the analysis of supplier relations should consist of review of prior performances of suppliers, both “good” and “poor”, so as to discover the causes behind the differences.
- It is not feasible for upper managers to become involved with the microprocesses individually. However, UMs can and should become involved with the microprocesses collectively.
- An effort to replan microprocesses on a broad scale should be preceded by training in how to plan for quality.
- Managers should be alert to a common illusion relative to replanning of microprocesses. Such replanning seldom solves the macroplanning problems.
- In microprocesses the responsibility for execution of the plan of quality control must be delegated mainly to the work force.
- The vital few decisions which are reserved to be made by supervisors should be specifically identified and spelled out in the procedures.
12
Q
Tasks for upper managers chapter 7
OPERATIONAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT
A
- To deal with deficiencies in macroprocesses requires action by upper managers.
- UMs should take positive steps to bring performance of macroprocesses into the system of UM reports.
- UM should identify the macroprocesses which require high level quality audits, and should take steps to organize such audits.
- UM can make a useful contribution to the microprocesses collectively by mandating a self-audit of microprocesses, to be conducted by the supervisors in charge, aided by their customers and suppliers.
- UM should create a project team whose mission is to design an appropriate system for self-audit of microprocesses by the respective supervisors.
13
Q
High points of chapter 8
THE WORK FORCE AND QUALITY
A
- Any effort to introduce change into workforce practice requires providing each workforce member with a clear answer to the question, ‘What should I do that is different from what I have been doing?’.
- To give maximum delegation to the work force requires being specific about which decisions and actions are to be delegated.
- It is now widely accepted that quality is better served if the workforce understands the purposes behind the goals - the why.
- The recent trend is strongly in the direction of providing the workforce with information on process trends and on the relation of process conditions to product results.
- The WF members are interested observers of any management drive for improvement, whether directed at the WF or not.
- A fatal obstacle to successful participation in quality planning is exclusion from the mainstream of the feedback flow.
- For workers to participate in quality planning requires creation of a methodology as well as an opportunity.
- WF participation can add significantly to companies’ quality performance.
14
Q
Tasks for upper managers chapter 8
THE WORK FORCE AND QUALITY
A
- UMs should look closely at the way in which the concept of the artisan enables workers to participate widely in quality-related matters and to accept a broader delegation of responsibility.
- The advantages of putting the WF into a state of self-control are obvious and important. To this end, UMs are well advised to establish improvement projects with a mission of identifying past obstacles to self-control so that they will not be carried over into new plans.
- Before embarking on any plan of motivating the WF to do good work, UM should determine the extent to which the workers are in a state of self-control.
- Managers should take soundings to understand the WF’s perceptions and to use those perceptions as an input to the proposed QI effort.
- UM should create a multifunctional team whose mission is to examine the feasibility of extending the role of the WF in quality planning, and to recommend a course of action.
- Certain prerequisites must be met if WF participation is to become effective on a continuing basis:
- UM must undergo the training needed to understand the support the objectives of the participation concept.
- Other members of the management team (managers, supervisors, and staff specialists) must accept the concept of participation, realizing that in doing so they will be delegating to the WF some activities that have in the past been regarded as “management perogatives”.
- These same members must undergo sufficient training in quality matters to be able to understand what is being offered to the WF.
- Management must face up to the WF’s apprehension.
15
Q
High points of chapter 9
MOTIVATION FOR QUALITY
A
- The need for motivation arises because there are some very real obstacles to achieving quality and because getting rid of some of those obstacles does involve motivation.
- Unawareness: people are not aware that they are creating quality problems.
- Competition in priorities: people are unable to achieve quality because other goals that have higher priority get in the way.
- Suboptimization: The achievement of quality locally gets in the way of overall quality.
- Cultural myths: People hold certain sincere beliefs that are related to quality but that are not based on fact.
- In most companies the obstacles that can be removed by motivation have their origin in prior managerial practices.
- As viewed by the middle and lower levels in many companies, the prevailing managerial practices do NOT add up to giving quality top priority.
- Those who design reward systems should assure that emphasis on departmental performance is not a detriment to overall performance.
- Managerial myths have been extensive.
- WF myths have been extensive.
- To deal with cultural resistance requires an understanding, in depth, of the inherent cause-and-effect relationships.
- Before announcing a major change in priorities, it is most helpful to examine the likely effect on the affected cultures.
- There are some broad-spectrum remedies available to deal with conscious errors:
- Depersonalize the orders
- Establish accountability
- Establish measurement
- Conduct quality audits
- Provide assistance to workers
- Improve communications
- Create competition, incentives
- Errorproof the operation
- Reassign the work
- Any technological or managerial change actually consists of two changes
- The intended change
- The social consequences
- The social consequence is the troublemaker.
- Behavioral scientists have provided some specific “rules of the road” for dealing with cultural resistance.
