Lecture 10 - Process Improvement Flashcards
What do operations managers do?
- Directing
- Designing
- Delivery
- Developing
What is performance measurement?
Is the activity of measuring and assessing the various aspects of a process or whole operation’s performance
What are critical success factors and Key performance indicators examples?
- improve order fulfilment - Ship to target - percentage of systems that ships on time exactly as customer specified
- increase product performance - initial field incident rate - frequency of problems experienced by customers
- Enhance post-sales performance - on-time, first-time fix - percentage problems fixed on first visit by a service representative
What factors are included in the balanced scoreboard?
- Financial
- Internal business processes
- Learning and growth
- Customers
What is quality?
The characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs, products or services free of deficiencies
What are features of the perception view of quality?
- Word of mouth
- Personal needs
- Past experience
- Customer expectations
- Customer perception
- Service or product delivery
How does quality affect cost?
As quality increases it can increase the cost of production generally increases but as aspects such as quality control and increased productivity can lead to cost reductions
How does quality affect revenue?
Revenue can be increased through enhanced service/product image, increased sales volume, increased customer service, reduced price competition
What is quality management?
Maximising customer satisfaction at the lowest overall cost to the org while continuing to improve the process through policies, objectives and processes
What are some methods of quality management?
- Inspection
- Quality control
- Quality assurance
- Total quality management
Quality management: What is inspection?
- Checking work after event
- identify sources of non-conformance
- Take corrective action
Quality management: What is quality control?
- Self-inspection
- Quality planning and procedures
- Use of basic stats
- Quality manual
- Use of process performance data
Quality management: What is quality assurance?
- Develop quality systems
- Use of quality cost data
- Quality planning
- use of stat process control
- Involve non-operations functions
Quality management: What is total quality management?
- Teamwork
- Employee involvement
- Process management
- Performance measurement
- Involves:
- All functions
- Suppliers
- Customers
What are some costs of quality?
- External failure costs
- Internal failure costs
- Appraisal costs
- Prevention costs
What are some dimensions of quality management?
- Values
- Tools
- Methodologies
What is hard quality management?
QM practices which focus on controlling processes and products through techniques & tools to conform to & established requirements
What is soft quality management?
QM practices which are directed towards involvement and commitment of management & employees training, learning and internal cooperation or teamwork
How can employees be involved in quality management?
- Training
- Employee relations
- Small-group problem solving
What are quality leader’s roles?
- advocacy
- stakeholder advocacy
- Systems thinking
- fact-based thinking
- quality planning
- quality coaching
- quality motivation
- Quality collaboration
What is the Ishikawa (cause-and-effect) diagram?
Used to structure investigation into root causes of a problem, choose categories of cause appropriate to the situation (5 Ms can be used: materials, machines, measures, mother nature, manpower)
Often used with brainstorming
What is why-why-why analysis?
Looking at the causes of failure, why they occurred e.g. lack of training and why this shortcoming occurred
What is lean production?
Production method that seeks to minimise waste to increase efficiency and minimise supplier, customer and internal variability
What are the five lean principles?
- Specify value
- Identify value stream
- make value flow
- Let customer pull
- Perfection
What is value?
the inherent worth of a product as judged by the customer and reflected in its selling price and market demand
What is waste (Muda in lean production theory)?
Any activity that consumers resources but creates no value
What are the seven wastes?
- Transport
- Inventory
- Motion
- Waiting
- Overproduction
- Over-processing
- Defects
What is Mura (lean production)?
Means unevenness or lack of consistency in operations (variability)
What is Muri (lean production)?
Refers to overburdening of equipment or operators
What are value streams?
All actions currently required to bring a product through the main flows essential to every product
What is lead time?
Time for one piece to move all the way through the process/value stream
What is value-creating time?
Time of those work elements that actually transform the product in a way the customer is willing to pay for
In a value stream how are activities classified?
- Creating value as perceived by customer
- Not creating value, but unavoidable given current tech or process
- Not creating value and immediately avoidable
What is value flow?
Focus on lean to achieve flow of materials, information or customers that deliver exactly what customers need, in exact quantity, time, location at the lowest possible cost
What is resource efficiency?
A measure of how much a resource is utilised in relation to a specific time period
What is flow efficiency?
A measure of how much value-receiving time a flow of unit experiences in relation to the total time from arrival in the system until departure
What is the difference between traditional and lean production in terms of capacity and flow?
traditional - resource-efficiency focus, focus on capacity utilisation
lean - Flow-efficiency focus, focus on flow
What is pull?
A system of cascading production and delivery instructions from downstream to upstream activities in which production upstream begins once downstream customer signals it
What is just-in-time production?
System producing specific items only when they are ordered and in the exact amount ordered.
How do push and pull control differ?
Push control has buffer inventory and information transferred up and down stream
Pull control demand downstream triggers production upstream, no buffer stock
What is kaizen (continual improvement/perfection)?
Means improvement in personal, home, social and work life, when applied to workplace means continual improvement involving everyone.
What are the Kaizen 5S’s?
- Sort: throw out what is unneeded
- Straighten: put things in best place to easily be reached
- Shine: Keep things clean and tidy
- Standardise: Standardise layouts and procedures
- Sustain: Develop a commitment and pride in keeping standards
What are causes of failure in continuous improvement (Kaizen)?
- Lack of involvement
- Insufficient education and training
- Lack of to management support
- Inadequate resources
- Deficient leadership or poor management
What is breakthrough improvement?
- Few, relatively large and infrequent steps
- Often managed top-down by technical experts
- Risky if planned improvement fails
What are causes of failure in breakthrough improvement?
- Lack of vision
- lack of powerful guiding coalition
- Under-communication
- Not anchoring change in corporate culture
