Introduction

„Management model is not on how much we are making but on how well we are meeting our customers’ requirements“ – Peter Drucker

• Understand their own systems first before adopting programs that work on other companies
• In an increasingly competitive marketplace, you cannot hope to survive in a system that is out of control
• You will need to:
  • Know your customer requirements
  • Have a well-defined process to translate requirements into internal actions
  • Align all of your tasks/processes alogn common goals and objectives
  • Use key measure to manage by fact
  • Involve everyone in continuous improvement
  • Understand and improve all your critical processes
  • Satisfy your customer
  • Quality = meeting or exceeding customer expectations
  • Quality excellence doesn’t have to be expensive
  • TQM doesn’t make decisions but provides a model to control and improve the company

(source: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=841097&show=html)

Leadership

• Without clear and consistent leadership, the company will never be a quality leader
• Quality leaders
  • meet with employees frequently, to inspire and recognize their best efforts
  • visit customers to find out what they need and expect
  • track quality improvements
  • take and teach quality courses
  • demand excellence
  • preach quality to every audience that will listen
  • Transition
    • Step one: Commit to quality
    • Step two: Know your company’s systems and values
    • Step three: Participate in your company’s quality processes
      • E.g. Fedex: Important things:
        • People
        • Service
        • Profit
• Step four: Integrate quality into the company’s management model
  • Culture of Quality
  • Senior manager as leaders
  • Open communication; employees shouldn’t be afraid
  • Set, track and help to achieve goals
  • Responsibilities for quality leaders
    • Lead the quality improvement process
    • Quality zealot
    • Understand customers’ needs and expectations
    • Empower everyone in the company to meet customers’ needs and expectations
    • Manage by studying facts
    • Promote process improvement
    • Strategic planning process to keep the company focused
    • Demand rapid, continuous improvment

Customer Focus

„Satisfaction used to be something that validated our performance. Now it drives the way we do business. – Steve Hoisington, IBM Rochester

• Talk, listen, check, verify and test with your customers
• Business begins with customer focus and ends with customer satisfaction

Strategic planning

• Align all the efforts oft he organization to customer satisfaction, quality and operational performance goals
• Translates visions into action plans
• Regular reviews of performance (daily, weekly, at max monthly)
• Most effective strategic plan allows each employee with each task to support one or more corporate objectives
• Quality and business planning must go hand in hand

Management

Quality is not an assignable task. It must be rooted and institutionalized in every process. It is everyone’s responsibility. – Motorola

• Motorola’s process
  • Have a set of metrics
  • Determine results
  • Pick a problem
  • Address the problem
  • Analyize the solution
  • Move on
  • Managers have to listen and engage their subordinates
  • Persuade rather than demand
  • Support their initiatives, coach, train, facilitate and serve
  • Leadership sets a company’s vision and values
  • Customer indicate what to focus on
  • Strategic planing converts all these into company goals
  • Goals need to be translated into goals for employees
  • Primary methods
    • Set challenging goals
    • Develop action plans o pursue those goals
    • Train people to achieve the goals
    • Exceptional Quality (EQ) Question for managers
      • What are you personally doing to improve EQ?
      • What are your plans for improving the work climate in your area?
      • What are your plans for empowering your people?
      • What have you identified that needs tob e fixed and how can I help you fix it?

• What successes have you had with EQ in your area?

Employee Involvement

• Employees who have been trained, empowered, and recognized for their achievement see their jobs and their companies from a different perspective
• Process of empowerment
  • Willingness from managers to give other responsibility
  • Training people in how to delegate and accept responsibility
  • Communication and feedback to tell people how they are doing
  • Rewards and recognition

Training

• Don’t assume any level of knowledge when you assess the need for training
• Without training no continuous improvement is possible
• Top performers treat their workers as  assets to be developed, not commodities to be used
• Question to ask
  • What kind of training do we need?
  • Whom should we train?
  • How will we deliver training?
  • How will we know whether the training is effective?
  • How can we improve the training process?
  • Duration: half to about one hour
  • Training should be very practical

Reward and Recognition

„The surveys show that people crave day-to-day recognition but they’re not getting it. They want feedback. They can’t function in a vacuum anymore. – Maehling (Recognition Redefined)

• Rewards become more important if a management system is established
• Employees crave recognition
• Recognition program
  • Consistent
  • Frequent
  • Interpersonal skills to give specific information about the accomplishment
  • Recognition comes from peers
  • Try to recognize as many people as possible
  • Prestigious awards that are considered special
  • Public display is involved
  • Must be based on sincere trust and respect
  • Specific feedback is provided
  • Tangible reminder to remind recipient oft he reason fort he recognition
  • Recognition is timely
  • Recognition is win / win — everyone is a winner

„Pay’s function is to create equity and fairness. IT should attract people to an organization and keep them there. Pay should not be an active ingredient in promoting teamwork and motivating performance“ – Dr. Michael Beer, Harvard

Employee focus

„The business exists as much to provide meaningful work tot he person as it exists to provide a product or service tot he customer“ – Robert Greenleaf, „Servant as Leader“

• Employees as an asset to develop
• Ben & Jerry HR agenda:
  • Guide for managers and employees
  • Improving communication
  • Adding training & cooperative work skills
  • Enhancing measurement
  • Introducing a new compensation system to reward them for acuqiring certain skills and competencies
  • Employee loyalty
    • Empowerment
    • Training
    • Reward and Recognition
    • Safety
• Jerry Greenfield: „If it’s not fun, why do it?“
• Measure employee satisfaction
• Communicate results to everybody

Customer Contacts

• Personal attributes that contribute to solid customer relationships
  • Treat customer as you want tob e treated when you are a customer
  • Take personal responsibility to see that customers’ needs are met
  • Constantly seek to improve by learning
  • Share your knowledge, skills, and time with others
  • Have a positive outlook
  • Communicate effectively
  • Solectron’s customer service standards
    • Notify the customer as soon as possible about unexpected problems
    • Identify the problem and its impact and propose an action
    • Try to respond within 24 hours
    • Don’t argue with customers about complains
      • Encourage them to talk
      • Apologize for any inconvenience or mistunderstanding
      • Ask for suggestions
      • Take action immediately
• Do not blame Solectron’s problems on any individual or department
• Formal weekly exchanges with the customer
• Ask customer how you could improve your service
• Short weekly surveys, e.g. one question about
  • Quality
  • Delivery
  • Communication
  • Service

Design of products and services

• Most customer-focused activity your company undertakes
• Key Questions:
  • How do we translate customer requirements into products and service design requirements?
  • How do we ensure design quality?
  • How do we reduce design-to-introduction cycle time?
  • How do we improve the design process?

Process management

All the management practices now being recognized as best practices follow the same basic approach: identify what is important tot he customer, identify your approach, and measure the results – Emery Powell, process strategy Manager, RTIS

• COPIS model
  • Customers
  • Output
  • Process
  • Input
  • Suppliers
  • Don’t just focus on financial results
  • Focus on people and processes that produces these results
  • Process
    • Identifying the problems
    • Deciding on the methodology
    • Recommendations
    • Action Plan

Supplier Quality

Companies that want to be lean and nimble in ever-flatter organizations strive to do only what they do best and to outsource the rest, without sacrificing quality, schedule, or cost.

Data Collection and Analysis

The Balanced Scorecard translates an organization’s mission and strategy into a comprehensive set of performance measures that provides the framework for a strategic measurement and management system – Kaplan and Norton (The Balanced Scorecard)

• KPIs help promote continuous improvement because the employee teams want to meet their goals
• Only measure what you can control

Benchmarking

Benchmarking ist he identification and implementation of best practices to achieve superior customer results and business performance“ – Ameritech

• Benchmark process
  • Know your product / service / process
    • Customers will tell you when you’re messing up
    • Two questions:
      • Has anyone ever faced a similar problem before?
      • What did they do about it?
      •  
• Find out what other companies are doing
• Identify gaps
• Initiate improvements

System Assessments

• Use Baldrige Award
  • Involve senior management
  • Establish application team
  • Train team members
  • Assign responsibilities
  • Collect data and information
  • Identify areas for improvement
  • Communicate needs, ideas and information
  • Begin writing and deliever the assessment

Crossing the River

• About three years+
• Goal is to align and improve your system for satisfying customers

• Goal: Gain commitment
  • Compare company performance against industry standard
  • Look at your company from a customer perspective
  • Brainstorm what the company would look like with the new model
  • Develop a new vision, mission and values
  • Begin work on a system of measures of senior executive
  • Goal: Determine customers’ perception
    • Identify primary market
    • Gather information from every possible source about the customers’ requirements, expectation and needs
    • Analyze the data
    • Check with reality
    • Goal: Develop action plan
      • Compare status quo and vision
      • Prioritize areas for improvement
      • Determine how progress will be measured
      • Formalize a periodic system assessment process
      • Goal: Align all activities through the strategic planning process
        • Establish strategic planning process by adapting best practices
        • Determine vital few long- and short-term goal
        • Decide on measurement of each goal
        • Goal: Involve all employees in continuous improvement
          • Communicate vision, goals, requirements, and expectation to all employees (via managers)
          • Formalize processes for ongoing communication
          • Clarify management’s role in the new system
          • Train employees in the skills they need to assume responsibility for their processes and results
          • Formalize processes for providing employees with feedback
          • Train employees in the skills they need to participate in teams
          • Initiate the use of teams to manage and improve processes and solve problems
          • Goal: Manage and improve all key processes
            • Identify core processes
            • Train employees in process management and improvement
            • Assemble cross-functional teams to analyses key processes
            • Reorganize the company around its core processes
            • Establish methods of communicating feedback to teams and results tot he whole organization
            • Goal: Establish a system of measurement
              • Measure only what you can control
              • Train employees
              • Formalize processes
              • Goal: Align compensation and recognition programs
                • Survey employees to understand their expectations and requirements
                • Work with cross-functional teams
                • Involve employees in running the company’s recognition programs
                • Formalize processes
                • Goal: Treat employees as the most important asset
                  • Ask employee what the require and expect in their work environment tob e healthy and satisfied
                  • Align the goals for employee health, well-being, and satisfaction
                  • Formalize processes for reviewing and improving
                  • Goal: Establish a benchmarking program
                    • Train management about benchmarking
                    • Formalize your company’s benchmark process
                    • Use input from customers, suppliers, and employees to identify benchmarking opportunities

Kodak self-assessment matrix