Process Focus - Evans and Lindsay
Process Focus
Quality Management focuses on process as discussed in GMS422 Lecture 05.
Process vs. Function
Process Focus: Centers on processes that cut across departments.
Functional Focus: Centers on departments with department managers.
Process Management
Identifies vital work processes related to core competencies that deliver:
Customer value
Profitability
Organizational success
Sustainability
Determine key work process requirements by incorporating input from:
Customers
Suppliers
Partners
Collaborators
Design and innovate work processes to meet all requirements by incorporating:
New technology
Organizational knowledge
Cycle time
Productivity
Cost control
Efficiency and effectiveness factors
Seek ways to prevent:
Defects
Service errors
Rework
Minimize costs associated with:
Inspections
Tests
Process or performance audits
Implement work processes and control their day-to-day operation to ensure design requirements are met, using:
Performance measures
Customer input
Supplier input
Partner input
Collaborator input
Improve work processes to achieve better performance by:
Reducing variability
Improving products and services
Keeping processes current with business needs and directions
Sharing improvements with other organizational units and processes to drive organizational learning and innovation.
Incorporate effective process management practices in the overall supply chain
Process management involves planning and administering activities necessary to achieve a high level of performance in key business processes, and identifying opportunities for:
Improving quality
Operational performance
Customer satisfaction
Process Management Activities
Design: Ensuring adequate inputs to the process, such as:
Materials
Technology
Work methods
A trained workforce
Ensuring the process can achieve its requirements.
Control: Maintaining consistency in output by:
Assessing performance
Taking corrective action when necessary
Improvement: Continually seeking to achieve higher levels of performance in the process, such as:
Reduced variation
Higher yields
Fewer defects and errors
Smaller cycle times
Standards
The entire set of standards is focused on an organization’s ability to understand, define, document, and manage its processes.
Organizations must plan and control the design and development of products and manage the interfaces between different groups involved in design and development to ensure effective communication and clear assignment of responsibility.
The standards address a wide variety of process management activities, including:
Control of production and service
Control of monitoring and measuring devices
Improvement of quality management system effectiveness
Types of Processes
Value-creation processes: Most important to “running the business”.
Design processes: Activities that develop functional product specifications.
Production/delivery processes: Those that create or deliver products.
Support processes: Most important to an organization’s value creation processes, employees, and daily operations.
Projects
In many companies, value-creation processes take the form of projects which are temporary work structures that start up, produce products or services, and then shut down.
Project management involves all activities associated with planning, scheduling, and controlling projects.
Value creation process requirements usually depend on consumer or external customer needs.
Support process requirements are driven by internal customer needs and must be aligned with the needs of key value-creation processes.
Process Design Considerations
Include:
Safety
Cost
Variability
Productivity
Environmental impact ("green" manufacturing)
Measurement capability
Maintainability of equipment
The goal of process design is to develop an efficient process that satisfies both internal and external customer requirements and can achieve the requisite level of quality and performance.
Process Mapping
A process map (flowchart) describes the specific steps in a process.
Analyzing Process Maps
Key questions to consider:
Are the steps in the process arranged in logical sequence?
Do all steps add value? Can some steps be eliminated and should others be added in order to improve quality or operational performance? Can some be combined? Should some be reordered?
Are capacities of each step in balance; that is, do bottlenecks exist for which customers will incur excessive waiting time?
What skills, equipment, and tools are required at each step of the process? Should some steps be automated?
At which points in the system might errors occur that would result in customer dissatisfaction, and how might these errors be corrected?
At which point or points should quality be measured?
Where interaction with the customer occurs, what procedures and guidelines should employees follow to present a positive image?
Service Design
Designing a service essentially involves determining an effective balance between people and technology.
The five key service dimensions (reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy, and responsiveness) provide a basis for designing quality into services.
Key Service Dimensions
Customer contact and interaction
Customization
Labor intensity
Important questions to address:
What service standards are required to be met?
What is the final result of the service to be provided?
At what point does the service begin, and what signals its completion?
What is the maximum waiting time that a customer will tolerate?
How long should it take to perform the service?
Who must the consumer deal with in completing the service?
What components of the service are essential? Desirable? Superfluous?
Which components can differ from one service encounter to another while still meeting standards?
Design for Agility
Agility refers to flexibility and short cycle times.
Flexibility refers to the ability to adapt quickly and effectively to changing requirements.
Examples:
Rapid changeover from one product to another
Rapid response to changing demands
The ability to produce a wide range of customized services
Agility is crucial to such customer-focused strategies as mass customization.
Mistake-Proofing Processes
Typical reasons for mistakes and errors:
Forgetfulness due to lack of reinforcement or guidance
Misunderstanding or incorrect identification because of the lack of familiarity with process or procedures
Lack of experience
Absentmindedness and lack of attention, especially when a process is automated
Designing potential defects and errors out of the process eliminates any possibility that the error or defect will occur and will not result in rework, scrap, or wasted time.
Identifying potential defects and errors and stopping a process before they occur often results in some non-value-added time.
Identifying defects and errors soon after they occur and quickly correcting the process results in some scrap, rework, and wasted resources.
Poka-Yoke
Poka-yoke is an approach for mistake-proofing processes using automatic devices or simple methods to avoid human error.
Based on:
Prediction: Recognizing that a defect is about to occur and providing a warning
Detection: Recognizing that a defect has occurred and stopping the process.
Examples of mistake-proofing:
Many machines have sensors that would be activated only if the part was placed in the correct position.
A device on a drill counts the number of holes drilled in a work piece; a buzzer sounds if the work piece is removed before the correct number of holes has been drilled.
Computer programs display a warning message if a file that has not been saved is to be closed.
Passwords set for web accounts are entered twice.
Orders for critical aircraft parts use pre-fit foam forms that only allow the correct part to be placed in them, ensuring that the correct parts are shipped.
Associates at Amazon sort products into bins that weigh them and compare the weight to the order; if there is an inconsistency, the associate is prompted to verify the items.
Types of Errors
Task errors: Doing work incorrectly, work not requested, work on the wrong order, or working too slowly.
Treatment errors: In the contact between the server and the customer, such as lack of courteous behavior, and failure to acknowledge, listen, or react appropriately to the customer.
Tangible errors: Unclean facilities, dirty uniforms, inappropriate temperature, and document errors.
Customer errors in preparation: Failure to bring necessary materials to the encounter, to understand their role in the service transaction, and to engage the correct service.
Customer errors during an encounter: Inattention, misunderstanding, or simply a memory lapse, and include failure to remember steps in the process or to follow instructions.
Customer errors at the resolution stage of a service encounter: Failure to signal service inadequacies, to learn from experience, to adjust expectations, and to execute appropriate post-encounter actions.
Process Control
Control is the activity of ensuring conformance to requirements and taking corrective action when necessary to correct problems and maintain stable performance.
Control is different from improvement:
Elements of a Control System
Any control system has four elements:
A standard or goal
A means of measuring accomplishment
Comparison of results with the standard to provide feedback
The ability to make corrections as appropriate
Control should be the basis for organizational learning and lead to improvement and prevention of defects and errors.
After-action review:
What was supposed to happen?
What actually happened?
Why was there a difference?
What can we learn?
Control is usually applied to incoming materials, key processes, and final products and services.
Effective quality control systems include:
Documented procedures for all key processes
A clear understanding of the appropriate equipment and working environment
Methods for monitoring and controlling critical quality characteristics
Approval processes for equipment
Criteria for workmanship, such as written standards, samples, or illustrations
Maintenance activities
Deming's View of a Production System
Continual interaction and feedback loops between suppliers, production, consumers etc.
Continuous Improvement
Continuous Improvement refers to both incremental changes, which are small and gradual, and breakthrough improvements, which are large and rapid.
Continuous improvement is important because:
Customer loyalty is driven by delivered value.
Delivered value is created by business processes.
Sustained success in competitive markets requires a business to continuously improve delivered value.
To continuously improve value-creation ability, a business must continuously improve its value-creation processes.
Learning
Learning is understanding why changes are successful through feedback between practices and results, leading to new goals and approaches.
A learning cycle consists of four stages:
Planning
Execution of plans
Assessment of progress
Revision of plans based upon assessment findings
Kaizen
Kaizen is a Japanese word that means gradual and orderly continuous improvement
Focus on small, gradual, and frequent improvements over the long term with minimum financial investment, and participation by everyone in the organization.
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Kaizen Event
A Kaizen Event is an intense and rapid improvement process in which a team or a department throws all its resources into an improvement project over a short time period, as opposed to traditional kaizen applications, which are performed on a part-time basis.
Teams are generally comprised of employees from all areas involved in the process who understand it and can implement changes on the spot.
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Breakthrough Improvement
Breakthrough Improvement refers to discontinuous change, as opposed to the gradual, continuous improvement philosophy of kaizen.
Breakthrough improvements result from innovative and creative thinking; often these are motivated by stretch goals, or breakthrough objectives.
Example (Motorola): Improve product and services quality ten times within two years, and at least 100-fold within four years.
Benchmarking
Benchmarking is “the search of industry best practices that lead to superior performance.”
Best practices are approaches that produce exceptional results, are usually innovative in terms of the use of technology or human resources, and are recognized by customers or industry experts.
Competitive benchmarking: Studying products or business results against competitors to compare pricing, technical quality, features, and other quality or performance characteristics.
Process benchmarking: Identifying the most effective practices in key work processes in organizations that perform similar functions, no matter in what industry.
Reengineering
Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed.
Reengineering involves asking basic questions about business processes:
Why do we do it?
Why is it done this way?
Supply Chain
The fundamental objective of a supply chain is to provide the right product in the right quantity at the right place at the right time.
Suppliers include not only companies that provide materials and components, but also distributors, transportation companies, and information, health care, and education providers.
Key considerations for supplier management:
Clarify the most important product requirements.
Develop processes for identifying suppliers that can provide the needed goods or services
Qualify processes in terms of their production and quality capabilities
Select suppliers that best fit an organization’s needs, their management and workforce capabilities, technology, quality processes, production control system, financial stability, total cost, capacity, and the potential to be long-term partners.
This might include supplier surveys; quality certification records, test and inspection reports, and process control data; audits at the suppliers’ sites, receiving inspection of delivered products, and recording key metrics such as defect rates and percentage of on-time deliveries.
Such activities can provide a basis for scoring suppliers against cost, quality, and delivery criteria.
Recognizing the strategic importance of suppliers in accomplishing business objectives, particularly minimizing the total cost of ownership
Developing win-win relationships through long-term partnerships rather than as adversaries
Establishing trust through openness and honesty, thus leading to mutual advantages.
Supplier Certification
A supplier certification process is designed to rate and certify suppliers who provide quality materials in a cost-effective and timely manner.
The Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association defines a certified supplier as one that, after extensive investigation, is found to supply material of such quality that routine testing on each lot received is unnecessary.
Supplier certification processes can be time-consuming and expensive to administer. Using a uniform set of standards such as ISO 9000 can reduce costs.