newsdigest

by Dirk Dusharme and Cecelia Reeves

President Announces 1996 Baldrige Winners
Motivational Posters-Back With a Vengeance
RAB Tightens Auditor Requirements
IRS: Labor-Management Teams That Work
ASQC Launches ISO 14000 Quarterly
Swept Away!
National Science Foundation Funds Quality Research
ANSI-RAB Evaluates ISO 14000 Trainers
Eight Steps to Change
Entela Founder Dies
Making TPM Work

President Announces 1996 Baldrige Winners

On October 16, President Clinton and Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor announced the winners of the 1996 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. There were winners in each of the award categories-manufacturing, service and small business-the first time that has happened since 1992.

There were 29 applicants for this year's award, the lowest since the award's creation in 1988. Although fewer companies are applying for the award, the award criteria are accepted widely as the standard for performance and business excellence. The criteria are used by thousands of organizations of all kinds for self-assessment, planning, training and other purposes. More than a million copies have been distributed since the first edition in 1988.

http://www.quality.nist.gov/

ADAC Laboratories, Milpitas, California
Baldrige category: Manufacturing Employees: 710

ADAC designs, manufactures, markets and supports products for health care customers in nuclear medicine, radiation therapy planning and health care information systems.

All executives are expected to spend 25 percent of their time with customers, personally take customer calls and invite customers to attend weekly quality meetings. Since 1990, customer satisfaction for post-sales technical support has increased 10 percent and customer retention has grown from 70 percent to 90 percent. In addition, the length of time it takes to get customers up and running once a problem has occurred has decreased from 56 to 17 hours.

Dana Commercial Credit Corp., Toledo, Ohio
Baldrige category: Service Employees: 547

Dana Commercial Credit provides leasing and financing services to a broad range of business customers in selected market niches.

DCC consistently meets or exceeds key customer requirements, including completing transactions that competitors cannot, closing transactions on time, getting transactions done as agreed and providing customized lease products before the competition. Customers of DCC's Capital Markets Group have ranked them between four and five on a five-point scale (five is highest). DCC's Dealer Products Group U.S. ranks between eight and nine on a 10-point scale (10 is highest).

Custom Research Inc., Minneapolis
Baldrige category: Small business Employees: 105

CRI is a full-service national marketing research firm with clients in consumer, business-to-business, service and medical markets. The company works with large multinational companies to design and conduct projects that provide information to help make better business decisions.

CRI meets or exceeds clients' expectations on 97 percent of its projects. Seventy percent of CRI's clients say the company exceeds expectations. CRI's "technology-driven processes" have allowed the company to reduce cycle time for data tabulation from two weeks to one day.

Trident Precision Manufacturing Inc., Webster, New York
Baldrige category: Small business Employees: 167

Trident Precision Manufacturing is a contract manufacturer of precision sheet metal components, electromechanical assemblies and custom products for the office equipment, medical supply, banking, computer and defense industries.

Trident monitors custom product reliability through defects per 100 machines. For the past two years, Trident's custom products have had zero defects. Quality rating for its major customers shows performance results consistent over time and above 99.8 percent. Since 1990, on-time delivery has risen from 87 percent to 99.9 percent, and direct labor hours spent on rework declined from 8.7 percent to 1.1 percent

Motivational Posters-
Back With a Vengeance

Do you miss those beautiful inspirational posters of soaring eagles, sunsets, joggers and the American flag waving in the breeze? Don't worry. They're back-with a vengeance.

But while sales are booming for companies that sell motivational missives, others question the motivation of managers who use them, according to a recent Conference Board report.

"These are gimmicky attempts to fill the void where effective management doesn't exist," says Alfie Kohn, author of Punished by Rewards. "Companies buy them because they're cheap compared to what it takes to remake a workplace. One of W. Edwards Deming's 14 points was to eliminate slogans. That whirring you hear in the background is Deming spinning in his grave."

"[Managers] actually believe that these pump-up toys work," says Charles Garfield, author of Peak Performers: The New Heroes of American Business. "If the poster says 'Risk and Experiment,' but the company's message is 'Don't lose a dime of the company's money,' which do you think you're going to follow?"

Then again, Southwest Airlines, renowned for its fun, participatory work environment, recently bought $38,000 worth of motivational posters.

RAB Tightens Auditor Requirements

Beginning Jan. 1, 1998, all certified auditors must document at least 15 hours of continuing quality-related professional development activities each year, the Registrar Accreditation Board recently announced. The requirement is part of RAB's update to its quality management system certification program. The program also requires that candidates applying for QMS auditor certification after Jan. 1, 1997, have completed an approved training course within the previous three years and removes the three-year limit for provisional auditors.

For certified auditors, acceptable continuing quality-related professional development activities include but are not limited to attending training classes, seminars, conferences or workshops; teaching courses; or publishing articles.

IRS: Labor-ManagementTeams That Work

By consenting to implement a total quality partnership agreement, the National Treasury Employees Union and the North Texas District of the Internal Revenue Service have significantly improved labor-management relations, enhanced customer service and saved the taxpayers money.

In 1993, labor-management relations at NTD reached an all-time low when the union, with a bargaining unit of 1,893 employees, filed 132 grievances and 20 unfair labor practices. Strained labor-management relations based on we-they positional bargaining slowed or prohibited process improvements, says Bobby Scott, NTD's director. "We had a standoff on a lot of routine issues," he notes.

With the signing of the Total Quality Partnership agreement in July 1994, the union gained a more active role in decision making, says Scott. NTEU members attend executive staff meetings, off-site planning meetings and budget meetings; NTEU representatives and nonbargaining employees participate in process analysis teams; and labor and management discuss workplace changes and other issues earlier in the process.

The transition has not been easy, says Scott. There is distrust on both sides and accusations of "sleeping with the enemy," he says. But the real test of whether the partnership has worked is in the results. "We have improved productivity and we have saved the taxpayer a lot of money," Scott points out.

Joint labor-management teams working on a variety of projects have saved taxpayers nearly half a million dollars, according to the IRS. Grievances dropped from 132 in 1994 to 123 in 1994, and no unfair labor practices were filed-resulting in a savings of $57,000. Union negotiations, which have taken as long as four weeks, were reduced to just three days at the last negotiations.

This year, the IRS, the North Texas District and the NTEU were winners of the federal National Partnership Award, which honors federal labor-management teams that improve the delivery of customer service.

ASQC Launches ISO 14000 Quarterly

New on the ISO 14000 horizon from ASQC is Focus on 14000, a new environmental management standards quarterly. The report will provide executive summaries of significant developments and trends in ISO 14000, as well as substantive and actionable information for those who need continuous updates on ISO 14000 developments.

Editor Cornelius "Bud" Smith Jr. is a leader of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group to ISO Technical Committee 207, the international body charged with developing ISO 14000. He will serve as the editor of Focus 14000. Smith will be assisted by a group of contributing editors, including SubTAG chairs of the U.S. TAG to ISO/TC-207. The advisory board will include Joe Cascio of Global Environment and Technology Foundation, U.S. TAG chair; Joseph Dunbeck, CEO of the Registrar Accreditation Board; Mary McKeil, director of the Volunteer Standards Network, Environmental Protection Agency; and various other contributors.

For subscription information, contact the ASQC at (800) 248-1946 or (414) 272-8575.

Swept Away!

Internet surfing may be sweeping employees away in a tide of unnecessary information and inefficiency. One problem is Internet privilege abuse, according to a survey developed by Robert Half International Inc. One-hundred-and-fifty executives from the nation's 1,000 largest companies were asked, "Is employee time spent accessing the Internet for nonbusiness purposes considered a threat to productivity today?" Fifty-five percent of them said yes.

Another problem is information overload. A British survey found that faxes, voice-mail, e-mail and, yes, the Internet actually increased stress levels and, to some degree, inefficiency. Four out of 10 managers call their working environment extremely stressful on a daily basis, and 94 percent do not believe the situation will improve.

National Science Foundation Funds Quality Research

One of the problems with the quality movement is the lack of good empirical research to back it up, according to University of Cincinnati quality expert James W. Dean Jr., program director of the Transformation to Quality Organizations research program at the National Science Foundation. To encourage research on quality, TQO, along with the ASQC and leading corporations and universities, has committed a total of $9 million in grants over a three-year period to fund research in quality management and engineering.

"We hope that the TQO will provide a firm foundation of well-executed research to give companies some assurance that what they are doing will make a difference," says Dean.

The purpose of the research is to develop or improve concepts, theories and methodologies for transforming to quality organizations and to encourage the development of new tools or processes that lead to quality improvements. Research supported by the program is done by university faculty and must be based on partnerships between researchers and organizations, says Dean. Research must also be interdisciplinary. NSF uses nine of 11 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award core concepts to suggest the research domain.

A few of the 25 research projects currently funded by TQO include "Leadership of Technical Professional Teams"-University of North Texas, Department of Psychology; "The Role of Employee Performance Evaluations in Quality Improvement Initiatives"-Boston University School of Public Health; and "Saturn: The GM/UAW Quality Partnership"-Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management.

For more information or grant application guidelines, call the TQO at (703) 306-1757.

http://www.asqc.org/alliance/nsf.html

ANSI-RAB Evaluates ISO 14000 Trainers

Five companies will participate in a pilot accreditation program for ISO 14000 auditor training course providers. The pilot is part of the National Accreditation Program, a joint ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 accreditation program run by the American National Standards Institute and the Registrar Accreditation Board.

The course providers selected for the pilot are: Applied Quality Systems Inc., Excel Partnership Inc., International Quality & Environmental Services, Quality Systems Development and Stat-A-Matrix. RAB auditors will perform detailed evaluations of each provider's complete course materials. These evaluations involve course administration system documentation, course examinations, and instructor and student materials. Each course must pass the detailed evaluation in order to move onto the the on-site evaluation.

On-site reviews will involve an RAB audit team observation of each candidate course's entire offerings. Once any nonconformances are corrected, a report is issued by the audit team to the environmental management systems' council. The council will then vote on the accreditation status of the pilot candidates.

Eight Steps to Change

How can change be instituted so that it strengthens rather than depletes our companies, our society, our people? John P. Kotter, professor of leadership at Harvard Business School, outlines an eight-step action plan in his book Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press):

Establish a sense of urgency: Examine market and competition realities. Identify crises and opportunities quickly.
Create a guiding coalition: Emphasize teamwork.
Develop a vision and strategy: Focus on giving efforts direction and on motivating people.
Communicate the change vision.
Empower broad-based action: Change those systems or structures that seriously undermine the vision.
Generate short-term wins: Plan visible performance improvements and recognize the people who achieve them.
Consolidate gains and produce more change: Use increased credibility to change any systems that don't fit the vision.
Anchor new approaches in the corporate culture: Ensure that employees recognize the link between customer satisfaction and improved results.

Entela Founder Dies

Kenneth Sweers, one of the founders of Entela Inc., died on October 15th of an extended illness. He was 68 years old.

Entela provides testing, inspection and quality assurance services to manufacturers from automotive, furniture, metal and plastic industries. Sweers built the business around the philosophy that employees were valued as contributing individuals in the firm's success and that they were an integral part of the corporate family.

Making TPM Work

The good news is: Total productive maintenance works. The bad news is: It doesn't work if you don't stick with it. That's the lesson learned by Fiberweb North America's Simp-sonville, South Carolina, plant, a producer of nonwoven fabrics.

Since implementing total productive maintenance one-and-a-half years ago, the Simpsonville plant has seen total uptime grow from less than 60 percent to more than 90 percent.

The system worked so well, in fact, that in June, with equipment uptime nearing 99 percent, the plant decided to skip scheduled maintenance for six weeks in order to accommodate increased production-a big mistake, says Plant Engineer Dennis Edwards.

"Very quickly, we saw the effects," he recalls. "In July, our overall uptime dropped below 80 percent." In August, when the plant resumed its regular maintenance schedule, uptime again increased into the mid-90s-nearing world-class levels, says Edwards.

Besides keeping on track with scheduled maintenance, the key to successful TPM for Simpsonville has been to view maintenance and production as a single process, says Edwards.

"We don't consider ourselves production or maintenance," he explains. "We're manufacturing; we're all in the same boat. That's why when we talk about uptime, we don't worry about equipment uptime vs. process uptime. We talk about total uptime."

At Simpsonville, maintenance technicians work closely with production to schedule maintenance during routine machine downtimes, such as during a changeover. Moreover, the plant tries to maintain a one- to two-week planned maintenance interval on equipment. Machine operators perform their own low-level maintenance, such as lubrication, leaving higher-level maintenance to maintenance technicians.