Six Sigma was Bill Smith’s vision for excellence in everything. Prior to Six Sigma, companies were implementing total quality management, statistical process control, pre-control, cost of poor quality, and other techniques with minimal effect. Quality became a promise of “motherhood and apple pie,” “or castles in the air.”
Quality improved only through sporadic implementation of preventive approaches and routine use of containment, sort, and corrective actions. Businesses achieved higher quality of product shipped, and paid heavily for it. People started saying “Quality costs.” Then, slogans such as “Quality is free” arose. People started thinking that quality must be a kind of gimmick, and the slogan didn’t fly, even if it was true in some cases. Questions remained—“What is quality?” “Why should it cost?” “Why does one need statistics to improve quality?” In most people’s minds, quality means a simple task that is done right, or done well, or that produces excellence.
When we learned about quality we learned about counting defects, inspection methods, sampling plans, categorizing defect data, control charts, process-control limits, specification limits, averages, and other similar concepts. Then we learned the concepts of PDCA (plan, do, check, act), which people rarely implement, but often mention when talking about process thinking. The common implementation of PDCA means plan projects conceptually, get busy, check the outcome—and if necessary, recheck it—and take corrective action. In all four steps of PDCA, the corrective action happens to be the most visible and obvious act of improving quality.
Unfortunately, the corrective-action systems on which most companies often work typically imply filling out corrective-action forms. Corrective actions have an element called root-cause analysis, which requires process knowledge and a willingness to think hard about details. The devil is in the details, and the root cause invariably points to the actions of the operator. The poor operator has to attend more training, undergo more performance reviews, and often eventually lose the job to some outsourcing partner.
After all this, quality is supposed to improve, and the company is expected to achieve higher profit and growth. Of course, the quality, profit, and growth of the outsourcing partner improves instead. All of these actions didn’t affect the attitudes of the company’s leadership and employees. Quality meant counting defects, sorting, punishing defect producers, and becoming quality-phobic.
If we reflect on our own quality experiences, we know in our heart and mind that quality really means doing it right, whatever it is. We think we’ve done it right when customers accept our product or service, and we don’t hear any complaints. However, the customer’s silence might just mean that the customer isn’t there any longer. We accept quiet customers, and we keep doing our jobs. Does it work? Are we delivering our best to our customers? And what does “our best” mean?
Think of producing your best and the best for the customer. We know the best means right on the money, on target. Excellence means being on target. Quality also means being on target. But where is the target? Nobody gives you one. The customer rarely communicates a performance target. Everyone gives a range of expected performance, which allows us and our friends to get by following the path of least resistance. Choosing easy over excellence is the root cause of our quality problems.
Achieving quality implies that we are determined in our minds to make the right decisions at the executive level and to encourage employees to take the right actions, all of which is doing the best for the customer.
To build a value-based relationship with customers and pursue excellence, the first step is negotiating the performance targets with the customer and agreeing among ourselves on the acceptable limits for profits. Then, the total cost of the product or service to the customer must be mutually understood. The road to excellence isn’t going to be easy without a discussion with the customer or the supplier. We must recognize that excellence requires more thinking than physical work. On the other hand, acceptable performance requires more physical work than thinking. We don’t want to be lean in our thinking. Perfection begins with the pursuit of excellence in our minds, which is then followed up by excellence in our actions.
Excellence is often a moving target. Best-in-class companies want to keep moving to stay ahead of the competition. Businesses must challenge their human capital to innovate new solutions in helping customers aim for higher performance targets by earning customer loyalty and achieving higher profit margins. Excellence means quality to our customers. The quality journey is the pursuit of excellence. Sustaining excellence is easier and less expensive than sustaining merely acceptable performance.
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