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On several occasions while conducting a third-party surveillance audit, I’ve gotten the following query--or a variation thereof: “One of our customers called us last week and wants to come in to do an audit in three weeks. Why can’t they just accept the results of the audit that you’re doing? After all, they’re auditing us to the same requirements. Isn’t registration to ISO 9001 supposed to stop these multiple customer audits?”
It does seem to be a dreadful waste of time. When any auditor comes in, there’s the need to have staff available for interviews. There’s at least one individual--usually the quality manager--who loses one or more days escorting the auditor throughout the facility. Schedules are disrupted; important tasks get sidelined.
Recently I called a friend, Ethan, to catch up on things. Ethan is a former student of mine who now holds a senior leadership position. He has been “tainted” by process excellence in the sense that because he understands the importance of processes, he can no longer practice traditional management by results. When an employee announces that he intends to reduce costs, Ethan wants to know the specific process that will be followed to accomplish the goal. In an effort to understand how this improvement will be achieved without causing harm elsewhere, Ethan asks such questions as, “What are the high-cost areas?” or “What are the major drivers of costs in these areas?” or “What are the root causes underlying these drivers?”
During an all-hands meeting at Ethan’s company, the new CEO was asked about his views on Six Sigma. The CEO responded he was in favor of Six Sigma’s emphasis on continuous improvement, but he wasn’t too keen on the “Belts.” In fact, he didn’t see a need for them.
If you’ve been paying attention, it’s probably no surprise to many of you that magazines and newspapers are struggling to survive. Daily newspapers are getting smaller and smaller; magazines are getting thinner and thinner. This issue of Quality Digest is the smallest we’ve ever produced. The long-predicted “end of print” seems to have finally materialized. The recession, the high price of fuel last year, and the popularity of the internet have all radically changed the balance sheet for traditional print media.
U.S. News & World Report will cease publication this year and be available only online. The Christian Science Monitor and PC Week will do the same. Even Entertainment Weekly is mulling a move to a strictly online presence. Many daily newspapers, including both Detroit newspapers, are moving to a mostly online presence. The New York Times is rumored to be in serious financial condition and may run out of cash as early as May.
I’m often asked, “Of all the stakeholders, which one is the most important? Which one is the most valuable resource that the organization must be sure is satisfied?” Let’s look at who the stakeholders are.
• Investors
• Management
• Employees
• Customers
• Suppliers
• Employees’ families
• Community
• Special interest groups
• Investors. An organization promises the investors an income that is better than what they could get from any other place. As a result, they invest their hard-earned money in the organization.
• Management. Managers are promised a good income if they can develop the organization and make it profitable. They often work 50 to 60 hours a week, giving up a lot of their family life. Certainly the organization has an obligation to its managers to provide them financial security and give them meaningful work assignments.
I recently received a data set consisting of the number of major hurricanes in the North Atlantic from 1940 to 2007. (Major hurricanes are those that reach Category 3 status or higher at some point during their existence.)
The first step in analyzing any data set is to look at the data. This means plotting the data in some meaningful format. With data that form a time series, the simplest and best format will be the running record where the data are plotted in time order. The running record for the number of major hurricanes is shown in figure 1.
The first question of data analysis must always be whether the data are homogeneous. If the data are, then we can use them with the various computations commonly taught in statistics classes. However, if the data aren’t homogeneous, then the question becomes, “Why or when did the changes occur?”
I believe that most manufacturers have mistakenly focused on initial quality and reducing cost and cycle time during the production and delivery cycle. This has come at the expense of reliability.
Customers buy for the following reasons, listed by top priority: • Features • Cost • Availability • Quality
Customers come back based on: • Reliability • Function • Cost • Availability
A customer puts quality last when making a purchase because quality is generally good no matter who the supplier is. In the same plant, the same people make Toyota and General Motors cars. Quality isn’t the problem; yes, there are “lemons” out there, but the top half-dozen name brands do a good job of producing initial quality. Why, then, have Ford and GM given way to Toyota as the No. 1 producer? Because Toyota is the best at producing reliability.
Let me give you some examples. The Toyota Yaris hatchback has 81-percent fewer problems during the first five years of ownership than the average car, while the Pontiac Solstice has 234-percent more problems than the average car.
We’ve heard it before: “______ won’t be around long. It’s the flavor of the month.” Fill in the blank with the latest management fad: zero defects, quality circles, SPC, TQM, systems thinking, balanced scorecards, reengineering, and most recently, Six Sigma and lean. What exactly is meant by tagging something the flavor of the month (FOM)? Should practitioners even care when their special initiative is the target of this unwelcome label?
Originally, of course, the FOM was a marketing promotion for Baskin-Robbins. It still is. December’s FOM was, appropriately, Egg Nog. But who really cares what last month’s FOM was? It’s yesterday’s news. This is one of the defining properties of the label. It’s here today, gone tomorrow. Lots of hype, enthusiasm, and fanfare. Then… nothing.
There is much confusion about the constructs of quality and customer satisfaction (Q/CS). “Quality is doing the right things right,” say some experts, but how can we be assured that a service provider is doing the right things? Here’s an example: “I recognize that the opera singer has a tremendous vocal range [high quality], but I hate opera [dissatisfaction].” In other words, if service providers are interested in quality as a means of achieving customer satisfaction, the cognitive model of quality is inadequate. In essence, a service provider can achieve quality by doing things right whether the things that they do are right or wrong in terms of customer satisfaction. Although it’s true that the cognitive formulation of Q/CS may result in orthogonal (or at least different) constructs that are easier for researchers to work with, the value of quality so defined appears suspect.
An alternative way of defining the Q/CS constructs would be to ask the consumer to make the following judgments:
1. Did the provider do what you wanted it to do?
2. When the provider did what you wanted, did it do it well?
3. How do you feel about the value you received from the service?
As some of you know, quality “speak” and concepts have been known to bleed into my everyday life. This is not uncommon for quality professionals. The only difference between some of us and the rest of you is that many of you are still in denial. You won’t admit to the occasional slip of the quality tongue (e.g., “I need to see the objective evidence that you’ve done your homework.”)
Several years ago, a colleague from Central America asked if I had any good examples of the difference between verification and validation. This particular question has plagued many organizations for quite some time. How can something possibly be verified as meeting specification and still not be what the customer wants? It seems illogical, and yet the truth is that it can and does occur.
I told my friend that I did indeed have a good example and proceeded to tell him this true story:
I was helping my mother with some crafts for her church bazaar. My mother would crochet fancy attachments resembling a stylized pinafore that she would affix to kitchen towels. This not only made them very pretty, but served the practical function of creating a loop for hanging the towel.
Well, well, well… 2009 is upon us. That sure happened fast. What happened to 2008? For that matter, what happened to 2007, or 1995, or 1978? It’s true what those Nationwide Insurance ads say: “Life comes at you fast.” (See how well advertising works?)
Not very many of us are mourning the end of 2008. It was a tough 12 months: numerous food and product safety recalls, soaring (then falling) oil prices, a long and bruising U.S. presidential campaign, and a mortgage market meltdown that helped usher in the worst financial collapse in several generations. Huge government bailouts of the financial sector and the auto manufacturers might help stem the tide--or might not. President Obama, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
For professionals in the U.S. manufacturing industry, the recession comes as the vicious right cross following the stiff left jab of outsourcing and offshoring. This is the nature of capitalism, however; inefficiencies in markets are exploited, often with unsettling consequences, and then conditions stabilize. On a macro level, in the due course of time, the economy will be just fine.
