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4.10 - Total Quality Organization – Systems

Overview

Total Quality Management (TQM) is the over-arching business culture or ethical environment and management style that encourages the use of tools, techniques and initiatives that contribute to the business objectives of an organization.

The restructuring of a business into Natural Groupings instead of traditional functions will allow control systems to be simplified.

Traditional Systems

  • Rely on large complex databases which cannot be accurately maintained and are not owned
  • Rely on paperwork or computing to chase work through larges numbers of offices
  • Fail to provide customer satisfaction
  • Have high overheads with over 60% non-value added activities
  • Are top-down imposed
  • Develop over-complicated procedures and excessive paperwork
  • Have inappropriate measures of performance for manufacturing systems and Just-in-time operation.
  • Encourage job specialisation with multiple payment systems based on job titles rather than skill levels
  • Have poor quality of performance

Systems Should

  • Assist process integration and be based on analysis of need
  • Facilitate control by recognising the basic business control systems
  • Provide customer satisfaction
  • Be appropriate for the cell or process group and relate to overall needs
  • Simplify operations and procedures and minimise paperwork
  • Have effective measures of performance reflecting business performance measures
  • Indicate achievement visibility with quality feedback
  • Have operator responsibility and ensure reliability in support of a right first time philosophy

Measure

Using

  • Achievement of plan
  • Stock Turns
  • Product Quality
  • Lead times
  • Sales arrears
  • Competitor performance
  • Value-added per employee
  • Process Control
  • Audit Process
  • Poka yoke, Taguchi, FMEA
  • Zero defect policy
  • Kanban & JIT
  • Module Scheduling and control
  • Departmental purpose analysis
  • Continuous improvement mechanism
  • Competitor analysis

Important Features for Systems Improvement

  • Clear measures of performance both business and customer oriented
  • Relevant local measures of performance for each cell
  • Identification of waste at source to reduce non-value-added activities
  • On-line problem identification and solutions
  • Use relevant data and problem definition procedures (e.g. Pareto) to focus on priority problems
  • Integrate top-down and bottom-up communication systems
  • Staff appraisal and career trajectory development supported by training
  • Supportive of innovation with clear development targets
  • Internal and external customer / supplier relationships
  • Single payment system based on skills and not jobs to provide motivation and recognition and reward performance
  • Pay attention to methods for project management of change and ensure each project has a resource to match its time scale

We must move

From:

To:

Practices which create expensive non-value added work

The determination of wasteful practices and procedures

From:

To:

Incentives to do the wrong things

Incentives to do the right things

From:

To:

Automation of fragmentation and complexity

Simplify before automation

From:

To:

One-way communication

Two-way communication

From:

To:

A just to late basis

A just-in-time basis via up-front analysis / planning

From:

To:

Seat of the pants judgement processes

Systematic problem definition, analysis and solution procedures

 
Further Reading