Here I have uploaded few images of  Hiroshima that testify the greatness of Japanese nation as how they recovered from the ashes of World War II. Japan is the only nation on this planet that suffered Nuclear Holocaust. The very same nation i.e. United States of America, that defeated Japan was trembling due to the invasion of Japanese products in her markets in the middle of 1980s.  The subject or the discipline of Total Quality Management is the result of this tug-of-war between these two great nations.  Let’s see the following images that would show us how Japanese nation recovered from the shock of ugly nuclear weapons:

I have found few clips of 5S that are mostly education or promotional in nature. However,  by watching these clips one can have some idea about how 5S activities are done in industrial setting.  If anyone finds a clip showing 5S in office environment, please do forward its link to me so that I could add the same on this post.

TQM pioneered by Edward Deming, is a broad-based systematic approach for achieving high levels of quality. Many leading companies such as Motorola, Cadillac, and Xerox, whose strategies require them to survive against the pressures of world-class competition, have  implemented TQM.

In strategic context, TQM is probably most accurately categorized as a tactic for carrying out strategies requiring high level of product or service quality. Essentially TQM pulls together a number of well-known management principles into a coherent and systematic framework. Through the systematic interaction of these principles, TQM has the potential to lead to increased quality. TQM principles emphasize:

• Articulation of strategic vision
• Objective and accurate measurements
• Benchmarking
• Widespread employee empowerment and team building
• Striving for continuous improvement
• Emphasis on a systems view of quality that conceptualize quality-related activities as being highly interdependent
• Leadership committed to quality
• Great emphasis on customer satisfaction

TQM programs hae the potential to increase the importance of the human resource management function. Human resource management plays a major role in providing more systematic training, facilitating changes that empower employees, instituting team-based reward systems, and communicating to workers their role in quality.

David Bowen and Edward Lawler have described the relationship between TQM and Human Resource Management as follows:

The importance of the HR side of quality equation provides HR department with golden opportunity. Quality can be the “business issue” that truly brings senior managers and HR executives together to move from just HRM to strategic HRM. A major role in the quality improvement effort puts HR in a position to contribute directly and visibly to the bottom-line, to add value to the company’s products and services in the same way that other functions, such as sales, accounting, and production, add value.

Before the human resource function can make full contribution to TQM efforts, high quality must be assured within the function itself.  Benchmarking provides a useful means of both evaluating the quality of human resource programs, activities and impact as well as a means of identifying areas in which resource should be concentrated. The following quotations by David Ulrich, Wayne Brockbank, Arthur Yeung describes practice:

Benchmarking HR practices provides the means of focusing attention on highest value-added HR activities–those practices which are more likely to be practiced by successful companies. Rather than fall into the trap of trying to do everything well and please everyone with insufficient resources–which results in no one being satisfied–HR professionals could use benchmarking to focus limited resources on critical activities.

One of the important impacts of TQM, from strategic HRM perspective, is that it places great emphasis on training. TQM maintains that error and mistakes, which detract from the quality of companies’ products and services, are predictable result of untrained workers, and therefore training must be provided. Consistent with the emphasis on measurement, in some companies that use TQM, training is evaluated with the use of control groups and experimental designs.

In contrast to training, TQM is sharply at odds with conventional human resource practices in the area of performance evaluation. According to Deming, traditional performance evaluation systems are flawed because they are directed toward the individual instead of a team. Such systems are also focus on assigning blames for past mistakes instead of pointing out the direction for the future and may even detract from teamwork.

Despite these differences, most of the concpets of TQM are very much applicable in HRM and if used in a systemactic and well-planned manners can result in good product and service quality and organizational growth.

Source: Strategic Human Resource Management, Second Edition by Charles R. Greer

The company that invented photocopier in 1959 and maintained a virtual monopoly for many years thereafter, like “Coke” or “Kleenex,” “Xerox” became a generic name for all photocopiers. By 1981, however, the company’s market shrank to 35% as IBM, Kodak developed high-end machines and Canon, Richo, and Savin dominated the low-end segment of the market. The Xerox vice president of copier manufacturing remarked, ” we were horrified to find that Japanese were selling their machines at what it cost us to make ours…we had been benchmarking against ourselves. We weren’t looking outside.”

The company was suffering from the “not invented here” syndrome, as Xerox managers did not want to admit that they were not the best. The company instituted the benchmarking process, but it met with resistance at first. People did not believe that someone else could do it better. When faced with the facts, reaction went from denial to dismay to frustration and finally to action. Once the process began, the company benchmarked virtually every function and task for productivity, cost, and quality. Comparisons were made for companies both in and outside the industry. For example, the distribution function was compered to L.L. Bean, tje Freeport, Main Catalog seller outdoor equipment and clothing and everyone’s model of distribution effectiveness.

By the company’s own admission, it would probably not be in the copier business today if it were not for benchmarking. Results were dramatic:

• Suppliers were reduced from 5000 to 300.
• “Concurrent engineering” were practiced. Each product development group has input from design, manufacturing, and services from the initial sages of the project.
• Commonality of parts increased from about 20 percent to 60 t0 70 percent.
• Hierarchical organization structure was reduced, and use of cross-functional “Teams Xerox” was established.

Results included:

• Quality problems cut by two-thirds
• Manufacturing costs cut in half
• Development time cut by two-thirds
• Direct labor cut by 50 percent and corporate staff cut by 35 percent while increasing volume

It should be noted that all of these improvements were not the direct result of benchmarking. What happened at Xerox (and what happened at most companies) is that in adpopting the process, the climate for change and continuous improvement followed a natural result.  In other words, benchmarking can be a very good intervention.

A key to improving quality through TQM is linking the design of products or services to the processes that produce them. Quality Function Deployment (QFD) is a means of translating customer requirements into appropriate technical requirements for each stage of product or service development and production. Bridgestone Tire and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries originated QFD in late 1960s adn early 1970s when they used quality charts that take customer requirements into account in the product design process.

In 1978 Yoji Akao and Shigeru Mizuno published the first work on this subject, showing how design considerations could be “deployed” to every element of competition. The core of this approach is a chart called house of quality, which is a conceptual map for inter-functional planning and communications.  See the following chart that shows a house of quality chart for improving the quality of a car door.

House of Quality Chart

The above chart was constructed by answering the following six questions:

1. Voice of customer: What do our customer need and want? Customers were asked to list attributes of car-door quality they felt were important. Customer attributes were grouped into two categories-”easy to open and close the door” and “isolation”-as shown in the above chart. The relative importance to the customer is listed as a percentage to the right of each attribute.
2. Competitive analysis: In terms of our customer, who well we are doing relative to our competitors? Customer perceptions of our car doors and those of our competitors for each attribute are listed on the right-hand side of the chart. For example, our car has an advantage over the other cars with respect to “no road noise,” but nine of the cars has advantage regarding “stay open on a hill.” The evaluations provide a place to start looking for ways to gain an advantage over the competition.
3. Voice of the engineer: What technical measures relate to our customers’ needs? The engineering characteristics that are likely to affect one or more of the customer attributes are listed along the top of the chart. The plus sign means that the engineers would like to increase the level that characteristic, and the minus sign mean that engineers would like to decrease the level. For example, our engineers would like to decrease the level. For example, our engineers would like to increase “road noise reduction” and decrease “energy to open the door.”
4. Correlation: What are the relationships between the voice of the customer and the voice of the engineer? The nature of the relationship between customers’ needs ad engineering attributes needs to be specified. For example, reducing the amount of energy required to close the door will make closing the door easier, but increasing the door seal resistance will make closing the door more difficult.
5. Technical Comparison: How does our product or service performance compare to that of our competition? Comparing our door with those of the competition for each engineering characteristics allows the technical difficulty of working on each one to be assessed. For example, our door requires the greatest energy to close (11 ft-lb) and the greatest peak closing force (18 lb). A scale of 1 to 5 (where a rating of 5 means most difficult) conveys the relative technical difficult of improving each dimension. In addition, the importance of each characteristic in responding to customer concern can be assessed. For example, “easy to close the door from outside” has high relative importance to customers and has a strong positive relationship with “reducing the energy to close the door” receives the highest imputed  importance (10 % points) of all the engineering characteristics. Estimated costs, again expressed as percentages, indicate relative importance. Finally,  in this step targets are assigned for the various engineering characteristics. Note that reducing the  “energy to clsoe the door” from 11 ft-lb to 7.5 ft-lb makes our car very competitive with the other cars. Other targets for the “open-close effort” category also were changed to improve the door.
6. Trade-offs: What are the potential technical trade-offs? Note that no changes were targeted in the current measures of engineering characteristics relating to the category “sealing insulation.” The reason is that those engineering characteristics and the ones included in the “open-close effort” category have some strongly negative relationships. These relationships are depicted at the top of the chart. For example, though “increasing road noise reduction” would have a strong positive impact on “no road noise,” it would have strong negative impact on “reducing the peak closing force” and “reducing energy to close the door.” Because customers gave a low priority to “no road noise,” no adjustment were made to “increasing road noise reduction.

The house of quality method provides a way to set targets and debate their effects on product quality. Engineering uses the data to focus on significant product deisgn features. Marketing uses this input for determining marketing strategies. Operations uses the chart to identify the processes that are crucial to improving product quality in the eyes of the customer. As a result, the house of quality encourages inter-functional communication for the purpose of improving the quality of products and services.

Source: Operations Management: Strategy and Analysis, Fourth Edition, by Krajewski/Ritzman

Continuous improvement, based on Japanese concept called KAIZEN, is the philosophy of continually seeking ways to improve operations. It involves identifying benchmarks of excellent practice and instilling a sense of employee ownership of the process.

The focus can be on reducing the length of time required to process requests for loans in bank, the amount of scrap generated at a milling machine, or the number of employee injuries. Continuous improvement also can focus on problems with customers or suppliers, such as customer who request frequent changes in shipping quantities and suppliers that fail to maintain high quality. The bases of continuous improvement philosophy are the beliefs that virtually any aspect of an operation can be improved and that the people most closely associated with an operation are in the best position to identify the changes that should be made.

Consequently, employee involvement plays a big role in continuous improvement programs. The idea is not wait until a massive problem occurs before acting.

Getting Started with Continuous Improvement

Instilling a philosophy of continuous improvement in an organization may be a lengthy process, and several steps are essential to its eventual success such as:

1. Train employees in the methods of statistical process control (SPC) and other tools for improving quality.
2. Make SPC methods a normal aspect of daily operations.
3. Build work teams and employee involvement.
4. Utilize problem-solving techniques within the work teams.
5. Develop sense of operator ownership of the process.

It is important to note that employee involvement is central to the philosophy of continuous improvement. However, the last two steps are crucial if the philosophy is to become part of everyday operations. Problem solving addresses the aspects of operations that need improvement and evaluate alternatives for achieving improvements. A sense of operator;s ownership emerges when employees feel as if they own the processes and methods they use and take pride in the quality of the product or service they produce.

Problem Solving Process

Most firms actively engage in continuous improvement train their work teams to use the plan-do-check-act cycle for problem solving. Another name for this approach is Deming Wheel, which lies at the heart of the continuous improvement philosophy. The cycle comprises the following steps:

1. Plan: The team selects a process (activity, method, machine, or policy, for example) that needs improvement. The team then documentss the selected process usually by analyzing data (using 7QC tools);  sets qualitative goals for improvement; and discusses various ways to achieve the goals. After assessing the benefits and costs of the alternatives, the team develops a plan wit quantifiable measures for improvement.

2. Do: The team implements the plan and monitors progress. Data are collected continuously to measure the improvements in the process. Any changes in the process are documented, amd further revisions are made as needed.

3. Check: The team analyzes the data collected during the do step to find our how closely they correspond to the goals set forth in the plan step. If major shortcomings exist, team may have to reevaluate the plan or stop the project.

4. Act: If the result are successful, the team documents the revised process so that it becomes the standard procedure for all who may use it. The team may then instruct other employees in use of the revised process.

Problem solving projects often focus on those aspects of operations that do not add value to the product or service. Value is added during operations such as machining a part or serving a customer. No value is added in activities such as inspecting parts for quality defects or routing requests for loan approvals to several different departments. The idea of continuous improvement is that activities that do not add value are wasteful and should be reduced or eliminated.

Phillip B. Crosby, a corporate vice-president and director of quality at ITT for 14 years, gained a lot of attention when he published his book Quality is Free in 1979.

The conventional wisdom at that time was that each level of quality has some price. For example, reducing the level of defect from 8 percent to 3 percent would cost a lot. The basis of this believe was the notion that improvements in quality require the purchase of improved machines, better materials, or more skilled labor. In addition to the loss of materials to scraps, Crosby points out that poor quality has hidden costs: increased labor and machine hours, increased machines failures and downtime, customer delivery delays adn lost future sales, and even increased warranty costs. Crosby believes that these costs typically dwarf the costs of machines, materials, and training needed to foster high quality. The savings created by reduction of hidden costs can offset the costs incurred to create the proper environment.

Crosby advocates a goad of zero defects. In his view, to have any other goad is essentially a commitment to producing a certain amount of defective material. Continuous improvement should be means that management uses to achive zero defects.

Source: Operations Management: Strategy and Analysis by Krajewski/Ritzman

Attaining quality is all areas of business is difficult task. To make things even more difficult, consumers change their perceptions of quality. For instance, changes in consumer life-styles and in economic conditions have drastically altered customer perceptions of automobile quality. When the oil crisis hit in the mid 1970s, consumer preferences shifted from power and styling to fuel economy.

To the 1980s preferences for quality of design and performance has been added a demand for greater safety in the 1990s. By failing to identify these trends and respond to them quickly in the 1970s and 1990s, US automakers lost opportunities to maintain or increase their market shares relative to foreign competition. Today US automakers are staging a comeback by being more aware that the customer has a choice and by anticipating customer preferences.

In general, a business’s success depends on the accuracy of its perceptions of customer expectations and its ability to bridge the gap between consumer expectation adn operating capabilities. Consumers are much more quality-minded now than in the past and in many cases prefer to spend more for a product that lasts longer or a service that is delivered promptly and thoroughly. A survey of 2000 business unit. Several studies have concluded that a high-quality product has a better chance of gaining market share than does a low-quality product. Moreover,  perception plays as important role as performance: A product or service that is perceived by customers to be of higher quality stands as much better chance of gaining market share than does one perceived to be of low quality, even if the actual level of quality are the same.

Good quality can also pay off in higher profits. High-quality products and services can be priced higher than comparable lower quality ones and yield a greater return for the same sales dollar. Poor quality erodes the firm’s ability to compete in marketplace and increases the costs of producing its product or service. For example, by improving conformance to specifications, a firm can increase its market share and reduce the cost of its products or services, which in turn increases profits. Management is more able to compete on prices as well as on quality.

Source: Operations Management: Strategy and Analysis by Krajewski/Ritzman

The Just-in-time philosophy also can be applied to the production of services. We have already discussed some of the elements of the JIT system used u a McDonald’s restaurant. In general, service environments may benefit from JIT systems if their operations are repetitive, have reasonably high volumes, and deal with tangible items such as sandwiches, mail, checks, or bills. In other words, services must involve “manufacturing-like” operations.

Other services involving a high degree of customization, such as hair cutting, can also make use of JIT systems but to a lesser degree-basically utilizing elements of JIT systems in their operations.

The focus of JIT systems is on improving the process; therefore some of the JIT concepts useful for manufacturers are also useful for service providers. These concepts include the following:

• Consistently high quality: Benchmarking, service design, and quality function deployment can be used successfully in service operations. Service employees can be taught the value of providing defect-free services.
• Uniform facility loads: Reservation systems and differential pricing are two ways in which service providers can level the loads on their facilities.
• Standard work methods: In highly repetitive service operations great efficiencies cab be gained by analyzing work methods and standardization improvements for all employees to use. For example, UPS consistently monitors work methods and revises them as necessary to improve service.
• Close supplier ties: Volume services such as fast-food restaurants and mass merchandisers  such as Wal-Mart and Kmart require close supplier contacts to ensure frequent, short lead time and high-quality shipments of supplier.
• Flexible work force: The more customized the service, the greater is the need of multiskilled work force. For example, stereo component repair shops require broadly trained personnel who can identify a wide variety of problems and then repair the defective unit. The employees at a sectional center post office have more narrowly defined jobs because of the repetitive nature of the tasks they must perform, and thus they do not have to acquire many alternative skills.
• Automation: Automation can play a big role in providing just-in-time services. For example, banks offer ATMs that provide various bank services on demand 24 hours a day.
• Preventive maintenance: Services that are highly dependent on machinery can make good use of routine preventive maintenance. For example, entertainment services such as Walt Disney World must have dependable people-moving apparatus to accommodate large volumes of customers.
• Pull method of material flows: Services operations where tangible items are processed, such as fast-food restaurants, can utilize the pull method.
• Product focus: Managers of service operations can organize their employees and equipment to provide uniform flows through the system and eliminate wasted employee time.

Source:  Operations management: Strategy and Analysis by Krajewski/Ritzman

In a global marketplace, firms face changing market conditions brought on by new competitors and changing customer preferences. Firms must rely on their employees to anticipate possible problems, develop new products and services, and increase the quality to remain competitive.

As employees become more involved in team work, their need for social and communication skills, quality management skills, and technical skills increases. The emphasis on efficient processes and high quality requires that employees have a broader base of skills so that they can take on a greater variety of training programs, including the following:

• General Training: These programs address topics such as leadership, communication, project management, problem solving, mathematics, statistical process control methods, critical thinking, and even remedial English. some firms encourage employees to take courses outside their fucntional areas, possibly at a local university or community college if heir own training facility cannot satisfy the need.
• Administrative training: Courses in employment practices, performance appraisals, and management skills are offered to employees who have been designated team leaders.
• Technical training: These courses focus on the specific aspects of person’s job or a related job with the goal of increasing the employee’s skills.

Source: Operations management: Strategy and Analysis by Krajewski/Ritzman