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“Six Sigma quality, the closest thing to
a management fad to have surfaced since the dotcom bust, has passed its
peak,” a leading financial newspaper argued several weeks ago. “If Six
Sigma continues to follow past patterns, the next stage will be disenchantment,
as companies find that the technique often achieves less than expected.”
Whether this statement is true or false is
not a debate here. More interesting is the assumption behind the statement:
that management trends and quality concepts come and go, and no matter
which ones are in at the moment, they all must serve a criterion—profitability.
Any quality assurance system must align with this credo.
Let’s put the knotty statistics, procedures,
theories, charts, and graphics aside, and instead look at the core of
a quality system. To start with, from a cost-management point of view,
the quality assurance function is a cost center, not a profit center.
To serve the corporate core ideology of profitability, a pragmatic quality
assurance system has to be built and maintained with the lowest cost possible
and accomplish two basic functions:
Monitor performance—distinguish
the good and the bad and report deviations.
Drive continuous improvement—provide
information on current performance and root causes to guide continuous
improvement initiatives.
 Figure
1 illustrates a design of such a quality assurance system. To monitor
operational performance effectively throughout the organization, the performance
review is divided into three levels based on organizational hierarchies
and time frames. To inject momentum into continuous improvement activities,
each review should define the weakest links and issue corrective action
requests to resolve weakest links.
In this design, each of the three levels
of performance review naturally implies a focus for corrective action:
First level—daily
review of work order/lot performance. In Japan, this is a morning routine.
In five-minute pre-production meetings, supervisors highlight the major
problems of the previous day, and operators discuss how to prevent them
in the future. Focus of corrective actions: improvement of operators’
routine activities.
Second level—monthly
review of summarized process performance. The typical application is a
monthly operational performance review involving a cross-functional team
of managers/directors. Focus of corrective actions: process improvements.
Third level—annual
or quarterly review of system performance. Best practice is the annual/quarterly
performance review or a scheduled failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA)
review. Focus of corrective actions: improvement of system efficiency
based on long-term performance and lessons from past failures. Implementing
such a design sounds undemanding; however, the real challenge is to execute
the theories with a reasonable cost. Most of the time, management fashions
fade away because of digressions, high implementation and maintenance
costs, and “less than expected” outcomes.
Lately, I came across a service-sector quality
system in need of improvement. To expedite the organization’s order-handling
process and improve accuracy, the quality manager initiated a project
to collect data on total time spent versus standard time. Periodically,
the total lost-time was calculated as an indicator of process performance.
Can you see what is going wrong here?
Let’s put the question in another form, and
then we will be able to see the problem more clearly: “Is the total lost-time
adequate to drive and direct improvements on reducing processing time
and improving order accuracy?” Obviously, the answer is no! More process
information is needed to identify the root causes in order to make improvements.
This is a classic example of system implementation wandering from the
core of a quality system, which is to drive improvement.
So let me reiterate: to preserve the core—driving
improvement—the monitoring system shall focus on defects and root causes
rather than the outcome of a process.
A simple and easy way to maintain optimal
implementation and maintenance cost is to employ a good software package
to manage the whole system. However, selecting the wrong software could
allow minor problems to turn into disasters, increasing your costs even
more.
Here are some practical rules for selecting
a good software package:
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Above all, the package should be a database
instead of a single-purpose application. Many SPC packages available
on the market are single-purpose applications; they primarily focus
on statistical calculations, and they are not capable of easing the
everyday data-crunching tasks of data retaining and summarizing and
performance reporting and charting.
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The software package should have the capability
to store and retrieve data such as process input, defect quantities,
defect descriptions, cycle time, etc.
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The software package should have the capability
to summarize data automatically and generate performance reports on
the three performance review levels mentioned above.
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The software package should have corrective
action issuing and management capability.
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Incorporating Quality Knowledge Base capability
will enable quality professionals to learn from past failures.
If Six Sigma is to
have a lifespan that outlasts management fads and quality trends, it must
continue to serve the ultimate purpose of profitability. This means driving
improvement by dealing with root causes. Granted, Six Sigma does perhaps
start with a stronger focus on process and root cause analysis than many
previous initiatives. Nevertheless, some management of the overall implementation—whether
by using a software package or another means of monitoring and driving
improvement—is the best way of ensuring that it stays true to its focus.
Author:
Logan Luo
QIT
Consulting, Inc.
Copyright C 2003 ASQ
Six Sigma Forum. All rights reserved.
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