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FeedsHome: Issue 5 2008 › Lead Story › A quality result
The matter of business performance improvement has been on the business agenda for a long time. It is discussed in meetings, dropped into strategy documents and generally revered as the ultimate marker of success. In the manufacturing industry in particular, factors such as process management and logistics need rigorous testing and assessment to ensure that operations run smoothly and efficiently. However, as both the industry and the business world evolve, with factors such as technology, staff training and consumer involvement progressing at a phenomenal rate, surely it’s time we reassess how we approach ‘business improvement’ itself. Part of improvement is looking again at exactly how we go about refining a business; if we do not constantly refresh our approach, we are ultimately limiting what we can achieve.
Firms face a range of challenges, from ensuring their workforce is well trained, happy and productive, to meeting the increasingly demanding needs of clients, customers and partner organisations. Environmental concerns and the march of technology are placing organisations under more pressure than ever to deliver results. The standard of leadership management has to be first class, and policy, strategy, resources and processes need to be aligned.
Too often, businesses only tackle one aspect of their organisation in isolation. For example, somebody decided that a new leadership programme is needed or that a customer service programme for staff is required. Dealing with issues separately in this way misses the entire point of business improvement. To improve, it’s vital to view your business as a linked, holistic entity, and to appreciate, for example, that excellent customer service cannot be delivered without excellent people management, processes and leadership. In other words, every organisation, large or small, is a complex system of interrelationships and interdependencies and the solution is to find a framework that allows you to assess the performance of every aspect of the organisation. An example of such a framework is the EFQM Excellence Model.
The Excellence Model
The Excellence Model is the most widely used organisational framework in Europe and is based on eight fundamental concepts of excellence that are common to all organisations:
Results Orientation - achieving results that delight all the organisation's stakeholders.
Customer Focus - creating sustainable customer value.
Leadership - visionary and inspirational leadership, coupled with constancy of purpose.
Management by Processes and Facts - managing the organisation through a set of interdependent and interrelated systems, processes and facts.
People Development & Involvement - maximising the contribution of employees through their development and involvement.
Continuous Learning, Innovation and Improvement - challenging the status quo and effecting change by using learning to create innovation and improvement opportunities.
Partnership Development - developing and maintaining value-adding partnerships.
Corporate Social Responsibility - exceeding the minimum regulatory framework in which the organisation operates and to strive to understand and respond to the expectations of their stakeholders in society.
Before embarking upon any initiative, it is vitally important to use a framework such as the Excellence Model to assess your strengths and priorities for improvement. When this is done and process improvement is revealed as an area for improvement, then methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma come into their own.
Lean
Lean was originally developed within the automotive industry and is a set of principles, practices and tools aimed at creating precise customer value. Lean can be applied to all aspects of an organisation, from product development and provision through administration and finance to customer services and support. The goal of ‘lean thinking’ is to create high quality, defect free products and services at all stages of the customer experience, whilst using less capital, space and effort to produce this.
‘Lean’ classifies every activity that we do into three types:
Value Add – activities that help create the final form or function of the finished article – those activities that a customer would be willing to pay for
Non Value-Add, but essential - things that need to be done, but that don’t actually bring any value to the finished article (e.g. waiting for a document to print, the time it takes for paint to dry and so on)
Waste – actions that bring no value whatsoever to the final form or function of the article involved, and are therefore unnecessary
Six Sigma
Organisations use Six Sigma to identify and eliminate costs that provide no value to customers. They analyse their processes to find out where and how defects occur, measure them and eliminate the problem areas.
Six Sigma is a highly disciplined, structured programme that delivers near perfect products and services. Sigma is a statistical term used in the measurement of how far a given process deviates from perfection. The idea is that, if you can measure the number of defects there are in a process, you can then systematically attempt to eliminate them to get as close to zero defects as possible. The generally accepted definition of the Six Sigma benchmark is 3.4 defects per million opportunities for each product or service transaction.
The principles of Six Sigma are to:
Joe Goasdoué
')";>')";>
Joe Goasdoué is the chief executive of the British Quality Foundation (BQF).
The BQF helps organisations to learn from best practice, improve their performance and achieve sustainable excellence. It delivers value to organisations in the private, public and voluntary sectors by advising on the EFQM Excellence Model, Europe’s leading performance improvement methodology, running the annual UK Excellence Awards, the most rigorously assessed and judged award programme in the UK and providing a wide range of best practice and performance improvement services including Lean, Six Sigma, Benchmarking, Business Continuity, Corporate Responsibility, Innovation, Recognition programmes and Leadership.
For further information, visit: www.bqf.org.uk
Firms face a range of challenges, from ensuring their workforce is well trained, happy and productive, to meeting the increasingly demanding needs of clients, customers and partner organisations. Environmental concerns and the march of technology are placing organisations under more pressure than ever to deliver results. The standard of leadership management has to be first class, and policy, strategy, resources and processes need to be aligned.
Too often, businesses only tackle one aspect of their organisation in isolation. For example, somebody decided that a new leadership programme is needed or that a customer service programme for staff is required. Dealing with issues separately in this way misses the entire point of business improvement. To improve, it’s vital to view your business as a linked, holistic entity, and to appreciate, for example, that excellent customer service cannot be delivered without excellent people management, processes and leadership. In other words, every organisation, large or small, is a complex system of interrelationships and interdependencies and the solution is to find a framework that allows you to assess the performance of every aspect of the organisation. An example of such a framework is the EFQM Excellence Model.
The Excellence Model
The Excellence Model is the most widely used organisational framework in Europe and is based on eight fundamental concepts of excellence that are common to all organisations:
Results Orientation - achieving results that delight all the organisation's stakeholders.
Customer Focus - creating sustainable customer value.
Leadership - visionary and inspirational leadership, coupled with constancy of purpose.
Management by Processes and Facts - managing the organisation through a set of interdependent and interrelated systems, processes and facts.
People Development & Involvement - maximising the contribution of employees through their development and involvement.
Continuous Learning, Innovation and Improvement - challenging the status quo and effecting change by using learning to create innovation and improvement opportunities.
Partnership Development - developing and maintaining value-adding partnerships.
Corporate Social Responsibility - exceeding the minimum regulatory framework in which the organisation operates and to strive to understand and respond to the expectations of their stakeholders in society.
Before embarking upon any initiative, it is vitally important to use a framework such as the Excellence Model to assess your strengths and priorities for improvement. When this is done and process improvement is revealed as an area for improvement, then methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma come into their own.
Lean
Lean was originally developed within the automotive industry and is a set of principles, practices and tools aimed at creating precise customer value. Lean can be applied to all aspects of an organisation, from product development and provision through administration and finance to customer services and support. The goal of ‘lean thinking’ is to create high quality, defect free products and services at all stages of the customer experience, whilst using less capital, space and effort to produce this.
‘Lean’ classifies every activity that we do into three types:
Value Add – activities that help create the final form or function of the finished article – those activities that a customer would be willing to pay for
Non Value-Add, but essential - things that need to be done, but that don’t actually bring any value to the finished article (e.g. waiting for a document to print, the time it takes for paint to dry and so on)
Waste – actions that bring no value whatsoever to the final form or function of the article involved, and are therefore unnecessary
Six Sigma
Organisations use Six Sigma to identify and eliminate costs that provide no value to customers. They analyse their processes to find out where and how defects occur, measure them and eliminate the problem areas.
Six Sigma is a highly disciplined, structured programme that delivers near perfect products and services. Sigma is a statistical term used in the measurement of how far a given process deviates from perfection. The idea is that, if you can measure the number of defects there are in a process, you can then systematically attempt to eliminate them to get as close to zero defects as possible. The generally accepted definition of the Six Sigma benchmark is 3.4 defects per million opportunities for each product or service transaction.
The principles of Six Sigma are to:
- Understand the critical to quality requirements (CTQs) of customers and stakeholders
- Understand processes ensuring they reflect these CTQs
- Manage by fact
- Involve and equip the people in the process
- Undertake improvement activity in a systematic way
- Benefits are seen in cost reduction, shorter cycle times, improved customer service, greater employee productivity and increased profit margins
Joe Goasdoué
')";>')";>Joe Goasdoué is the chief executive of the British Quality Foundation (BQF).
The BQF helps organisations to learn from best practice, improve their performance and achieve sustainable excellence. It delivers value to organisations in the private, public and voluntary sectors by advising on the EFQM Excellence Model, Europe’s leading performance improvement methodology, running the annual UK Excellence Awards, the most rigorously assessed and judged award programme in the UK and providing a wide range of best practice and performance improvement services including Lean, Six Sigma, Benchmarking, Business Continuity, Corporate Responsibility, Innovation, Recognition programmes and Leadership.
For further information, visit: www.bqf.org.uk