Replying to LO29893 --
Hi Fred (and others on this thread)
I have been pondering this thread since Douglas Merchant's Contribution
(LO29877) and there are so many angles to it as there is when considering
the brand of quality managment to implement.
I work in the area of quality management and was part of a small group
that set up our "Integrated Management System". Our IMS is designed to
give each of our business units, in an integrated manufacturing
environment, compliance with safety and environmental legislation, and
compliance with ISO 9000:2000. The idea on an ongoing basis is to note
any areas of non conformance to standards according to external auditors
(quality, safety, environment) and make changes to the IMS manual to
ensure practices are changed to bring us within the requirements of the
standards. In this way we still work to the one manual, for although you
would like the utopian ideal of each doing their thing to the max of their
individual creativity, without due respect to societal norms will see you
all out looking for another way to feed your families.
Our company was accredited to ISO 9001 in 1992 and although it has been a
struggle to keep accreditation, mainly because people find it difficult to
keep to procedure and prefer to use their memory or their opinion, (when
all else fails - see instructions) our system is still substantially
intact. And now we are aligning our system to ISO 9001:2000. While it
took substantial effort (18 Months for our small group) to compile the IMS
manual to ensure following it will give safety, quality, enviromental
compliance, we only need make small adjustments to our existing
documentation to "get it on track".
Now, we keep to our IMS manual and the underlying processes and procedures
and we manufacture our product accordingly. We have kept to the laws of
the land - safety and environment, and internationally recognised quality
standards, our employees get paid, their families can eat and they can
make donations to the less fortunate! (hopefully educational donations -
give the man a fish/teach the man to fish)
Very clinical indeed, yet I work with systems right at the coal face, with
the operators and trades people. These people understand that they must
work to procedure and instruction from a boss/worker point of view. The
boss('s) know(s) he/they have the position power and there are procedures
and processes in place to assist them have workers "toe the line". It is
well that there is a nucleus of management and workers who understand this
scenario and that through their ongoing "authentic" efforts we produce
products at the right price and quality that they sell in sufficient
quantity with sufficient returns to keep our company organism living and
all its drones/workers (bosses and workers) solvent and them and theirs
fed.
Is there another way?
Within the scenario I have outlined many human interchanges take place,
good and bad. Every learning organisation in my understanding attempts to
have all those relationships harmonious ones. Many organisations write
charters in an attempt to keep the intentions of the organisation in the
apex of Maslow's hierarchy by appealing to the higher nature of its
membership. We all know that there is normally a gap between the
intention in the charter and the actions of the people. The width of the
gap depends on how healthy the relationships between the members of the
organisation are. Good health in my experience is linked to the closeness
of the actions of senior managers to the values inherent in the charter.
If the systems and relationships (the culture) of the company don't
connect/synergise, there will be nothing to market - there is a link isn't
there?
If too many people get injured at work generally the rules are not being
followed and the legislative penalties make it more expensive to operate,
and is the customer willing to pay for organisational safety
discrepancies?
If the organisation is polluting the environment, again the penalties
increase the cost of staying alive/feeding the dependants.
For me quality management encompasses the culture of the organisation.
My organisation is in a mature industry where there has been no great
innovation in the last 40 years in fact manufacturing capacity world wide
has been cut drastically so those at the manufacturing face must pay
attention to detail/follow procedure closely or fail to compete in the
market place.
We have 1000 fewer workers than we did 12 years ago. Were our learnings
not embedded in procedure we would continue to relearn and while that is
good for learnings sake, it is not commercially viable. Technology has
also assisted, procedures are no longer hard copy and placed around the
opeartions areas, they are all accessed on line making the the system less
expensive to maintain.
In our organisation our logistics people have forged closer electronic
relationships between the marketers, customer services, production
schedulers and they to the manufacturing teams, each has a greater
appreciation of needs of the other functions. Marketing cannot forge
ahead and leave big backlogs of unfilled customer orders for example.
This all comes under the umbrella of quality management in my
understanding. Broken relationships are too expensive and effort is
expended to repair them. And will we survive? That is debateable, we
have so far, because we have been able pull the organisation kicking and
screaming to make the new benchmarks that seem to come with regular
monotony. Kicking and screaming because the majority of the workforce
just want to feed their families, buy new cars and computers and all the
other trappings of modern society, they don't want to be worried by all
this quality management crap. Some others of us actually do that and
hence the colony/hive/organisation survives/overcomes the "I can't be
bothered" virus. And if quality management were a religion, yeah we get a
few converts as well. Should the virus be too strong? Well as in nature
the colony dies/becomes extinct and a few survivors emigrate to enhance or
pollute another colony.
And clinically for us? I mentioned that we struggle to keep ISO
accreditation. Senior Managers are now under intense pressure to turn the
stubborn end of our culture (including themselves) toward the system. I
can see 20% more on the bottom line of the business if we can do this. I
would like to think that when that occurs we will have organisational
alignment and organisationally that is tantamount to overcoming
gravity/this virus, this time.
Dennis
--"Dennis Rolleston" <dennisr@ps.gen.nz>
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