Qualtec's Business Performance Improvement Blog

Organizations that choose one-off solutions to react to regulatory and compliance requirements on a case-by-case basis, as they are impacted by them, will spend 10x as much as those who choose to design and implement business processes that have measurement, visibility, and proper controls built into them from the start ….

I believe it was Gartner that made this assertion some years back, and it has proven to be true for many.  Organizations with a solid process infrastructure already have much of what they need deal with compliance requirements. The fundamental tenets of good process management include measurement, visibility, predictability, consistency, and repeatability, and business practices implemented with these elements in place can easily be transferred into specific controls that can be measured and reported on a regular basis.    Organizations that do not have a good process infrastructure in place may find themselves expending huge resources to redesign bad processes and systems when new requirements come down the line, as they always do.  Ouch.

our short executive brief that discusses the importance of process management in meeting compliance challenges

If your company is like most, you face growing regulatory and compliance demands that absorb time, money, and other valuable resources and, ultimately, sap your competitiveness. However painful, this is reality and faced with these realities, you want to find a way to meet compliance requirements that is objective, reliable, and efficient. Merely managing the issue by opinion can be very dangerous and expensive. Opinions, not matter how smart the “opiner”, have a tendency to not match reality. A better answer is to drive compliance to an objective, measurable specification.  Management by fear can be even more expensive, inducing you to greatly overspend on compliance and to shy away from reasonably acceptable risks that could mean far better business results.

And, let’s be clear, policies and procedures are not controls. A policy merely states an intention to do something; a control ensures that it is done, done repeatedly, and done up to standard. Moreover, policies have to be read, understood, and remembered, all of which opens many possible routes to failure.

Bottom line — work is accomplished through processes – and in no other way.  To reliably achieve compliance you must be able to improve those work processes or design new ones. In other words, the way in which you meet a requirement must be embedded in the work itself, not merely displayed on a policy document. In order to sustain compliance, you must be able to establish measurements and controls within those processes. Certainly, you may have policies that apply, but the way in which you build, operate, and control work processes constitutes how we meet a requirement.

Contact me if you’d like to discuss how basic process management and improvement approaches might help with your compliance challenges.

It is often said “free training is not always good, and good training is not always free”, and for the most part this holds true time and time again. But I have also heard the expression “Win-Win” and I firmly believe there is always a win-win out there, so how do we use our creative imagination to combine the two and help our organizations?

I’m talking about finding a partner that has as much to gain through the development of a skilled workforce as you do, but has deeper pockets and can achieve economies of scale far beyond what a company can- I am talking specifically about the state and federal government grants available for training.

You want productivity gains for your business without the expense of overhead or additional manpower, and the states want companies to remain committed to thier communities and viable going concerns that pay taxes and create jobs – I see a Win-Win. Take a look around and ask what is out there for your organization, Continual Improvement and Lean Six Sigma are designed to support bottom line activities with direct and measurable payback that can be easily translated those metrics that are important to those writing the grants and awarding the dollars at the local and state level.

I’ll let you in on a secret…. behind these grants are good people actively looking for a good investment.  Behind the money is an individual not unlike you or I that would love to find a viable company, give them grant money and show the success through job retention or promotion of participants.  It allows them to stride proudly into their place of work and say “ I found that company… I gave a grant to that company”.  These people are out there and they are looking for the same things in a client that you look for in your best clients. And when they find it they want to fund it.

Fundamentally it is simple to do, define what you want…seek out a grant that matches your needs. Some are competitive, some are bound in a certain dollar amount and some have very precise stipulations about what the money can and cannot be used for… but just as there are cars for every driver, there are grants for every business. Grants do not always have to be about promotion, hiring or overhead, they sometimes can be simply job retention or more often than not they can be about marketability of the workforce in the event of an economic downturn…define how the grant will judge success and then make sure you meet your mark.  Use the same concepts discussed in Pay-as-You-Go to build a case just like you would for your management team.

Here is another secret… shoot for what seems impossible. If you are playing on the edge there is less competition, there is a saying that after $500K it gets easier. This is because companies do not think the grants are out there, or their needs for the deployment do not come close to the amount. Don’t let this dissuade you as a company from seeking the win-win and using someone else’s money to train your employees and kick off your Six Sigma or Lean initiatives. States are just as competitive for business bids as individual business is for customers and if you reach out the response will be overwhelming, just begin with the end in mind and know what you are looking for and what you are willing to give in return.  Finally talk to your service provider, if they know what you are attempting to do they can tailor a training plan to meet your grant requirements and define the metrics to make sure you appease the ones that funded the grant.

our Lean Quickstart Presentation for an overview of Lean and Six Sigma, now they work together, and how they may be deployed.

In conclusion lean and Six Sigma address all of the key indicators grant requirements look for  profitability, waste reduction, labor retention, job promotion…etc.etc. Use this to your advantage and seek  win-win with the local governments, as an alternative you may be able to create a co-op of similar non-competitive businesses to fund the match  on the training and collaborate in the projects to off-set the costs, all of this is possible and has been done before,  it is only limited by your organization’s creative imagination and commitment.  If you’d like to know how we did this successfully for my company, contact me.

A core commandment of my philosophy toward Quality Management Systems is that the QMS is not separate from the business environment, but rather just another facet of the business. This leads us to the idea that there is no room in the QMS for non-value added activities, however due to the segregation of the systems, much of the time Quality Auditing is seen as just that… non-value added. Historically this is not an untrue view, as previous quality systems relied on a complex checklist that only scratched the surface of a process, and provided little or no value to the organization.  For this reason my next few posts will deal more specifically with how Six Sigma and other Continuous Improvement  techniques and methods can be used to achieve the GOAL of certification while actually adding value to the business.

Our Complimenary Executive Brief on how Yellow Belts can play a key role in Quality and CI programs

                To re-affirm my stance, certification is the GOAL, how you get there is up to you; coincidentally what you have to work with at the end is your choice as well (for good or bad). This week we will focus on the application of Six Sigma Yellow belts as the foundation of an Internal Audit Program, a requirement of ISO 9001. This applies to all of the System and process audits that ISO9001 requires, product audits are a whole other animal.   In his post “What can Yellow Belts do…really” Eric Harris hit on a few key roles for Yellow Belts in a Six Sigma organization, these were:

1. Characterization of processes
2. Establish/ Validate Measurement Systems
3. Establish process Control Systems
4. Perform Small Scope  projects

                 In ISO 9001:2008 the requirement is to have an internal audit program with qualified auditors. Now if you are looking to add value to your organization doesn’t it seem most advantageous to have an auditor with the skills listed above. Training an “internal auditor” traditionally revolves around a lengthy class of standards exploration, leaving them competent to fill out their checklist and audit to the “shalls” in the standard, but what value are you really getting from these “checklist jockeys”? Wouldn’t it make sense to have your auditor explore the process map, improve the process and continually push the process to new levels? Yellow Belts can do this, and this is more powerful than you realize due to the fact that you are actually performing Continual Improvement (a requirement of the ISO standard) and at the same time knocking out the requirements for ISO 9001:2008 relating to internal auditing….. This is a multiple win when coupled with the below suggestions:

1. Use your Yellow Belts as your Internal Audit staff, the standard is easy to learn and application is simple.
2. Use your auditors to follow the process through using a process map highlighting the non-value added steps and constraints to feed into your CI activities
3. In the event of an audit NC to the standard the Yellow Belt can assist the auditees in performing true systemic correction with adequate measurement systems, their mentoring can provide sustainable change in an organization, and this is a huge cultural change win!

             This in the end comes down to a fundamental decision as management: Do I have a Yellow Belt that knows the standard, or someone that knows the standard more completely but cannot help me along my way? In my humble view I feel there is more value derived from an individual familiar with process improvement that knows what the process must do, rather than someone that can recite the standard but cannot improve process and metric. As mentioned above, the GOAL is ISO certification… how you get there is up to you. What you do to meet the requirement for internal auditing can very well make the difference between having to add overhead and cost to meet the requirement, or multiplying the power of your CI activities in a way that happens to meet the requirement. In the end the results you end up with are exactly what you have set yourself up for ….. Which will it be?   If you wish to discuss contact me.

I was thrilled when I was offered to contribute to SSQi’s blog and share my thoughts and opinions with such a diverse and influential audience, but then I had to consider what to write about. A focus of recent posts is the ability to do more with less in the current reality in which we find ourselves, which is both a challenging and wonderful place to be. I say challenging because of the obvious competition for priorities and resource allocation, but wonderful because it is this “steel-sharpens-steel” approach that drives innovation. We can only grow in an environment outside of our comfort zone, and this is a country that thrives in the area of adaptation and evolution at every expansion of boundary. While the manufacturing floor is changing to more and more a specialized lean-based methodology the quality expectations are being pushed to new boundaries by customers more able to eloquently and specifically express their needs and wants in terms of specifications (both written and implied). However a company’s QMS is not evolving with the changing times and tools to continue to be a useful relevant tool for an organization.

our Complimenary Executive Brief on how Yellow Belts can play a key role in Quality and CI programs

A company’s Quality Management System is perhaps more vital than a customer’s perception of quality because of the intimate relationship it has on every aspect of the business, yet it is constantly given second class treatment with external and manufacturing processes taking precedent in a crowded environment of scarce resource. A company’s QMS forms the structure of how a company realizes the products and services it manufactures, it is in effect the vehicle for change. ISO 9001 has made great strides to bring about a process perspective, yet the application is still very much rooted in the perception of overhead intensive systems. Processes must be made simpler within the QMS, measures must be formulated to judge processes from the customer perspective (i.e. what is the average cycle time for a customer corrective action implementation… and is that an acceptable number?). How much redundancy is present in repetitive loops and data transfer (how many times do we record the same information)… a common theme I hear from company to company is “add”. We can no longer add, no more than it would be acceptable to “add” a non-value added step to manufacturing process to compensate for a failure.

Addition is the antithesis of innovation; addition is a poor substitute for failure to really think outside the box in a QMS. We need to be smarter, face the challenge and set a basic premise that we will no longer “add”, but rather “evolve”. Now don’t misunderstand me, some processes need an EVOLUTION, and some need a REVOLUTION, and it is up to each business to decide which is appropriate. Whichever one it chooses the fundamental task is a simplification to the raw requirements of the customer, and for the QMS that is the organization. Turn the tools of Six Sigma inward on your QMS, help yourselves through the core competency that you turn to in a manufacturing crunch, and in doing this your system will be leaner, require less maintenance and ultimately fit within the new reality in which we all find ourselves. If we do not then we risk failing to meet the customer demand through failure to help ourselves…but more on that in subsequent postings.  If you wish to discuss, feel free to contact me.