Improvement 2003 / 2004
Started by Simon, Dec 12 2003 09:34 AM
Hi Saferpakers,
Quite a general and broad topic title "Improvement 2003 / 2004." I thought it might be interesting if we shared some of the business, quality and personal improvement activities we have been working on during 2003. What have been your major successes and spectacular failures, how did you do it and what have you learned. And how about the future…what are your goals and plans for 2004?
Regards,
Simon
Quite a general and broad topic title "Improvement 2003 / 2004." I thought it might be interesting if we shared some of the business, quality and personal improvement activities we have been working on during 2003. What have been your major successes and spectacular failures, how did you do it and what have you learned. And how about the future…what are your goals and plans for 2004?
Regards,
Simon
Do you spend enough time on food safety and quality improvement?
Elevating Performance: Achieving Continuous Improvement through Internal Auditing Practices
Performance Improvement Plan (PIP)
Continuous Improvement
Food Quality Management Improvement Plan
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Simon,
Though, It is a general question but not very easy to reply in a nut shell.As far as my Company is concern, It was awarded for ISO/TS 16949:2002 for its Radiator Foil Manufacturing and Supply Business. Last year it got TS for Alloy Wheel Manufacturuing and Supply Business.
In this year only our Company has launched WCM Program (World Class Manufacturing). We have taken a few Focused Improvement Projects as Focussed Businesss Improvement, We have started measuring Quality Cost in a very meticulas way in this year. Our Company was audited twice for QMS (9001:2000) and EMS (ISO14001) Survillance audit. There are many many more achievemens.
Regarding my learning, I shall be telling in detail.
Though, It is a general question but not very easy to reply in a nut shell.As far as my Company is concern, It was awarded for ISO/TS 16949:2002 for its Radiator Foil Manufacturing and Supply Business. Last year it got TS for Alloy Wheel Manufacturuing and Supply Business.
In this year only our Company has launched WCM Program (World Class Manufacturing). We have taken a few Focused Improvement Projects as Focussed Businesss Improvement, We have started measuring Quality Cost in a very meticulas way in this year. Our Company was audited twice for QMS (9001:2000) and EMS (ISO14001) Survillance audit. There are many many more achievemens.
Regarding my learning, I shall be telling in detail.
Thanks for that Manoj it sounds like you've had a very busy and CI filled year. You mention a lot of new and ongoing certifications for your company (TS, ISO 9000, ISO 14000). On the face of it these are additional costs to the business. Do you think the certificates are helping your organisation to improve and become more profitable? Or do you see them as a drain on your organisations finite resources of time, energy and money that could maybe add more value if they were channelled into improvement initiatives such as your WCM Program and Improvement Projects?
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2003 has probably been the toughest year of my life work-wise…I have grafted unbelievably hard, which is totally out of character for me. However, I have to say it's been worth it as I've managed to get a business off the ground and launch a website that people find useful and mildly interesting. Best of all it's given me the opportunity of meeting lot's of interesting people from all over the world. :D
On a personal note this year I discovered that I am going to be a father again :D (next May) and after several attempts over many years I've finally kicked the coughing nails into touch (stopped smoking). I'm really looking forward to 2004, which I'm sure will be a great year in many ways.
Simon
Look forward to hearing about it.Regarding my learning, I shall be telling in detail.
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2003 has probably been the toughest year of my life work-wise…I have grafted unbelievably hard, which is totally out of character for me. However, I have to say it's been worth it as I've managed to get a business off the ground and launch a website that people find useful and mildly interesting. Best of all it's given me the opportunity of meeting lot's of interesting people from all over the world. :D
On a personal note this year I discovered that I am going to be a father again :D (next May) and after several attempts over many years I've finally kicked the coughing nails into touch (stopped smoking). I'm really looking forward to 2004, which I'm sure will be a great year in many ways.
Simon
This year has been hard work (seems there is an echo around here) preparing for ISO14001 and doing the ground work for TS16949:2002.
As this business has quality/environment/health and safety all ingrained deeply into everything that is done it is actually bloody hard to demonstrate one facet without involving the others. Yup H&S inspectors did not believe our statements until they visited and were buried in documentation.
Integrated Management at its seamless. Always room for improvement - within commercially viable constraints.
Personnally I have managed to get to quite a few 'Gigs' this year (with suitable ear plugs) Iron Maiden, Alice Cooper, Thunder, Def Leppard to name a few(not to mention our favourite Blaze)
Next year sees a bit of the unknown, our directors are 'selling up' and for me the potential new owners want me to 'roll out' the quality, environmental and H&S ethic we have here to the other businesses in the group!!!!!!1
Happy christmas
As this business has quality/environment/health and safety all ingrained deeply into everything that is done it is actually bloody hard to demonstrate one facet without involving the others. Yup H&S inspectors did not believe our statements until they visited and were buried in documentation.
Integrated Management at its seamless. Always room for improvement - within commercially viable constraints.
Personnally I have managed to get to quite a few 'Gigs' this year (with suitable ear plugs) Iron Maiden, Alice Cooper, Thunder, Def Leppard to name a few(not to mention our favourite Blaze)
Next year sees a bit of the unknown, our directors are 'selling up' and for me the potential new owners want me to 'roll out' the quality, environmental and H&S ethic we have here to the other businesses in the group!!!!!!1
Happy christmas
As you are now the undisputed QA guru of your group you should really be looking to take advan£age. Consultants are very expensive beasts you know!Next year sees a bit of the unknown, our directors are 'selling up' and for me the potential new owners want me to 'roll out' the quality, environmental and H&S ethic we have here to the other businesses in the group!!!!!!1
Let me know if you want an agent.
Simon
Hi all,And how about the future…what are your goals and plans for 2004?
as a Quality professional I'm used to tell my colleagues to set up KPI for the processes they manage.
I realized I haven't done it for the processes I'm responsible
I'm planning to set up KPI for Quality Control.
Have you any experience to share ?
Hi Franco,
That's it you set them a good example to follow, I think you would have made a very good politician.
Seriously though have you developed KPI's for your Customer Complaints Process?
Of all the processes for which we developed KPI's the largest improvements were realised in this process, reducing an average reply to a customer complaint from 24 days in 2001 (roughly but not accurate), to an average of 8.6 days in 2002, with a much tighter standard deviation.
We introduced KPI's to this process first because the Quality Department managed it and we hoped we could demonstrate to the other managers the improvements that could be realised by setting targets, measuring, and reporting performance and ultimately to gain their commitment to process improvement.
One thing to say is that the introduction of KPI's to the customer complaints process came at the same time we moved from a paper based system to an in-house developed database system…and we couldn't really have done it without this technology.
As you know a customer complaint has to traverse many departments (and scale many castle walls) in order to get resolved. E.g. complaint received from Customer Care, passed to technical for analysis, forwarded to relevant department for corrective action, returned to technical for review and drafting of reply, and fired off to the customer via customer care. A long and winding road…
Firstly what we did was set an ambitious main process target of 14 days for the number of days taken to reply to a customer complaint. We felt that speed of response (along with the quality of the corrective / preventive action and credit payment) was the critical Key Performance Indicator as we obviously wouldn't want to make an unhappy customer even more unhappy by taking an aeon to respond to their complaint.
In order to achieve the 14 day reply time we had to break the process down into smaller activity chunks for which we also allocated a target e.g.
Information receipt 2 day
Technical review 3 days
Corrective action 4 days
Technical review 2 days
Generate reply 2 days
Send reply 1 day
We knew that if the 'in-process' KPI's were achieved we would achieve our 'main process' 14 day target. As a customer complaint passed through each process step the person carrying out the action would enter a date on the database and this was how we generated the information we needed to measure the process. At last we had an accurate measure of process performance and equally as important we knew WHY we were performing as we were.
It made the process completely transparent and we found that by providing monthly reports on process performance everyone quickly jumped into line. Not only did we achieve the 14 day target, we smashed it and were able to consistently achieve a response time of less than 9 days.
The net result was our customers were more satisfied with our performance in this area and this showed up in the annual customer satisfaction survey. It was very pleasing that we were able to vastly improve our performance whilst at the same time making the process much less burdensome.
We had turned a light on in a black hole and we found it much easier to roll out the KPI methodology throughout the organisation. In fact most managers were very proactive…they virtually begged us for KPI's!
Apologies for going on a bit.
Simon
That's it you set them a good example to follow, I think you would have made a very good politician.
Seriously though have you developed KPI's for your Customer Complaints Process?
Of all the processes for which we developed KPI's the largest improvements were realised in this process, reducing an average reply to a customer complaint from 24 days in 2001 (roughly but not accurate), to an average of 8.6 days in 2002, with a much tighter standard deviation.
We introduced KPI's to this process first because the Quality Department managed it and we hoped we could demonstrate to the other managers the improvements that could be realised by setting targets, measuring, and reporting performance and ultimately to gain their commitment to process improvement.
One thing to say is that the introduction of KPI's to the customer complaints process came at the same time we moved from a paper based system to an in-house developed database system…and we couldn't really have done it without this technology.
As you know a customer complaint has to traverse many departments (and scale many castle walls) in order to get resolved. E.g. complaint received from Customer Care, passed to technical for analysis, forwarded to relevant department for corrective action, returned to technical for review and drafting of reply, and fired off to the customer via customer care. A long and winding road…
Firstly what we did was set an ambitious main process target of 14 days for the number of days taken to reply to a customer complaint. We felt that speed of response (along with the quality of the corrective / preventive action and credit payment) was the critical Key Performance Indicator as we obviously wouldn't want to make an unhappy customer even more unhappy by taking an aeon to respond to their complaint.
In order to achieve the 14 day reply time we had to break the process down into smaller activity chunks for which we also allocated a target e.g.
Information receipt 2 day
Technical review 3 days
Corrective action 4 days
Technical review 2 days
Generate reply 2 days
Send reply 1 day
We knew that if the 'in-process' KPI's were achieved we would achieve our 'main process' 14 day target. As a customer complaint passed through each process step the person carrying out the action would enter a date on the database and this was how we generated the information we needed to measure the process. At last we had an accurate measure of process performance and equally as important we knew WHY we were performing as we were.
It made the process completely transparent and we found that by providing monthly reports on process performance everyone quickly jumped into line. Not only did we achieve the 14 day target, we smashed it and were able to consistently achieve a response time of less than 9 days.
The net result was our customers were more satisfied with our performance in this area and this showed up in the annual customer satisfaction survey. It was very pleasing that we were able to vastly improve our performance whilst at the same time making the process much less burdensome.
We had turned a light on in a black hole and we found it much easier to roll out the KPI methodology throughout the organisation. In fact most managers were very proactive…they virtually begged us for KPI's!
Apologies for going on a bit.
Simon
No need to apologise :)We had turned a light on in a black hole and we found it much easier to roll out the KPI methodology throughout the organisation. In fact most managers were very proactive…they virtually begged us for KPI's!
Apologies for going on a bit.
Simon
getting colleagues to 'buy into' KPI's is probably the hardest part, then sifting the bloody stupid ones is the next hardest task.
We recently changed a KPI, then I discovered no person was actually collecting the data and the wonderful software for performing the task is now 6 months away
Progress eh!!
Do you spend enough time on food safety and quality improvement?
Elevating Performance: Achieving Continuous Improvement through Internal Auditing Practices
Performance Improvement Plan (PIP)
Continuous Improvement
Food Quality Management Improvement Plan
Continuous Quality Improvement of Quality and Food Safety Culture
BRCGS 1.1.2 Clear plan for the development and continuing improvement of a product safety and quality culture
Food process improvement using Statistical Process Control (SPC)
Food process improvement using SPC
Food process improvement using Statistical Process Control (SPC)