Focus: Process and Quality Excellence
Through decades of in-the-field experience, we have learned that the root cause of operational issues is often the lack of alignment to a well-understood strategic plan, set of organizational values and well-designed and implemented core processes that work efficiently and effectively. As these processes typically cut across departmental boundaries, their design requires teamwork, coordination and alignment of goals and expectations among multiple stakeholders. And the most effective process designs also include process performance measures that are linked to overall operational goals and objectives.
And when the critical processes are technical in nature such as in many manufacturing environments, they need to be well developed and robust in a way that facilitates consistent product quality.
To improve business performance, an organization and its leaders must understand the inter-connecting dynamics of the five major components of process and quality excellence. These components, illustrated in the diagram below, demand integration if an organization is to maximize the leverage and sustain the gains from its hard-won improvement efforts.
process - quality - performance
There may be opportunities for organizational alignment and performance improvement in your organization if one or more of the following situations exist:
- "The left foot doesn't always seem to know what the right foot is doing."
- "We can't seem to make the product exactly the same way every time."
- "Our performance needs to be better and more consistent from month to month."
- "Our leadership team needs to work together and have aligned goals."
- "We need a set of performance metrics that tells us how we're doing on a timely basis."
- "We need a proactive strategy for continuous improvement and data driven problem solving at the root cause level."
- "We need to better define our core work processes so our people can understand how they are each part of something bigger and our quality and productivity levels can get measurably better.
- "We need to better understand what our customers like and don't like about our products and services to help us target our improvement strategies."
- "Our quality and productivity levels must get measurably better."