Little steps towards big changes

THE QUALITY CONUNDRUM

How Indian Industry is managing quality.

Contribution to quality improvement takes place not only due to the implementation of best-in-class quality tools. It is also because of top management developing the right vision for building global businesses.

Yoshikazu Tsuda, the Japanese professor of quality management, believes that the top Indian management has the right vision for business, the Indian worker is diligent and is executing his task well. Indian workers are open to suggestion and improvement.

There are, however, performance gaps at the middle-management level. The production manager operates in a confined environment of rules and regulations and is far too involved with his supervisory role.

The problem lies with the managers not being able to keep up with the plan of the day. Tsuda has defined the functions of management, based on the level of seniority in the organisation and the way an individual needs to schedule his day to attain best results.

For instance, an operator, supervisor or a person at the shop-floor level must spend 90 per cent of his time attaining exactness. The middle manager must use 50-60 per cent of his time on continuous improvement activities, while the rest of his time should be spent on regular activities. The top management "" that is, the chief executive and the divisional head "" must spend 60-70 per cent of their time on attaining breakthroughs.

For instance, from 1990 to 1993, Alex d'Arbeloff, the CEO of automatic test equipment manufacturing company Teradyne, devoted most of his time to TQM implementation to attain organisation breakthrough. From 1993 to 1996, he devoted his time to developing a new product that opened a new market for Teradyne "" this was a market breakthrough.

However, this is not how most managers schedule their day. Eighty to 90 per cent of the time, managers are fire-fighting or managing their customers instead of following their day's plan. Their time is spent on tasks that are urgent, but may not be important.

Daily work management (DMW) will help organisations become more efficient, achieve better results and improve employee morale. With DWM in place, the middle manager will be able to focus and spend more time on continuous improvement activities.

Continuous improvement (CI), in regard to organisational quality and performance, focuses on improving customer satisfaction through continuous and incremental improvement to process, which includes removing unnecessary activities and variations. This can be termed as elimination of waste of material, time and effort.

CI is not a tool or technique but is a way of life, a cultural approach to quality improvement. The concept has to be set in the context of quality movement.

The essential principles of CI are: human resources are the most important company asset; processes must evolve by gradual improvement rather than radical changes; and improvement must be based on statistical/quantitative evaluation of process performance.

Here are two examples of how CI leads to Kaizens.

In a heavy pneumatic press, there was a possibility of accident by injury to the operator's hand. It had to be ensured that the machine stopped operating if the operator's hand accidentally came in the machine. For this, an optical sensor was identified and placed in the press, which ensured that the machine would stop if a hand came in the machine.

Such small ideas (Kaizen) on fool-proofing (Poka-Yoke) help in improving the operational efficiency and add to safety through a process of CI thinking.

The second example relates to the lapping machine of an axle plant. It was found that the tool change time was as high as 19 minutes because the operator had to remove the tap-holding mandrel (which was 1,050 mm long) every time there was a change of the model he was working on.

To save time, the tap-holding mandrel was split into two and the component locator and the tap locator were separated. Thus, only the component locator had to be removed for tap change "" which took only eight minutes.

Such thinking happens when management encourages CI as a business strategy. The human mind at the worker or engineer level is capable of doing this, but it is the management that has to create and nurture such an environment.

Dr Surinder Kapur is chairman, CII Mission for Manufacturing Innovation, and CMD, Sona Koyo Steering Systems Ltd