Page 114 - DMGT524_TOTAL_QUALITY_MANAGEMENT

Unit 8: Continuous Process Improvement

Notes

Caselet Real-life Usage of Kaizen

anon of Japan implemented in 1975 to excel over international competition and
expand its operations on a global scale in 6 years. Canon put in place a special
Cmatrix management system with numerous small group activities. The purpose
was to eliminate wastes, revitalize the workforce, and improve continuously in all business
processes. Techniques like Canon Production System, Quality Assurance, Production
Assurance, and Personnel Training were introduced. Canon achieved an astonishing 3%
per month productivity increase.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
9. …………… means continuous improvement in personal life, social life and working life.

10. ………………… refers to activities directed towards maintaining current technological,
managerial and operating standards.
11. ………………… refers to those directed towards improving current standards.

8.5 Re-engineering

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is an approach aiming at improvements by means of
elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the business process that exist within and across
organisations. The key to BPR is for organisations to look at their business processes from a
“clean slate” perspective and determine how they can best construct these processes to improve
how they conduct business.
Business process re-engineering is also known as BPR, Business Process Redesign, Business
Transformation, or Business Process Change Management. It is the radical redesign of an
organisation’s processes, especially its business processes. Rather than organising a firm into
functional specialties (like production, accounting, marketing, etc.) and considering the tasks
that each function performs; complete processes from materials acquisition, to production, to
marketing and distribution should be considered. The firm should be reengineered into a series
of processes.
Hammer and Champy (1994) define BPR as “fundamental revision and radical redesign of
processes to reach spectacular improvements in critical and contemporary measurements of
efficiency, such as costs, quality, service and quickness.” Keywords in this BPR definition are:

Fundamental: What is the company’s basic style of working?
Radical: All existing procedures and structures must be forgotten and new styles of
working must be discovered. Superficial changes are not useful. Changes must be made at
the very root.
Spectacular: Spectacular changes must be discovered, not marginal improvements.

Processes: Redesign must be fixed on the processes not on the tasks, jobs, people, or
structures.
Consequently, a firm must start over, leaving their old procedures behind, testing the work
without prejudices, and forgetting systems used up to now. In other words, redesigning is

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