Page 169 - DMGT524_TOTAL_QUALITY_MANAGEMENT

Total Quality Management

Notes “In India, many people have difficulty giving up the old and embracing the new, but the
mind-set is changing. Six Sigma is making people look outward. We’re shifting from an
organizational focus to a customer focus.”
Wipro’s trained teams have launched close to 30 projects, including three major cross-
functional undertakings. “Defects are steadily falling in cylinder manufacturing,” discloses
Bagchi. “In the fixed deposits area of our Financial Services division, we’ve established a
process to eliminate non value-added steps and mistake-proof the system. We’re also
projecting a 30-per cent cycle-time reduction in our computer business. The estimated
near-term gains will be six to eight times the total investments we’ve made in Six Sigma.”
The First Step
Other re-engineering programmes often advocate tearing down an organization and
rebuilding from scratch. MU advises organizations to start where they are, build on current
successes and modify current processes. They must rely on the interwoven concepts of
defect reduction, which encourages employees to relate more to each other, and cycle-
time reduction, which eliminates unnecessary, non value-adding steps from processes.

Six Sigma requires more than a monetary investment, Erwin points out. “You must have
a plan, necessary resources, the commitment of everyone and uncompromising matrixes,”
he says. “Then you set aggressive goals along the path and hold people accountable.”
The MU Six Sigma programme emphasizes the following key components:
1. A goal of total customer satisfaction.

2. A common language throughout the organization.
3. Common, uniform quality measurement techniques for all business areas.
4. Goals with identical improvement rates, based on uniform matrixes.

5. Goal-directed incentives for both employees and management.
6. Coordinated training in “why” and “how” to achieve the goal.
No one set procedure will work when following the Six Sigma method. Every company is
different and must account for its strengths and weaknesses; then leverage them accordingly.
“A clear, quantitative understanding of customer satisfaction typically is accomplished
through surveys,” notes Hayes. “Surveys should identify gaps between customer needs
and a company’s current performance level. Then, through benchmarking, a company’s
core processes are compared to another best-in-class performer. This is useful in determining
the first layer of needed goals.”

Motorola SPS statistician Skip Weed has been involved with Six Sigma since the programme
began. “The major impact, especially when it first started, was on our culture - the people
and systems required to produce high-quality products and services,” he recalls.
“Previously, there was minimal effort in preventing defects rather than inspecting them
out. The directive for the programme came from our highly respected CEO, who was
strongly behind it, and everyone then began to buy in.”

Management by Fact, not Emotion
Ron Randall, quality improvement manager at Raytheon TI Systems, says his company is
impressed with Six Sigma’s quantitative methods. “We looked at our products and
compared them to similar ones from Motorola,”
Contd...

164 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY