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To make the quality improvement as an effective process, it should be organized and co-ordinate within a structured quality improvement system. This requires organizing, planning, measuring for quality improvement and reviewing all quality improvement activities.

 

• Organizing for quality improvement
• Planning for quality improvement
• Measuring quality improvement
• Reviewing quality improvement activities

 

Organizing for quality improvement

 

Organizing for quality improvement begins with identification of opportunities for quality improvement, both vertically within the organizational hierarchy and horizontally in the process that flows across organizational boundaries.  Organizing involves development of a system for planning the quality improvement activities, implementing the plan, measuring and reviewing the improvements.

 

Planning for quality improvement

 

Quality improvement planning includes setting of improvement goals and determining the methods to achieve those goals.

 

Management should set quality improvement goals in the broadest sense, including reducing quality losses.  Plans should be developed within the business planning cycle to provide strategic guidance and direction for meeting these quality improvement goals and implementing the quality policy. These plans should address the most important quality losses and should be deployed throughout, at all functions and all levels of the organization.

 

The development of quality improvement plans should involve everyone in the organization, together with the suppliers and customers of the organization.  Involving everyone greatly increases the opportunities for improvement.

 

Quality improvement plans are often implemented through a set a specific quality improvement projects. Management should take care to monitor and control such implementation projects to ensure their integration into the overall goals and business plans of the organization.

 

Plans for quality improvement focus on newly identified opportunities and on areas where insufficient progress has been made.  The planning process has inputs from all levels of the organization, from reviews of achieved results and from customers and suppliers.

 

Measuring quality improvement

 

To control the progress of quality improvement, a practical and effective system of objective measurements should be established for identifying and diagnosing improvement opportunities and for measuring the results of quality improvement activities. A well-developed system includes measurements at unit, department, cross-functional and total organizational levels. The measurements should relate to quality losses associated with customer satisfaction, process efficiencies and societal losses.

 

• Measurement of quality losses associated with customer satisfaction may be based on information from surveys of current and potential customers, surveys of competing products and services, product or service performance records, changes in revenues, routine inspections by service personnel, information from sales and service staff and customer complaints and claims.
• Measurement of quality losses associated with process efficiency may be based on labor, capital and material utilization, producing, sorting, correcting or scrapping unsatisfactory process output, process readjustments, waiting times, cycle times, delivery performance, unnecessarily redundant designs, size of inventories and statistical measures of process capability and process stability.
• Measurement of societal quality losses may be based on failure to realize human potential (e.g., as indicated by employee satisfaction surveys), damage caused by pollution and disposal of waste and depletion of scarce resources.

 

The phenomenon of variability is common to all measurements.  Trends displayed by measurements should be interpreted statistically.

 

Measuring and tracking trend from a “baseline” of past performance is important, in addition to establishing and meeting numerically given targets. Measuring enhances problem identification based on facts.

 

The measurements should be reported and reviewed as an integral part of the management accounting and control practices of the organization. The people and organizations involved in the improvement process should be informed of their progress in terms that are meaningful and measurable from their perspective.

 

Reviewing quality improvement activities

 

Regular reviews of quality-improvement activities should be conducted at all levels of management to ensure that:

 

• The organization for quality improvement is functioning effectively
• Quality improvement plans are adequate and are being implemented as planned
• Progress of quality improvement projects is properly measured and indicates satisfactory progress
• Progress of quality improvement projects is reviewed periodically and appropriate corrective and preventive actions are taken. Results of review are used in further planning