1. Explain why continual quality improvement is important.
Continual Quality Improvement has following advantages to the industry:
- It reduces errors which may be defects in case of manufacturing industries, and mistakes in service industries, CQI aids in eventual elimination of these errors.
- Better equation with dynamic nature of markets, as we know the demands & desires of customer changes continuously, since a business involved in CQI follows a dynamic nature of processes it better adapts to the market and has higher chances of customer attraction and retention.
- CQI makes the end workers more involved in the process and gives them a chance to contribute towards increasing the company’s efficiency, they feel more involved and productive rather than feeling unproductive and inefficient in case of traditional businesses where mistakes are loaded on them.
- CQI uses monitoring the process data for finding improvement opportunities which is more quantitative and ordered approach as opposed to whimsical improvements.
All the above factors increases the business’s efficiency, productivity and thus, revenue.
2. What is management’s role in continual quality improvement ?
Among a manager’s primary duties are evaluating the performance of staff , providing feedback and mentoring, developing education programs, contributing to staff professional development, interviewing and hiring staff, developing departmental budgets, and maintaining inventory of , equipment and supplies. Managers may also speak on behalf of their staff when upper management is making decisions that affect the staff. In this situation, managers serve as a representative and promote the best interests of their staff and the customers that they care for.
Other managerial duties include:
- Provide leadership and guidance to staff.
- Ensure that staff is properly trained
- Address any personnel issues to promote a productive and supportive work environment
- Monitor for quality
So, in a nutshell managers’s role in CQI starts from training, educating workers, gathering their feedback from the processes ad they know them the best, collect suggestions present and communicate with the top level management. Bring best practices into use and provide any support needed for maintaining conducive environment of the workplace.
3. Discuss the Kaizen approach.
Kaizen is an approach for creating continuous improvement based on the idea that small, ongoing positive changes can reap major improvements. It has been successfully implemented in the healthcare industry, and is complementary to lean manufacturing, Kaizen is coined by coalescence of two Japanese word which mean good change.
There are ten principles of Kaizen as follows:
These principles are for the directing, how a company’s mindset should be apply Kaizen,
- Let go of assumptions.
- Be proactive about solving problems.
- Don’t accept the status quo (Current company conditions financially, socially, politically).
- Let go of perfectionism and take an attitude of iterative, adaptive change.
- Look for solutions as you find mistakes.
- Create an environment in which everyone feels empowered to contribute.
- Don’t accept the obvious issue; instead, ask “why” five times to get to the root cause.(Root Cause Analysis).
- Cull information and opinions from multiple people.
- Use creativity to find low-cost, small improvements.
- Never stop improving.
Kaizen is also distilled to Deming’s cycle or PDCA cycle.
Following flow diagram summarizes the steps involved in the Kaizen Approach.
Figure: 1 Steps in implementing Kaizen Approach – BY ME
4. How would you describe a lean system?
A lean system is one which has successfully eliminated waste wherin, waste can be material waste, time waste, extra moves etc. A lean system uses a simple design process and eliminates all of he above, always a lean system must incorporate continuous improvement and look for opportunities to reduce the lead time, moves, scrap and reworks. A modern lean system should incorporate Information technologies like ERP, High speed network, Statistical Quality Control software packages etc.
5. What is lean six-sigma and how would you apply it to a quality management system?
Lean Six Sigma is a synergy of two managerial concepts:
Lean & Six Sigma.
Lean focuses on the elimination of the eight kinds of wastes:
- Over-production
- Waiting
- Non-utilized talent
- Transportation
- Inventory
- Motion
- Extra-processing
Six Sigma seeks to improve the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects (errors) and minimizing variability in (manufacturing and business) processes.Sigma recognizes special cause and normal variations and thus, guides to reduce the variations.
Synergistically, Lean aims to achieve continuous flow by tightening the linkages between process steps while Six Sigma focuses on reducing process variation (in all its forms) for the process steps thereby enabling a tightening of those linkages. In short, Lean exposes sources of process variation and Six Sigma aims to reduce that variation enabling a virtuous cycle of iterative improvements towards the goal of continuous flow.
Lean Six sigma uses a philosophy of acronym DMAIIC as discussed below:
Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Implement, Control.
Define the opportunity for improvement.
Measure the process parameters.
Analyse these parameters.
Based on these analysis try to improve the process.
Implement in the improvement
Check if the system is still in control
This process goes on continually reducing waste/muda as discussed above and increases the sigma level of the process which means less number of variations, errors and thus ensuring precision of the process.
6. Define benchmarking. Define auditing. How does benchmarking and auditing relate to each other?
Benchmarking is looking out at other businesses, organizations and understand how they perform and analyze their processes.
Benchmarking explains how a well performing organization is doing it so well and point out he key areas of focus that others can implement to compete and perform better.
Figure 2: Steps in Benchmarking- BY ME
Auditing is an on-site verification activity, such as inspection and examination, of a process or quality system, to ensure that the company is agreeing with the requirements.
Quality audit means a systematic, independent examination of a manufacturer’s quality system that is performed at defined intervals and at sufficient frequency to determine whether both quality system activities and the results of such activities comply with quality system procedures.
An audit can apply to an entire organization or specific to a function, process, or production step.
Audit is a quality improvement process ,where performance is measured against standards or criteria, which are important for overall performance. In audit there will be pre-determined standards within defined parameters, against which performance will be evaluated. Changes can then be implemented to improve standards. Audit can be done by an internal or external person.
Benchmarking depends on having an audit system in place at an early stage so that it can build up enough data to define benchmarking measures. The initial audit provides a baseline. So, audit can be thought of as a step in the benchmarking process.
7. How can you apply benchmarking data in auditing processes, systems, designs, products, factories and services?
Benchmarking process yields quantitative as well as qualitative data of our own company and the other companies, all of this open data can be very helpful in auditing, beacause auditing is basically checking the records of the company and seeing if it is up to standards, benchmarking data also includes details about processes, systems, designs, products, factories & services used and comparison with other companies process data this can be used while auditing and checking if the company meets the standard.
8. What is a JIT system?
A JIT system is one which uses JIT inventory control system, JIT is an acronym for Just In Time. In this inventory system, the company holds no inventory and gets raw materials when needed for production and thus saves inventory storage, moving and maintainence costs, but this prompt availability of inventory needs the company to have good bond with the supplier and also the supplier generally needs a legal bond for supply, this type of system produces when they get an order. JIT system can lead to the supplier being your competition as he gets valuable information.
9. What are the benefits of JIT/lean?
Following are most important advantages of JIT:
- It eliminates the need of line balancing.
- Reducing over-production.
- Reduced waiting times and transport costs.
- Effective usage of resources by streamlining your production systems.
- Reducing the capital you have tied up in stock.
- Decreasing product defects.
- All of the above increases efficiency and competitiveness.
10. Discuss automation system ideas for JIT/lean.
Automation is the use of control systems for actuators such as machinery, boilers, processes, aircraft and the automobile industry. Automation was first performed in the automobile by General Motors in 1947 where productions of parts were done by the use of robots as equipment. Automation brings faster process with less errors as the human error factor is eliminated, In a JIT system with cellular manufacturing system if automation is used the production time will be reduced a lot, but for a job order production the automation system has to be flexible, so finally a lean system with automation will have a very low cost, high efficiency, high productivity, less or no scrap and rework, less supervision cost, high quality product. The only expected disadvantage will be that due to JIT manufacturer cannot exploit the bulk order discounts and automation will have very high capital so the total capital investment will have to be very large.
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