Why Quality is Important and How It Applies in Diverse Business and Social Environments, Volume I

Paul Hayes

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781947098534
• eBook ISBN: 9781947098541
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Opérations

These two volumes are about understanding—why—and application—how—with the aim of providing guidance and introduction to both.

Quality is the consistent achievement of the user's expectations of a product or service. The achievement needs to be "The right thing, right first time, every time, in time." Beginning with manufacturing and services, it also includes professional, personal, and spiritual dimensions.

Variation does not sit happily with consistency and skill in handling risk and opportunity requires competence in the use of statistics, probability, and uncertainty; and needs to complement the critically essential soft dimensions of quality and the overarching and underpinning primacy of personal relationships.

There are no clear boundaries to the applicability of quality and the related processes and procedures expressed in management systems, and this is why it matters so much to show "how it applies in diverse business and social environments." Increasingly, the acceptability of boundaries that are drawn depends on their effect on the user and the achievement of quality, and the latest standards on quality management are explicit on this key point.

Quality is everyone's business, and there is no single professional discipline that can properly express this. Insights, knowledge, experience, best practice, tools, and techniques need to be shared across all kinds of organizational and professional boundaries, and there is no departmental boundary that can stand apart from the organization-wide commitment to quality achievement.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This is about understanding—why and application—how.

The aim is to provide guidance and introduction to both.

The book is in two volumes, with the first ending with Chapter 12, Quality Management.

What Is Quality and What Does It Entail?

Consistency and Variation

Quality is the consistent achievement of the user’s expectations of a product or service. The achievement needs to be “The right thing, right first time, every time, in time.”¹ We begin by looking at manufacturing and service industry and we wrap up by looking at the professions.

Immediately we can see that variation is not going to sit happily with consistency and that we must consider risk, and its converse—opportunity, likelihood, and probability and understand and use statistics. There are common and special causes of variability and with each we need to apply the related statistical techniques.

Products, even if produced by robotic machines, still involve human agency individually and in teams at key points throughout production and then in the use and service phases even more so. We need to be confident that we can deliver to the standards required and this needs to be established by a whole range of means.

Processes, Procedures, Best Practice, and Their Expression

The creation and delivery of products and services depends on processes, and more detailed procedures when necessary, within and across organizations of all kinds. Processes are assembled, established, and maintained in management systems inside and across organizational boundaries. We are going to need to describe these processes and communicate them within and across organizational boundaries.

Best practice that is known to enable and assure consistent achievement of user’s expectations must be captured and shared and leads to standards, specifications, and many related documents, which increasingly are created and shared, sometimes exclusively, within virtual information technology environments. There is a natural flow from statements of objectives, with their associated measures of achievements, through policies on how they will be achieved in different areas, to the enabling processes and procedures for the use of those individuals responsible for their operation.

A record of how processes and procedures are operated, and the outcomes are documented also needs to be captured, stored, and shared.

Scope and Boundaries

There is no clear boundary to the applicability of quality and the related processes and procedures expressed in management systems, and this is the main reason for this work and its stated aim to show “how it applies in diverse business and social environments.” Increasingly the acceptability of boundaries that are drawn depends on their effect on the user and the achievement of quality, and the latest standard on quality management is explicit on this key point.²

Quality is everyone’s business and there is no one professional discipline that can properly express this. Insights, knowledge, experience, best practice, tools, and techniques need to be shared across all kinds of organizational and professional boundaries, and there is no departmental boundary that can stand apart from the organization wide commitment to quality achievement.

Foundations of Society

In early society, weights and measures were the basis of trade and international collaboration, and the ethics of honest accurate traceable measures is reflected in their reference in the law codes and spiritual reference works of the day.

Modern science is based on the higher and higher discriminations and the lower and lower uncertainty in measurements that permit testing of the most revealing, and often counterintuitive and disturbing hypotheses and current findings of modern science.³

Health and Safety

Quality failures have consequences, and these can be extreme, so this topic has traction well outside the immediately obvious scope.

Improvement and PDCA

Quality is a journey and continual improvement is a driver and motivation, goal, objective, aim, and expression and will be central to everything we say about achievement of quality. Not only is this a truism we used heavily in the 1970s and 1980s, but it reflects the widely accepted belief that achievement and maintenance of quality is central to business and organizational success.

Continual or Continuous Improvement is a process with four very well-established steps PLAN, DO, CHECK or STUDY, and ACT (PDC[S]A), that have clear links to the scientific method (Figure 1.1) which it probably even predates.⁴

Figure 1.1 Evolution of the scientific method⁵

The very largely accepted standard for management systems—ISO 9001 (now version 2015)—has this statement “The PDCA cycle enables an organization to ensure that its processes are adequately resourced and managed, and that opportunities for improvement are determined and acted on.” The open source Management System Standard⁶ describes it as “Plan–Do–Check–Act” (PDCA) is a cycle that individual people naturally follow to varying degrees of competence. PLAN is the preparation for doing something. DO is the execution of the PLAN. CHECK is monitoring to confirm the PLAN is being properly followed during DO and that nothing unexpected occurs. Finally during ACT, a review of PLAN, DO, and CHECK processes is conducted to see if the approach used can be improved the next time around plus agreeing actions to make it happen.

PDCA is therefore a natural potentially universal cycle of continual learning and continual improvement applicable to organization strategy, tactics, and operations. The fourth element ACT can also be conducted proactively to ensure that the organization remains aligned with future stakeholder needs and expectations by trying to anticipate future likely innovation and change.”⁷

“Check” is sometimes replaced with “Study” for non-native English speakers if “Check” has negative connotations of “holding back.” It is also conceived as applying more explicitly to improvement.⁸ This gives rise to the equivalent PDSA cycle.

Excellence, the Destination

The journey has a goal, and this is explored in several ways. Excellence is a common aim. It is expressed in many ways as follows:

• Customer delight—see “Going the extra mile and the importance of family”

• Total Quality Management—see “Total Quality Management, Company Wide Quality Control”

• Personal Mastery⁹—See “Personal Quality and Mastery”

Touching Lives

Quality is all about relationships and the motivation and values expressed. It is concerned with building values and community and expressing the highest ideals—see Quality, Life, and Service and the concluding Chapter 24—Quality, Faith, and Transcendent Values.

Who Is the Publication Aimed at an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Quality and Manufacturing Industries
• Chapter 3: Quality and Service Industries
• Chapter 4: Quality, Risk, Opportunity, and Improvement
• Chapter 5: Quality and the Individual
• Chapter 6: Quality and the Team
• Chapter 7: Quality and the Community
• Chapter 8: Quality, Health and Safety, and the Environment
• Chapter 9: Quality and Information Technology
• Chapter 10: Tools and Techniques for Quality
• Chapter 11: Deployment for Quality
• Chapter 12: Quality Management
• Appendices
• References
• About the Author
• Index