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Quality is a company’s top priority. WRONG!
You probably thought that your company’s mission statement highlighting ‘exceeding customer expectations’ and ‘striving for world-class quality’ was defining the company’s actual priorities. Wrong!
Quality performance has historically been a major differentiator in a company’s performance (sales, customer satisfaction) and for many decades took a great deal of attention from top management to achieve it. As quality levels have improved over time in many industries, strong quality performance is no longer a customer delighter but now only “table stakes” for a company to maintain their market position. Quality performance becomes visible only when you fail. For this reason, companies have fallen into a trap – the have put their quality system on ‘cruise control’. This puts them at high risk.
When you look “behind the curtain”, the reality is often quite different than the company priority statements. Start digging deeper. Take a close look at monthly management review agendas. Is quality the first topic you find? Likely not. Look at the Key Process Indicators (KPIs) and other high-level company metrics. Do you see more than token quality measures, or even any quality measures at all? Often not!
If you do see quality performance represented loudly and clearly: high in management agendas and prominently among KPI’s, congratulations - you work for a quality-focused company. If you don’t, a higher priority is front and center of the attention of top leadership. Financial performance, shareholder value, and/or top-line growth are the priorities of most companies. (Of course, those are the outcomes that keep a company alive, so this should come as no surprise.) That said, a company without the dedication and a robust system to achieve world class quality can also easily fail!
High quality is a prerequisite for businesses these days. For long-term success, it is imperative to set up a system that pushes quality performance to ever-higher levels. However, this does not mean quality is a higher (or even equal) priority compared to financial results - don’t let them tell you it is. Quality performance is quite often a secondary (or lower) priority that most top leadership “want handled” by a different group. Don’t think that top leadership speaking about quality and setting quality initiatives by a defined group pushes it to top priority for the company. It doesn’t. It may be just a side initiative to handle the mess called “quality”.
Spotting the difference between putting quality on cruise control vs. seeing it as a real priority is easy. Your company is REALLY prioritizing quality performance when you see all of these indicators:
1) The top-level company priorities and measures include quality performance
2) A clear quality improvement plan is visible to all employees
3) Management is proactively monitoring quality performance with KPIs
4) Management is swiftly addressing quality excursions (internal and external)
5) Resources are added in areas that address quality, not only financial gain
6) Problems are not only fixed but the deficient systems behind them are corrected
7) Performance in quality is visible to the entire company
If you don’t see nearly all of these things, your company is at risk. A competitor who is truly quality focused will come along and “eat your lunch”. There are ways to combat this reality. CӔDENCE can help you achieve world-class quality, set up a thriving quality system, and push through the typical corporate roadblocks to success. In a future post, we will explore how a top-notch company approaches strategic quality improvement.
Why are ideas cheap? Supply and demand – there are lots of ideas out there – everyone fancies themself an innovator, the supply far outstrips the demand. BUT, coming up with a good idea is only 1% of the success of a business. The hard part remains….
Why does execution matter more? Once an idea is created, there are hundreds of steps needed to turn it into a viable product backed by a viable business model. Driving rigor at speed through the product development, marketing and sales, pre-launch, and production ramp processes is what will make your business successful.
If you've got a favorite way of communicating (perhaps by text, email, or in-person) that you use most of the time, you are undermining the effectiveness of your communication! If you've ever been frustrated that your team or manager isn't taking action on what you've told them must be done – this post & infographic is for you.
Not all modes of communication are created equal. The way you communicate should be selected based on 3 situational factors: who you're communicating with, the gravity of your message, the outcome you're trying to achieve. Choosing the the mode appropriate to your purpose will greatly enhance the impact of your messaging. Choosing the wrong mode can undermine what you're trying to accomplish by communicating.
CAEDENCE has developed a novel improvement to overcome the communication-based shortfalls in existing methods. Applicable to all structured problem-solving approaches, Visual 8D™ enables teams to execute the familiar problem-solving steps (with no additional effort), while capturing plans and progress in easy-to-follow diagrams. Visual 8D™ puts teams in the position of providing answers to management and customer questions before being asked, resulting in improved control of the situation and minimizing time wasted on extraneous actions.
Danger is lurking around every corner in a new product development / new product introduction project. Avoidable risks wind up blindsiding teams, always at the worst possible moment. Risks blow up into problems because teams misjudge their nature and origin, and lack the right tools and processes to effectively identify, assess, and mitigate them. Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction
There are dozens of tools for reducing risk in new product development and introduction. We know because we've used them to successfully launch dozens of new products in highly demanding industries like automotive and aerospace. Let CAEDENCE show you a few of our favorite tools that you can use immediately to dramatically reduce the chances of disaster on your next NPD/NPI project.
Risk is inherent in new product development and introduction. Regardless of your personal risk tolerance, it's critical to understand that unmanaged risk could ruin your business. We're not saying "don't take risks". We're saying "take risks with your eyes open". Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction.
Many risks in NPD & NPI are visible. New process steps that must be implemented with caution and back-up plans. Unique product features that are challenging to accomplish. But there are other risks lurking. Things that can derail your project before you even realize. A bit nervous now? You should be! But, don't worry. Let CAEDENCE introduce you to a systematic approach and toolkit for managing and reducing risk in new product development and introduction.
Successful new product development and introduction projects require carefully balancing dozens of critical parameters, any one of which could sink the ship. At the end of the day, each of those dozens of NPD/NPI success measures relates to an aspect of just 4 main stakeholder care-abouts: Launch timing, Project budget, Product margin performance, Quality / delivery (customer experience). Learn the systematic method to reduce risks in your new product developments.
CAEDENCE has decoded decades of business experience to reveal the intuition and practices of top performing teams and individuals to radically accelerate people and teams toward excellence. We know the theory, but we've also lived everything we teach and honed best practices for decades. This arms us with tons of real-world examples to engage students and clarify techniques. We often help clients out of crisis situations, but our passion is preventing crises from occurring in the first place. This means (a) establishing robust systems, (b) empowering leaders, and (c) upskilling teams.
We challenge our problem solving classes to play “20 questions” – can we guess a randomly selected word using just 20 yes/no questions? Engineers often say it’s impossible. But, 99 out of 100 times, we find the word! How? There’s no magic: what’s on display is the power of binary decision making, what we call “splitting the dictionary”. And you can apply it to all sorts of real-world problem-solving scenarios. “Splitting the dictionary” is a problem scoping technique of asking the right questions to eliminate as many incorrect possibilities as you can, thus focusing your root cause search in the right area. Effective scoping is key to efficient problem-solving. Once the problem is clearly defined, think of the root cause as a needle in a haystack. Before you start examining hay, first ask “Am I on the right farm?”, then, “Which haystack should I search?”, then “Which portion of the chosen haystack is most likely to contain the needle?” Scoping out the possibilities with a simple tool or test can radically acc
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