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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.
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
Many teams and companies struggle to get the most out of structured problem solving methodologies because they make one or more of the common mistakes shown, and they don’t even realize they’re doing it! (We’ve shown the 8D process here, but whether your company uses 8D, Six Sigma DMAIC, PDCA, A3, or another paradigm doesn’t matter.) The issue is HOW any of those methodologies are used by real teams in real time in the real world.
“The people we nominate to help in this situation are either going to be the chicken or the pig.” The room went silent. The “chicken or pig” comment came specifically in response to resistance someone had to sending some people to the remote site. After a pause, the executive went on to explain “when you are making breakfast, the chicken contributes, but the pig is committed”. We weren’t going to resolve this problem with remote and part-time help. To get the job done, we would have to send people truly committed to working hands-on and to staying abroad for weeks until the job was done. “chicken or pig” became team shorthand for level of commitment. Next time your team is faced with a big challenge, I strongly encourage you to reflect - are you and your team sufficiently committed for the team to succeed? Are you going to be chickens or pigs?
When trying to improve or optimize a business or manufacturing process, there is one main rule: your actual process is never what you think it is. You need to "walk the process" (literally follow and watch every step of the process) to understand every step and detail. This will reveal steps and activities that are non-value added or causing significant pain. In addition, when working with teams, if people see that you’re really listening to them, they will be open to listening to you.
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