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The Rest of the Story: How to Make Quality a Top Priority
Previously we challenged you to “Decide if your company really wants to improve quality!” This week we’ll reveal how a company can de-emphasize quality without even realizing, and what to do about it.
After 14 years managing corporate quality, I moved to a role with P&L responsibility and realized that quality is viewed very differently from “the business side”. Before, I was dedicated to making quality improvements and achieving 100% customer satisfaction, an uphill battle of incremental improvements requiring constant pushing & aligning of functional teams. Suddenly, running a multi-million dollar business unit, the priorities were revenue growth & profit margin. Quality was rarely a topic of management meetings and metrics lacked quality improvement goals. It was as if leadership was saying “Quality’s not that important”.
Upper management talked about quality not as a growth enabler or savings opportunity but as an area to quietly manage. To them, quality was about maintaining & reacting, not driving improvement. Discussions were about inspection costs, customer pain, slow root cause investigations, and irritating documentation – always negative aspects. “Don’t distract engineering - go handle it” was the unspoken (and at times spoken) sentiment for the Quality team. Peers in other groups didn’t want to work on quality issues, and who could blame them? - painful interactions with angry customers, torturous audits, and action items outside your expertise. Quality was viewed as a drain of time, energy, & money. Leaders without quality background were even more likely to diminish its importance. We had to make an extraordinary effort to regain our quality focus, driving several strategic and tactical changes to turn things around:
- Holding an off-site leadership meeting to review quality performance and set short- and long-term goals
- Aligning with upper management to own quality performance metrics
- Implementing corporate-level quality KPIs & setting quality KPIs for all functional groups
- Assigning each top-level functional manager to own a key customer’s experience and scorecard
- Training engineering to understand the impact of design choices
- Adding quality resources for each product life cycle phase (not just to create documentation and clean up emergencies)
- Cross-pollinating engineers into quality roles – a great way to generate ownership of quality and develop fresh ideas
- Proactive, planned, annual customer visits
- Tracking COPQ (cost of poor quality), COPE (cost of poor engineering), COPPM (cost of poor project management) & making those impacts visible
These are just a few of the steps needed to make strides in quality performance. CAEDENCE can help you develop your plan to shift from de-emphasizing quality to putting it in its rightful place as a pillar of a successful business, on equal footing with other top business priorities.
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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