Continuous Improvement of Quality

As has already been pointed out in previous chapters, improving product and service quality on a continuous basis is the key to improving customer satisfaction, increasing productivity, and remaining competitive in the marketplace Opportunities always exist in productive enterprises for making improvements to the quality of products and services by using the resources already available Many corporate managers believe that problems relating to quality can only be resolved by investing more capital to buy newer equipment, with all possible automation and the latest bells and whistles Dr Deming used to decry this tendency toward blaming lack of quality on lack of new and expensive equipment and then launching into extensive capital investments in the name of quality improvement He cited several examples in his writings where improvements in quality and productivity were accomplished using the same machinery and resources that had been condemned earlier as being incapable of meeting quality needs This author has seen this happen and can provide several examples to support this Poor quality, waste, and customer dissatisfaction all result largely from a lack of understanding of the processes and a lack of knowledge regarding how process variables and their interactions contribute to the quality of the final product or service If proper tools are employed to understand the interrelationships among the variables governing a process-and if appropriate levels for these variables are chosen to provide the desired levels of the product characteristics-then quality and productivity can often be improved without much additional investment in new machinery It does not, however, mean that new machinery will never be needed, just that the capability of existing machinery is more than likely adequate to achieve needed quality improvements In this chapter, we will discuss the tools that are used in discovering opportunities for improvement, making the improvements, and maintaining the improved positions Some of the tools are simple, some involve a certain level of analysis, and some require a bit of advanced mathematics We will discuss here some of the commonly used tools that are valuable in terms of the impact they make on the improvement process Before discussing the improvementtools, however, we will discuss the general problem-solving methodology, or the framework for the process of completing improvement projects An opportunity for an improvement project exists whereve