This course has had the opportunity to teach me a lot of things about quality management. During the course I was able to interview two very different companies about their quality management programs. The interview conducted with Amber Carroll the Food Safety and Quality Assurance Manager at the Tyson Foods plant in Blountsville, Alabama was successful in identifying the risks to undertrained employees. Tyson has a decent education program in place with continuous education quarterly. Amber identified some faults with the programs they have in place and explained how they could be fixed. Tyson follows certain certifications and external audits that rank them nationally by how well they rank. The Blountsville, Alabama plant that Amber operates is ranked in the top 5 safest poultry plants in the southeast. The BRC is the certification and auditing system that Tyson uses and the WCA is how Tyson evaluates their workers and their paperwork. Overall Tyson has a lot of very well managed risks and operates a very stable and safe plant in Blountsville, Alabama. I then was able to compare Tyson and their top standards to a smaller, family owned operation that also has certain standards but they are still learning how to become certified. I determined the Yoder’s of Yoder Naturals in Fairplay, South Carolina have a lot of work to do to continue to be able to produce and sell CBD oil to their wholesalers and to their customers but with help of the quality assurance manager they will be able to take the proper steps in managing their risks before the FDA can cite them for anything. They have a good risk prevention plan in place and with proper procedures and planning risks will be avoided early during internal auditing before they ever go external. In the subsequent paragraphs I will tie my interviews into what I learned from the different quality philosophers throughout the year.
My favorite leader in the field of quality management is Edward Deming. He was arguably one of the most influential philosophers when it came to quality. Deming had the philosophy that the way to improve quality was to minimize uncertainty and variability in the way a service is delivered. This means that the people who are working for you are the key to minimizing risk and assuring top quality. He believed that the proper training and working in sync with each other directly related to the quality of work and any incidents that occur. Edward had two different types of variations that he believed in. The first one is common cause variation, which is the explanation of how changes happen. It explains that any change can “be explained, and predicted”, which means that if things are run according to code then there should be no changes unless there is an error being made somewhere. Special cause variations are “changes attributed to extraordinary events”, meaning that changes only happen because of errors and there are always errors. Edward says that we should always know which variation we are looking at because there are different answers to each variation. Edward had a prize named after him the “Deming Prize” which goes to organizations that have exerted immeasurable influence directly and indirectly on the development of quality control. Edward also created his own fourteen principles of quality management. His fourteen principles are as follows:
1. Create constancy of purpose for improving products and services.
2. Adopt the new philosophy.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.
4. End the practice of awarding business on price alone; instead, minimize total cost by working with a single supplier.
5. Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production and service.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Adopt and institute leadership.
8. Drive out fear.
9. Break down barriers between staff areas.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce.
11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.
12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship, and eliminate the annual rating or merit system.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone.
14. Put everybody in the company to work accomplishing the transformation.
In my opinion Edward’s 14 principles were a great way to measure success for a company when it relates to their safety. Each separate principle can be used in many different ways in many different industries and it can help quality managers stay on course.
We examine Walter Shewhart who was another big factor in the world of quality management. He is often reffered to as the “Father of quality control”. He was well knows for his theories of assignable cause and chance cause variations. Shewhart was great at statistics and hired Edward Deming to be his statistician. He was able to create control charts that help quality managers monitor errors and activity as a visual aid. His theory of chance cause is a cause that cannot be identified and it cannot be corrected. Assignable cause can be identified and corrected. The control charts were very easy to use because of their visual nature and they helped quality managers look at statistical patterns and determine where they need to look at things and fix them. I think that these charts were great in helping.
Philip Crosby was a well-known philosopher in quality because of his fourteen steps to help organizations build a good quality program. The first is that management should be committed to quality. You need to know where management stands on quality. The second step is to create teams committed to quality improvement that represent each different group in your organization. These teams should run the quality improvement program. The third step should be able to measure and determine current and potential quality issues in an organization. The fourth step is to calculate the cost of poor quality and define what is causing the poor quality. The fifth is to raise awareness to all employees and provide a method of raising the personal concern felt by all personnel in the company toward the conformance of the product or service and the quality reputation of the company. The sixth step would be to take action to correct quality issues and provide a systematic method of permanently resolving the problems that are identified through previous action steps. The seventh step is to monitor progress of quality improvement and establish a zero defects committee. The eighth step is to train supervisors in quality improvement in order to actively carry out their part of the quality improvement program. The ninth step is to hold zero defect days where you create an event that will let all employees realize through personal experience, that there has been a change. The next step, is the tenth and it is to encourage all employees to create goals toward quality improvement. The eleventh step is to encourage employee communication with management about obstacles to quality and give the individual employee a method of communicating to management the situations that make it difficult for the employee to fulfill the pledge to improve. The twelfth step is to recognize participant’s efforts and be appreciative that people do not only work for money but they work for appreciation and recognition. The thirteenth step is to bring together professional quality people to create quality councils on a regular basis. The fourteenth step is the most important one and it is to constantly repeat. Quality improvement in an organization never ends and it is important to continue to do what you need to improve quality.
Joseph Juran was a charismatic person, acknowledged all over the globe for his enormous contribution to the theme of quality management. In his time, he was a legend, and his role in shaping our modern view about quality cannot be overlooked. Juran, along with Deming, is greatly appreciated for accelerating the evolution of quality movement in Japan. His role in manufacturing across the globe has been substantial. In his prior days as a novice engineer, Juran discovered that, if a list of defects is made based on their frequency, it is only a few of the defects that would account for the bulk of the ones found. With the progress of his career to management, he discovered such an occurrence of the phenomenon in other parts. This was the basis of ‘the vital few and the trivial many,’ which is popularly known as the “Pareto’s Principle of unequal distribution”. It has become a common term used to describe any situation in which a relatively minor percentage of elements are attributed to a significant percentage of effect.
According to Juran, there are two definitions of quality. First, it means those features that meet the needs of the customer, thereby, leading to customer satisfaction. As a result, the meaning is oriented to income. The need for higher quality, in this case, is to provide more customer satisfaction, with the aim of increasing overall income. However, availing more and quality features normally needs investment, thus, leading to increased costs. Better quality in such an instance “costs more”. Second, quality implies freedom from deficiencies or errors that lead to redoing the work, customer dissatisfaction, field failures, customer claims, and much more. He notes that higher quality resulting from product features that satisfy customer needs enables the organization to: improve customer satisfaction, meet competition, make products saleable, provide sales incomes, increase market share, and secure premium prices. Similarly, high quality emanating from freedom from deficiencies enables companies to: reduce waste, error-rates, warranty charges, customer dissatisfaction, inspection, and increases yields and delivery performance. In this case, higher quality is less costly.