Quality Circle
After second world war, most of the
countries in the world had to face the problem of industrial development. Japan
was worst hit and the industrial units in Japan were going from bad to worse
and it was necessary for Japan to put their shattered economy back to the
rails. To do so modern concept of quality control came to Japan after 1945,from
USA, but it was only after 1955 that this system of management of quality
control was actually implemented to the company from the bottom of the organization
that could also share in the quality control function at the workshop level.
Quality circle provides the employees at the bottom level to proceed towards
the top level with opportunities to perform effectively and solving the daily
problem of the unit.
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What is Quality Circle
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A
group of individuals with related interests that meet at regular intervals to
consider problems or other matters related to the quality of outputs of a
process and to the correction of problems or to the improvement of quality. A group
of employees who perform similar duties and meet at periodic intervals, often
with management, to discuss work-related.
Importance of Quality Circles with in a Company
to ensure quality work!
Companies specially startups are facing problem and it's a big
challenge for them to ensure quality work. It's very important to motivate
employees to more focus on quality as it increases profit, productivity by
avoiding rework and saves time. Many companies are working to introduce
quality circles within their companies.
Quality Circle: A small group of employees who meet regularly to identify, analyze,
and solve product-quality and production problems and to improve general
operations.
Quality
circles are applicable to a wide variety of business situations and problems.
They are based on two ideas: that employees can often make better suggestions
for improving work processes than management; and that employees are
motivated by their participation in making such improvements.
Quality Circle Benefits:
Team Spirit Development: This will eliminate inter-team conflicts and they will learn working
as a team.
·
Change in the Attitude: Employees will start working on continuous improvement/ quality of
work. From, 'I don't care' to 'I do care' attitude will start growing within
employees
·
Self Development: This will bring out hidden potential of people at work. They get to
learn additional skills too from each other
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Improves Organizational Culture: This results in positive working environment.
Also, this results total involvement of employees at all levels
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Other Benefits: Quality circles can help a small business reduce costs, increase
productivity, and improve employee morale. Other potential benefits that may
be realized by a small business include greater operational efficiency and an
overall better working climate. Quality circles offer a wide variety of
benefits for small businesses. For example, they serve to increase
management's awareness of employee ideas, as well as employee awareness of
the need for innovation within the company. Finally, quality circles can
improve a small business's overall competitiveness by reducing costs,
improving quality, and promoting innovation.
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Quality circles have the advantage of
continuity; the circle remains intact from project to project. (For a
comparison to Quality Improvement Teams see Juran's Quality by Design[1]
The use of quality circles then spread beyond
Japan. Quality circles have been implemented even in educational sectors in
India and QCFI (Quality Circle Forum of India) is promoting such activities.
However this was not successful in US as it turned out to be a fault finding
exercise.
There are different quality circle tools,
namely:
- The Ishikawa diagram - which shows hierarchies of
causes contributing to a problem
- The Pareto Chart - which analyses different
causes by frequency to illustrate the vital cause
Ishikawa diagrams were proposed by Kaoru Ishikawa in the 1960s, who pioneered quality
management processes in the Kawasaki
shipyards, and in the process became one of the founding fathers of modern
management.
Mazda Motors famously used an Ishikawa diagram in the development
of the Miata sports car, where the required
result was "Jinba Ittai" or "Horse and Rider as One". The
main causes included such aspects as "touch" and "braking"
with the lesser causes including highly granular factors such as "50/50
weight distribution" and "able to rest elbow on top of driver's
door". Every factor identified in the diagram was included in the final
design.
Causes in the diagram are often based on a certain set of
causes, such as the 6 M's, 8 P's or 4 S's, described below. Cause-and-effect
diagrams can reveal key relationships among various variables, and the possible
causes provide additional insight into process behaviour.
Causes in a typical diagram are normally grouped into
categories, the main ones of which are:
The 6 M's
Machine,
Method, Materials, Maintenance, Man and Mother Nature (Environment)
(recommended for the manufacturing industry).
Note: a
more modern selection of categories used in manufacturing includes Equipment,
Process, People, Materials, Environment, and Management.
The 8 P's
Price,
Promotion, People, Processes, Place / Plant, Policies, Procedures, and Product
(or Service) (recommended for the administration and service industries).
The 4 S's
Surroundings,
Suppliers, Systems, Skills (recommended for the service industry).
Causes should be derived from brainstorming sessions. Then
causes should be sorted through affinity-grouping to collect similar ideas
together. These groups should then be labeled as categories of the fishbone.
They will typically be one of the traditional categories mentioned above but
may be something unique to your application of this tool. Causes should be
specific, measurable, and controllable.
Pareto
Analysis is a statistical technique in decision making that is used for the
selection of a limited number of tasks that produce significant overall effect.
It uses the Pareto Principle (also know as the 80/20 rule) the idea that by
doing 20% of the work you can generate 80% of the benefit of doing the whole
job. Or in terms of quality improvement, a large majority of problems (80%) are
produced by a few key causes (20%). This is also known as the vital few and the
trivial many.
In
the late 1940s quality management guru Joseph M. Juran suggested the principle
and named it after Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of
income in Italy went to 20% of the population. Pareto later carried out surveys
on a number of other countries and found to his surprise that a similar
distribution applied.
The
80/20 rule can be applied to almost anything:
- 80%
of customer complaints arise from 20% of your products or services.
- 80%
of delays in schedule arise from 20% of the possible causes of the delays.
- 20%
of your products or services account for 80% of your profit.
- 20%
of your sales-force produces 80% of your company revenues.
- 20%
of a systems defects cause 80% of its problems.
The
Pareto Principle has many applications in quality control. It is the basis for
the Pareto diagram, one of the key tools used in total quality control and Six
Sigma.
In
PMBOK Pareto ordering is used to guide corrective action and to help the
project team take action to fix the problems that are causing the greatest
number of defects first.
Pareto Analysis
Seven
steps to identifying the important causes using Pareto Analysis [1]:
- Form
a table listing the causes and their frequency as a percentage.
- Arrange
the rows in the decreasing order of importance of the causes, i.e. the
most important cause first.
- Add a
cumulative percentage column to the table.
- Plot
with causes on x-axis and cumulative percentage on y-axis.
- Join
the above points to form a curve.
- Plot
(on the same graph) a bar graph with causes on x-axis and percent
frequency on y-axis.
- Draw
a line at 80% on y-axis parallel to x-axis. Then drop the line at the
point of intersection with the curve on x-axis. This point on the x-axis
separates the important causes on the left and less important causes on
the right.
This
is a simple example of a Pareto diagram using sample data showing the relative
frequency of causes for errors on websites. It enables you to see what 20% of
cases are causing 80% of the problems and where efforts should be focussed to
achieve the greatest improvement.
The
value of the Pareto Principle for a project manager is that it reminds you to
focus on the 20% of things that matter. Of the things you do during your
project, only 20% are really important. Those 20% produce 80% of your results.
Identify and focus on those things first, but don't totally ignore the
remaining 80% of causes.
Example of quality circle
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“Quality
is never an accident; it is always the result of intelligent efforts”
Jyoti has incorporated a Quality Circle for communicating and implementing
the quality philosophy and values with the help of progressive sharing and
learning. The importance of quality and how to measure Quality Circle and
improve the same, not only at product and process level but at each and every
activity of organization is the main purpose of this Quality Circle. The
Jyoti management believes to manage their 4Ms (Man, Machine, Material,
Method) through 3Cs (Communication, Co-ordination and Co-operation).
The philosophy of Quality Circle preaches to attain self motivation
& happiness by improving the products through quality excellence in each
of the functional areas. Apart from the progressive changes in the
organization, this Quality Circle is also proving fruitful by accelerating
the development of individuals. This development can be seen in terms of
change in attitude, self development and development of team spirit resulting
in improvising the overall organizational culture. The steering committee of
the quality circle formally meets once in a month and the inner circles of
the same, meet twice a month with a crystal clear agenda. Involvement up to
the grass root levels of the organization brings out a realistic feedback.
This in turn is used to bring in improvement in all directions.
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