communication, skill development, safety, waste and other resource factors.  This elevates awareness and reveals frustrations or subtle causes that inhibit performance, while arising interest for improvement by soliciting suggestions for improvement.  In addition, a comprehensive review of operations is performed noting process and equipment capabilities as well as use of current technologies.  From that, an analysis/evaluation is performed culminating in the preparation of a written management report.

The report discusses the state of organizational functioning, outlining recommendations for improving the use of existing resources and technologies, management and workforce development, including training needs.  In short, it would embody a strategic plan for business excellence.

 

 2. Evolving Strategy for Business Excellence. Adopting the Customer-Supplier relationship concept is the foundation for effective quality management.  It is based upon the premise that every organization or work group exists to provide products and/or services to its customers.  Therefore the work performed can be viewed as a process that can be managed and improved to benefit the recipients (or customers).  In turn, it is a customer to its supplier.

 

 In this phase we summarize and evaluate the results obtained in Step 1.  This output will enable us to develop a strategy for performance improvement that would include:

                     • Defining the work group’s products/services, who its customers are

                       for each product and supplier inputs.

                     • We would then describe current processes/tasks performed using

                       detailed flow-charting.  This would aid in identifying factors that

                       may be causing delays, rework/scrap or other perturbations,

                       including:

                                  - Scheduling practices

                                  - Organization structure

                                  - Communications systems

                    • From this, we would identify opportunities for improvement.  Those would

                      be linked to suggestions offered by employees from the assessment to

                      reduce business cycle time.

3. Program Implementation  Working together with the department or work group, we would:

                     • Identify short term actions which could be taken to improve

                       performance and implement them.  Then we would: