Process Management

“Look after the process, and the output will look after itself” - Dr J M Juran

The Process Management criterion of the IMC Ramakrishna Bajaj National Quality Award looks at a company’s operating systems – specifically the processes directly involved in producing and delivering the goods and services that have been selected through the organization’s strategy formulation as outlined in the criterion Strategic Planning. Process Management considers how the processes that contribute to the production of the organization’s wares are managed and improved.

The major questions in this criterion are:

• How are manufacturing or service-delivery processes controlled?
• How is are products and services designed to meet customer requirements?
• How the quality of systems, products and services assessed and improved?
• How is the quality of business processes, support services, and suppliers ensured?

Companies that score well in this criterion are strong in “process thinking”.  They have evolved beyond managing products or departments in isolation to managing the processes that combine activities across departments. Customers, suppliers, and the company are brought together in a common alignment.  High-scoring companies develop comprehensive sets of measures to continually monitor the quality of their process.  They regularly evaluate the “fitness for use” of all their processes, practices, products, services, with the never-ending, single-minded purpose of improvement.  The quality of support services, business processes, the new product/service development cycle, and supplier quality are all ensured, assessed, and improved.

By contrast, companies that perform poorly in this criterion spend most of their time correcting mistakes rather than preventing them.  Interfunctional cooperation is low; product/service concepts are “thrown over the wall” from marketing or the senior executives, first to engineering and then to manufacturing.  Control and assessment processes are loosely regulated.  There are no evaluation-change cycles; communication with support functions and suppliers is minimal.

Process Management is primarily about the prevention of errors.  It provides a foundation for building quality into production by eliminating errors at the source.  This is a huge criterion, covering a great deal of ground.  It starts with the conversion of customer requirements into design features and then winds its way through process-quality assessment and control, and the quality of support services and suppliers.  Naturally, there are many stops along the way to check for continuous improvement.

The principles, tools, and techniques for process control can be found in almost any quality control handbook.  For many processes, these techniques are quite straight forward and obvious.  However, in the case of complex services such as education, healthcare, and consulting, whose services are often more complex and often less amenable to quantitative analysis (and benchmarking) than are manufacturing processes, the path to control becomes less distinct.

Why this disparity?  Manufacturing processes are often more measurable.  Interaction with customers is a much more predictable affair.  The transformation of raw materials is sequential and routinized.  In services such as consulting, by contrast, processes constantly fluctuate in response to new information.  Five bad parts per million in the manufacture of screws is a nice, neat concept.  But how do you define five bad parts per million in advertising, insurance, or banking?  Nevertheless, it is possible to set up tolerance variables against which to measure the acceptability and quality of a service, even if such measurement is based only on the subjective perceptions of customers (such as customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction).