The Quality Push Is Alive And Well

Whatever happened to the quality movement?

TQM — total quality management — was one of those can’t-miss business concepts that took time-honored efficiency concepts of W. Edwards Deming and others to a new level in corporate America.

The TQM buzzwords — and the drawers of statistical analysis of every work function — may be on the back burner now, but for some businesses in Spokane the quality practice concepts have become corporate culture.

“TQM, by that name, is something whose time has come and gone,” says Clarence “Bud” Barnes, dean of Gonzaga University’s School of Business Administration. “But the idea is still very important. Now we call it lean manufacturing or lean management. It’s a derivative of TQM.”

Barnes’ colleague, Will Terpening, agrees.

“As a fad, TQM is dying out. But I don’t think quality as an important factor has disappeared,” said Terpening, professor of operations management at GU.

Spokane author Lori Silverman thinks the quality movement “has entered a new era that will profoundly impact organizations in the way they approach performance improvement” for years.

Silverman, who owns the Partners for Progress consulting firm, is publishing a book on the quality movement called “Critical SHIFT: The Future of Quality in Organizational Performance.” The book is based on interviews with 45 business leaders nationwide.

She says that while TQM originally focused on saving money, “now the challenge is what to do to grow the organization.” Silverman cites the need for “ongoing renewal” in businesses large and small. Companies like IBM and Phillip Morris have had to do this when their markets changed or eroded, she said. “Royal Dutch was ready when the oil prices dropped,” she adds.

Silverman concludes that “the practice of quality is timeless,” not a fad, but what’s new is merging the practice of quality control with general management. The result, she said, should be “a total system based on providing value to consumers, employees, shareholders and society in general.”

While the rhetoric sounds lofty, three very different local examples lend credence to the concept.

Kaiser Aluminum’s Trentwood plant and the Spokane insurance office of Sedgwick Noble Lowndes both have gone to the considerable work of gaining the quality movement’s Holy Grail — certification by the Geneva-based International Standardization Organization (ISO).

ISO’s blessing, local practitioners say, essentially means this: “Say what you do. Do what you say. Then prove it.”

While some business customers, especially in Europe, require ISO certification, in each of the local cases, the commitment to quality is genuine and companywide.

Each company also has managed to minimize the burdensome mountain of paperwork that was a TQM turnoff for many businesses.

At Kaiser Trentwood, “TQM originally was a very cumbersome, regimented process,” said John Walker, president of the Flat Rolled Products Division.

Now, he says, quality initiatives are focused efforts by cross-functional teams from all departments. And “turbo teams” are formed to tackle specific short-term quality issues, such as cutting waste on lid stock for cans.

Walker said the key to maintaining good quality programs at Trentwood is to be “more action-oriented than task-oriented” and not to worry about filling in all the blanks on the three-inch binders full of forms.

At a small manufacturer like Visiontec, Richard Tinsley, vice president of manufacturing, said the production processes are charted daily, even hourly, for the firm’s 45 employees. “But we (management) coach from the side; we don’t supervise or dictate,” said Tinsley.

The Spokane Valley company, which builds products for Packet Engines, uses self-directed work teams that measure their own quality performance, he said.

“We don’t have a separate quality department,” he added. “We just train every employee (to emphasize quality) from day one.”

To make the system work at Visiontec, Kaiser and others, customers and suppliers are involved in ensuring quality.

It’s understandable why manufacturing firms would certify product quality, but why an insurance office like Sedgwick?

Michael Reilly, senior vice president for Sedgwick in Spokane, acknowledges that his firm is the only insurance company to obtain ISO certification.

Reilly said one reason is that Sedgwick and its parent firm, Marsh, do business worldwide, and the ISO presence means more in Europe.

Maintaining quality standards in a service business like Sedgwick’s “is not as easy as tracking a manufacturing process with widgets,” Reilly admits.

“But quality is part of the culture here,” he says, and part of the job for all 105 staffers in Spokane.

Reilly thinks the quality movement will grow in the service sector for one more reason: “There are so many businesses in the same industry that it is increasingly more difficult to differentiate one firm from another.”

So certified quality service is seen as a competitive advantage.

Whatever the motivation, as author Silverman and others note, successful quality programs involve everyone, top to bottom.

“It starts with management,” says Visiontec’s Tinsley. “They have to believe it and practice it every day, not just three or four days a week.”