"Best Practice" Case Study In North Carolina

This case study looks at how Quality Quest helped a worldwide company based in North Carolina devise and implement a major quality improvement program.

The Issue.
The client was a manufacturing company with world-wide sales of over $1 billion. The brief was to ensure everyone within the organisation - from the president down - supported the new initiative. The client wanted a program which was centred on the customer and which was capable of being rolled out to all its worldwide operating companies.

The Solution.
Quality Quest ran workshops with representatives of each of the company's disciplines. These resulted in consensus on performance measure targets using a balanced scorecard approach - all of which were designed to improve the company's bottom line. Training needs were also identified, and Quality Quest designed and presented workshops in different locations to train a wide cross section of personnel in quality improvement tools and techniques, including relevant aspects of ISO.9000, the Business Excellence Model, Six Sigma and problem solving techniques. Then, Quality Quest provided consultancy to particular departments, to help them identify best practice, write policies and operating instructions and assess their own performance against the agreed "quality measures".

The Results.
The company gained ISO.9001:2000 accreditation at the first attempt in all three locations. Internal cost savings in the first year outweighed the cost of the training and consultancy by a factor of five. Savings were made by reducing production rework, QC laboratory retesting and manufacturing equipment downtime. Suppliers' performances, on-time delivery and customer perceptions all improved significantly. Quality Quest has been retained to help rollout similar projects in the company's operations in the UK, Europe and Asia.

The Reasons for Success.

• Everyone in the organisation could become involved in generating improvements in the way things were done. This meant everyone had ownership of the project, and no one felt changes were being imposed upon them.
• The firm focused on quality improvements to critical business processes that would impact on their customers. They changed practices in areas where they had identified clear commercial opportunities.
• Quality Improvement techniques were trained-in - not simply presented to the workforce.
• People who were responsible for implementing processes were able to become involved in creating procedures - so the firm recorded reality in its procedures and employees were motivated to continuously improve "best practices."