As the illustration for my article in the last issue of Photonics News, our graphic designer chose an elephant sitting on a tree, looking off into the distance. At LASER COMPONENTS, this image has since developed a life of its own. Upon conducting an in-house audit recently, I discovered it hanging on the pinboard. Someone had stuck the famous picture from the first chapter of Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince on it: a giant snake digesting an elephant that it had devoured in one piece. Both pictures speak volumes of the challenges and pitfalls quality management faces.
Let us first look at the pachyderm on the tree. In this picture, the tree stands for the large, comprehensive corporate strategy and the elephant for the current challenges faced in quality management. Of course, this is quite a huge chunk, and it is my job to make sure that the tree does not collapse under the weight of the elephant. However, the elephant likes the view he enjoys up in the tree and will not leave it voluntarily. Therefore, the elephant must become lighter, and the tree must develop stably and healthily to continue supporting it.
The Pachyderm Diet
To this end, we follow an approach that the Japanese refer to as KAIZEN, which means “to make the good better.” At the heart of this approach is the quest for continuous and infinite improvement, in which all the hierarchical levels of a company participate equally. The management level takes care of the tree. It determines the long-term corporate goals and ensures healthy growth. This is the classic, hierarchical top-down approach. The quality manager regularly consults with management to find out where the elephant could become dangerous for the tree. This is what we call “management review” in QM terms.
The employees are the elephant’s “diet consultants.” To make the pachyderm thinner, they use the various pills and therapies available from the QM pharmacy: 5S, process orientation, 8D, Ishikawa, 5WHY, etc. Following the bottom-up approach, they have equal influence on the KAIZEN process because they see best which pills work and where the diet plan has its weaknesses. They share these insights with management.
With Small Doses to Success
The quality manager’s task is to monitor the dosage and step in to moderate because KAIZEN means slow but steady progress. The giant snake must not be allowed to come into play at any end: “Boa constrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that they need for digestion,” writes Saint-Exupery. This danger lurks in various places. The management team can take too much action, paralyzing the entire company. In addition, those who tackle the QM tasks too quickly run the risk of choking on the oversized morsels. Furthermore, it is crucial to make sure that the QM tools are known and accepted by the employees. If too much is expected of them at once, they will first take a six-month digestive nap instead of taking care of the elephant.
If the measures are dosed correctly and implemented consistently, the elephant will slowly shrink to the size of a mosquito, and there will be room on the tree for other “animals” such as growth, new facilities, and innovative technologies.
