Everyday Blog

How Total is Your Quality Management?

Moving from Partial Quality Management to true Total quality management is exceptionally tough. Here are a few of the keys:

Senior Management Involvement - permission, lip service, even passionate lip service, isn’t enough. Managers and supervisors adopt the visible priorities of their boss. Too often service and quality improvement is what the top delegates to the middle to do to the bottom. At Vancouver based Finning Ltd (the world’s largest Caterpillar dealer), CEO Jim Shepard and his executives are not only first in line for all the service and quality training being given to everyone else, they are also the trainers delivering sessions to their people.

Building Skills as Well as Knowledge — three slide trays, a bunch of videos, and five pounds of books and manuals all delivered by a dynamic presenter may teach team members or leaders about group dynamics or process management. But often this “spray and pray” approach doesn’t help participants understand how to keep meetings focused or resolve conflicts. In improving physical fitness we all know that understanding common sense ideas is one thing, putting common sense into common practice is something else. The technology used in most training programs is ineffective. It may leave participants excited, enlightened, and aware, but rarely leaves them more competent.

True Total Quality Management produces effective results. But shifting from PQM to TQM requires as much discipline, consistency, and new habit formation as moving from endless dieting or new year’s fitness resolutions to long-term, permanent lifestyle change.

A case history on achieving the first construction project ISO14001 certification

Why is achieving ISO certification so hard for a construction project, especially one in the oil and gas industry? Maybe because the workforce, the management and the environmental engineers all have different and often conflicting priorities.

To ensure both the management and the workforce accept the need for an environmental management System and to keep the motivation to uphold it once certification has been achieved, requires a complete understanding of all the issues and an ability to engender commitment to a workable ideal.

Andy Ive enabled industry giant BP to achieve the very first ISO 14001 certificate to be awarded to a construction project in the world, setting up easily manageable systems to ensure the certification could be retained for years to come.

Is your factory safe?

A safety inspection checklist:

1. Are you confident that you have a safe factory?
2. How do you know?
3. Do you regularly inspect your workplace to identify safety problems?
4. Do you in fact know what leads to an unsafe workplace?
5. Do you talk to your workers regarding safety issues and encourage your employees to report safety problems?
6. Do you regularly inspect your workplace to identify safety problems?
7. Do you rectify the identified problems?
8. If so, do you make sure that the work being carried out is done in a safe manner?

The law

The Occupational Health and Safety Act 2000 requires you to make sure your factory is safe for employees, visitors and tradespeople. Legislation, which came into effect in September 2003, means that if you run a business in New South Wales you also have obligations under the NSW Occupational Health and Safety Act and occupational health and safety Regulations 2001.This legislation requires all small businesses to undertake a risk assessment audit of their workplace(s) and implement a Risk Management Plan.