Creating Quality – Process Design for Results

Citation

Kuei, C.-H. (2001), "Creating Quality – Process Design for Results", Measuring Business Excellence, Vol. 5 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/mbe.2001.26705bae.001

Creating Quality – Process Design for Results

William J. KolarikMcGraw-Hill1999641 pp.ISBN: 0-07-036309-9

Every work is a process. Every organization needs a set of well-designed processes to deliver goods and services. What process elements are essential to accomplish a firm's mission? How can these help to improve the overall process performances? Creating Quality – Process Design for Results tends to answer these questions.

This book begins with the definition of a production system and its elements. Popular organization theories, quality initiatives, and analytic tools are reviewed. A total of 15 chapters are used to cover three essential process elements: process definition, process control, and process improvement. A downtown bakery case is presented with a detailed quality function deployment (QFD) analysis on chocolate-chip cookies. The production of chocolate-chip cookies is then broken down to basic components that include activities such as dough mixing, cooking forming, baking, topping, cooling, packaging, and boxing. The author shows that the process is driven by customers' needs and wants. Further, the supply chain network is shown in details as well as the interdependence between the different operations. Thus, readers can get a whole picture of a bakery system, from upstream to downstream. Anyone engaged in supply chain analysis will find the illustrations very helpful.

For the process control, the central focus is on measurement, comparison, and correction. As a result, topics such as control charts, process capability, and multivariate statistical process control (SPC) models are discussed. A salsa production process case is shown in this section, with an example on filling jars and plastic jugs operations. Various models are then employed to ensure that the process is stable. In addition to SPC, automatic process control (APC) is also discussed, aimed at meeting contemporary process needs. Anyone engaged in quality analysis may find this section useful, since this book covers fundamentals of statistical process control.

As for the process improvement, in order to achieve an intended state of change, three sub-elements were proposed: discovering opportunity, describing change, and changing process.

An excellent summary on quality initiatives is presented at the end of the book (chapter 19). Topics covered include benchmarking, concurrent engineering, fifth discipline, functional-value analysis, ISO 9000, Poka-Yoke, quality awards, reengineering, robust design, Six Sigma, theory of constraints, and total quality management. The essence of each initiative is well documented. This chapter alone can be used as a good reference for business and engineering students.

To sum up, practitioners who are committed to quality must know how to define a process, control the process, and change the process to improve performances. One can easily follow the structured approach presented in the book to ensure that every process element is in the right place. Statistical information is abundant in the process control section.

Chu-Hua KueiDepartment of Management and Management Science Pace University, New York, NY, USA