All Posts Tagged With: "knowledge management"
Sophisticated Information Sharing
This is one of those “big picture” issues. If your organization is large enough to have business units, divisions, or multiple locations, you are big enough to have silos of data and information. In “Stop the Profit Drain: Pull Data Across an Entire Organization” (IndustryWeek, October 9, 2009), Michael Newkirk talks about a company that has 16,000 process improvement software licenses, which has the potential to create 16,000 silos. “It nourishes an environment where thousands of engineers reinvent the wheel because all the meetings in the world can’t share best practices efficiently enough to keep that from happening,” Newkirk writes.
Such silos are not limited to manufacturing or business. The Baldrige Criteria ask how you align and integrate data and information to track daily operations and overall performance. In other words, how do you move it out of the silos and into the hands of anyone, anywhere in the organization, who could use it to improve performance?
Newkirk cites a Korean steelmaker that used Six Sigma to make incremental process improvements but sought a larger impact. “There were still large profit variables between plants and items and scrap losses were unacceptably high,” Newkirk notes. “Traditional, isolated process oriented analysis wasn’t sufficient.”
The steelmaker pulled all of its data together across plants and processes. The result? Scrap ratio cut from 15% to 1.5%, a 50% reduction in lead times for standard hot coil production, and an inventory reduction of 60%.
Newkirk…
16Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Most Popular Improvement Tools
The list comes from the Global Benchmarking Network’s 2008 survey on business improvement and benchmarking. Which of these does your organization use?
- Mission and vision statement
- Customer/client surveys
- SWOT (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats)
- Informal benchmarking (encouraging employees to learn from other organizations)
- Quality management system (think ISO)
- Improvement teams
- Employee suggestion scheme
- PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act)
- Performance benchmarking (comparing process/activity performance levels)
- Knowledge management
- Business process reengineering
- Balanced scorecard
- TQM (total quality management)
- Business excellence (using Baldrige, EFQM, or other national excellence models)
- Best practice benchmarking (structured process for comparing performance and implementing best practices)
- Corporate social responsibility system
- Lean
- Industrial housekeeping (5S)
- Quality function deployment (QFD)
- Six Sigma
More than 450 responses from 44 countries ranked their organizations’ usage of these improvement tools in the order above. The percent of usage ranged from 77% for “mission and vision statement” to 22% for Six Sigma. Every tool from the top through PDCA was used by more than half the respondents; the rest were used by fewer than half.
The Baldrige message is a good news/bad news deal: “Business excellence” is currently being used by just 40% of the respondents, which is pretty good considering that only 59% said they understood what the “business excellence” tool is.
You can read a summary of the survey here.
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