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What is Process?
A process is a collection of tasks, steps, or activities that are performed, usually in a specific order, and result in an end product such as a tangible good or the provision of a service. In a business, multiple processes work together to achieve organizational goals. Technically, the business or organization itself can be seen as one enormous process.
Defining Process Components: The SIPOC
SIPOC stands for Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customer. Suppliers are the people, processes, and organizations that supply inputs to your process. Customers are the people, processes, and organizations that make use of the outputs of your process. The process itself is the series of steps that take the inputs and make them outputs. It’s a very high-level, simplified SIPOC that shows how customers and vendors provide information and items; the printing company then turns those inputs into products such as printed business cards. The final product goes to individuals, businesses, and marketing professionals who placed the order.
What is Quality?
One of the most concise definitions of quality comes from the International Organization for Standardization, or ISO. ISO 9000 defines quality as the “degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements. A Six Sigma team should be interested in requirements generated by all interest points, but often focuses most on those generated by the customer. Various types of requirements might include:
Brand expectations, which come from in-house leadership. Brand expectations are typically stated; while not obligatory in the sense of being backed by regulation, companies for which high-quality, a specific voice, or other unique factor is a component of branding might treat brand expectations as obligatory.
Compliance or regulatory rules, which are obligatory. For example, healthcare organizations must protect the confidentiality and security of patient data; they are obligated to do so under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
Customer expectations, which are typically stated or implied values.It’s implied that a customer wants the product he or she ordered. Expectations of delivery speed might be stated in the form of feedback in customer surveys
Critical to Quality Characteristics
Critical to quality characteristics, or CTQs, are the factors or parameters that are the major drivers of quality within an organization or process. CTQs are closely related to CTCs, or critical to customer characteristics, but they are not the same thing. Something can be critical to quality – even critical to how a customer ultimately feels about a service or product – without being critical to the customer directly. CTQs are internal concerns, but they drive CTCs.
Cost of poor Quality
External Failures : External failures usually occur after products or services have been delivered, which means they are directly associated with customer dissatisfaction. External failures might include revenue losses associated with a reduction in sales because of the quality of products, services, systems, or information.
Internal Failures : Internal failures occur when products, services, or processes don’t conform to the requirements set by the company, and the product or service is provided to the customer in an unsatisfactory fashion. Internal failures are usually handled by scrapping the work, redoing the work, or repairing the work.
CoP = External Failure Cost + Internal Failure Cost
Identifying Prevention and Appraisal Activities
The first step to removing quality-related Muda is identifying it. Process maps, spaghetti diagrams, and value stream maps are valuable tools for uncovering activities that don’t need to be included in a process.
Does the activity itself add any value to the output?
Does the activity substantially reduce the time it takes for the process to produce an output?
Does the activity substantially increase the cost of the process?
If the activity is designed to prevent defects within the process, can the activity be made more efficient?
If the activity is designed to prevent defects, can the activity be made less expensive?
If an activity is designed to capture quality data about the process for reporting purposes, are those reports necessary?
If quality reports are necessary– either because of obligatory requirements such as compliance or because the reports provide value in another process – can the reports be automated to reduce associated expense?
What are the 7 tools of quality?
Stratification
Histogram
Check sheet (tally sheet)
Cause and effect diagram (fishbone or Ishikawa diagram)
Pareto chart (80-20 rule)
Scatter diagram (Shewhart chart)
Control chart
Stratification
Stratification analysis is a quality assurance tool used to sort data, objects, and people into separate and distinct groups. Separating your data using stratification can help you determine its meaning, revealing patterns that might not otherwise be visible when it’s been lumped together. Whether you’re looking at equipment, products, shifts, materials, or even days of the week, stratification analysis lets you make sense of your data before, during, and after its collection.
2. Histogram
Quality professionals are often tasked with analyzing and interpreting the behavior of different groups of data in an effort to manage quality. This is where quality control tools like the histogram come into play. The histogram can help you represent frequency distribution of data clearly and concisely among different groups of a sample, allowing you to quickly and easily identify areas of improvement within your processes. With a structure similar to a bar graph, each bar within a histogram represents a group, while the height of the bar represents the frequency of data within that group. Histograms are particularly helpful when breaking down the frequency of your data into categories such as age, days of the week, physical measurements, or any other category that can be listed in chronological or numerical order.
3. Check Sheet
Check sheets can be used to collect quantitative or qualitative data. When used to collect quantitative data, they can be called a tally sheet. A check sheet collects data in the form of check or tally marks that indicate how many times a particular value has occurred, allowing you to quickly zero in on defects or errors within your process or product, defect patterns, and even causes of specific defects. With its simple setup and easy-to-read graphics, check sheets make it easy to record preliminary frequency distribution data when measuring out processes. This particular graphic can be used as a preliminary data collection tool when creating histograms, bar graphs, and other quality tools.
4. The Cause and Effect, or Fishbone, Diagram
The cause and effect diagram is called the Fishbone diagram because you begin with what looks like a simple drawing of a fish skeleton. Fishbone diagram as part of a team brainstorming exercise. Lets take an example of bad burger. The Fishbone diagram is a visual representation of cause and effect relationships. It is a simple to use the tool, yet very effective in improving a process and the quality of a product or service. With its continuous implementation, an organization can be proactive in determining any process shortcoming and can address problems quickly and accurately.
5. Pareto Chart
The first graphical tool for validating root causes is the Pareto chart, the principle behind Pareto Chart is 80/20 rule, which says that 20 percent of the causes lead to 80 percent of the results. Because of this, a Pareto chart is a good starting point for root cause brainstorming – teams can start with the few inputs or attributes accounting for the bulk of the Pareto chart. Just as you can “drill down” using the Fishbone diagram, asking deeper and deeper “Why?” questions, you can drill down using a Pareto chart.
6. Scatter Diagram
the scatter diagram is most useful in depicting the relationship between two variables, which is ideal for quality assurance professionals trying to identify cause and effect relationships. Scatter diagrams can prove useful as a quality control tool when used to define relationships between quality defects and possible causes such as environment, activity, personnel, and other variables. Once the relationship between a particular defect and its cause has been established, you can implement focused solutions with (hopefully) better outcomes.
7. Control Chart
Control charts use a central line to depict an average or mean, as well as an upper and lower line to depict upper and lower control limits based on historical data. By comparing historical data to data collected from your current process, you can determine whether your current process is controlled or affected by specific variations. Using a control chart can save your organization time and money by predicting process performance, particularly in terms of what your customer or organization expects in your final product.
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