Quality Initiatives That Lead To Continuous Improvement Efforts
Bryan Ward
Bryan Ward, President, WTMS, Inc., will be presenting how a quality plan can be used to drive continuous improvement in investigations at the 2012 Global TapRooT® Summit.
Bryan has dedicated the last 20+ years to designing and improving processes and creating cultural change at all organizational levels. He has a passion for continuous improvement.
“Continuous improvement reveals itself in many different forms,” said Bryan. “It can be an up front conscious effort to improve something — anything for that matter. In most cases it is a reactive decision as opposed to a pro-active decision.”
Bryan will show how in the following case, it was neither. It was nurtured through developing a Quality Management System.
Working on an Enterprise Transformation project with a client, Bryan discovered that they had “said” all of the right things to be in compliance for a specific project, but did not have anything behind the curtain, so to speak. No substance. In this case there was a Quality Manual, but no Quality Management System. If a client had asked them to produce performance metrics to prove stability in the system … it could not be done. It would simply have been stated as such, “ … we stand behind our work 100% … no questions asked.” That is a confident statement, but there was nothing available to measure and track true service performance.
After reading through this Quality Manual, Bryan developed a system that measured the company’s core competencies. But, having served as a change agent for many years, he knew that if there was no ownership at the field level this was simply going to be a system that if not pushed, would not be used.
The system began with training on the system, the measurement requirements, self verification / self audit process and forum for review.
After implementation, the Quality Management System revealed several area’s where the business could improve. Not from a quality standpoint, technically they were very sound, but in the Enterprise it revealed area’s to improve. After reviewing the data for several months the following Continuous Improvement initiatives were under taken:
Reduce consumable costs by implementing a consolidated tool kitting process
* Vendor Managed Inventory
* Standardized Consumables & Tools By Field Service Craft
* Create a pull system for tools and consumables; eliminate the PUSH system
Preventative Maintenance Program
* Tools ( Hand and Pneumatic )
* Tool / Work Trailers
* Electrical / Rigging Equipment
Review audit results weekly at the General Manager Meeting
* Gross Profit was improved by 11% through this initiative
* Self Verification audits revealed the real issues being felt at the field service level ( Voice of the Customer ) * TRIR / EMR rates were reduced with the focus of weekly review of equipment and processes. Less hand and eye injuries.
* General Manager “Top 5” List started with this review ; this is rolling list of improvement actions sponsored by the General Manager ( On Going Improvement Items )
Register for the “Quality Issues” session and learn how this quality plan was used to drive continuous improvement efforts. You can add it to your schedule as a custom course, or register for the Quality and Corrective Actions track (this session is part of the Quality program).
Learn more about Bryan Ward and the February 29 – March 2, 2012 Summit in Las Vegas, Nevada on the Summit website.
