Several years ago I removed this page from my website becuase my focus had narrowed. Now I see that there are a number of
links out there that are still active, so I decided to put it back.
Since I retired, I held a part time job for 10 years in a tiny factory environment. There I learned that the ideas below are
just as valid today as they were in 1997.
I, Pete, just retired from 3M Company having spent the last 15 years of my business career in the quality management field. To me, this is the discipline that keeps continuous improvement, both incremental and breakthrough in front of everybody, by championing the cause of the customer. Every business MUST have a regular process for getting orderly customer satisfaction information, analyzing and acting upon it. The processes that I developed for doing this have won me 3M Corporate recognition and have been considered world class and benchmarkable by external consultants.
The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) criteria form the best organization assessment tool that exists today for testing ANY organization against the concept above. If you would like to see what processes need to be in place to have an excellent chance for business success, you can order a free copy of the criteria from American Society for Quality, ASQ . (see link, above). Don't worry about actually applying for the award. The REAL value is in using the criteria to assess your whole organization, then using the assessment results to develop and implement improvement strategies.
Many companies have become registered to ISO-9002 (or sometimes ISO-9001) in order to meet requirements of some large customer. But this is NOT enough for a WHOLE continuous improvement strategy. It has said that an "ISO-9002 company" would only qualify for about 600 of the 1000 points in the MBNQA criteria!
If I were going to implement a continuous improvement process in a company that did not have one of a formal nature, I would start with an MBNQA assessment. If ISO-900X is required by customer demand, the need would show up in the assessment and would be ranked with other critical issues and attacked in priority order.
If you represent a company in the eastern Minnesota or west central Wisconsin area that is interested in these concepts and would like to discuss them in more detail, feel free to contact me.