Jože Makoter; dr. Franc Gider Deloitte&Touche Ljubljan d.o.o. Management Consulting Ljubljana SLOVENIA QUALITY AND CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT Practical case of implementation 20 Keys method in Slovenia
“If our factorise, through work, assure the quality of our products, it will be to foreigner's to get supplies from us, and their money will flow into the kingdom”. (Jean –Baptiste Colbert, Finance Minister to Louis XlV, 1664) Since 1950s the attitude towards quality has rapidly changed. Something like: 1950s What’s this about quality? 1960s Nice to have good quality but we can sell all we produce so it’s not critical. 1970s Japanese quality is good and we need to match their levels but will add to our costs to get there. 1980s If we get quality right first time that actually saves us money. Crosby tell us that Quality is free. 1990s Achiving high levels of quality, consistently, gives us a competitive edge. Continuous Improvement has become a major theme in manufacturing over the past 15 years and is a certainly core Lean concept. Although Kaizen has become well established since Masaaki Imai’s classic work on topic continuous improvement and breakthrough improvement. Thus Juran refers to breakthrough activities, using project by project improvement. Davenport, in the context of business process reengeering, has referred the sequence of continuous alternation between continuous improvement and more radical breakthrouh by reengeneering. And finally Womack and Jones discuss Kaikaku resulting in large, infrequent gains as being different from Kaizen or continuous improvement resulting in frequent but small gains. There are therefore four types of improvement and there is, or schould be a place for all four types in every organisation. Adopting lean manufacturing does not mean ignoring other forms of improvement to concentrate on kaizen and kaikaku. Involving people in the process of continuous improvement is essential for successful implementation of TQM methods. People are drivers of all changes and key success factor in organizations. The question that arises at this point is: “How to mobilize