Total Company-Wide Management System: A framework for Six Sigma and continuous quality improvement.

摘要

Industries are continuously facing a fierce competition and a global challenge of meeting an increasing demand for higher quality products at economic costs. The success of an organization is directly related to how effective its implementation of Continuous Improvement (CI) methodologies is. There is a genuine need for more research in this area. This research consists of the following interrelated concepts and problems of economic importance and its practical engineering value.;The Six Sigma Methodology is a well disciplined and structured approach used to enhance process performance and achieve high-levels of quality. Total Quality Management (TQM) has been a dominant management concept for CI utilizing Deming's basic concepts of Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). Another state of the art CI methodology is Lean which is proven to help organizations achieve on-time delivery of the right quality and quantity. Also, Kano model, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Taguchi's Quality Loss Function (QLF), and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) are all important approaches for Quality Improvement (QI). Six Sigma and these improvement approaches share the same goals of customer satisfaction and Business Excellence (BE). However, each has its own strengths. Management systems (MSs) are ways to manage a business which are developed to meet the requirements of Quality Management (QM), health, safety, security, financial management, etc. Recently, different MSs have gained more attention as they form a critical infrastructure for improving and controlling the different operation systems of an organization. As such, studies on integrating Six Sigma with other methodologies such as TQM, Lean, Kano model, SCM as well as other MSs are worth investigating through various proposed models and practical examples.;Typically, CI methodologies are implemented without being properly integrated to MSs. As a result, numerous studies pointed out that most implementation efforts of CI methodologies have failed. The framework for formulating and modeling such an integration is presented through the proposed Total Company-Wide Management System (TCWMS) which has been developed as part of this research. In addition, the proposed TCWMS is implemented and evaluated through two actual case studies at real Companies A and B. The case studies help demonstrate and prove how effective this integration is, qualitatively and quantitatively through a few years comparison of both a pre-application status and a post-application status.;TCWMS has benefits such as enhancing performance, communication, profit, productivity, quality, society satisfaction, strategic alignment, cost reduction, resources optimization, employee motivation and improvement rates. The results of the implementation in Company A showed improvements such as the 20% improvement in the Balanced Score Card (BSC) Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) results, the turning of the financial situation from being non-profitable in the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars into becoming profitable in the order of millions of dollars, 67% improvement in regional market share, 21% improvement in gross margin, 20% improvement in productivity, 13% improvement in customer satisfaction and 36% improvement in the employee survey results. The results of the implementation in Company B showed improvements such as the 23% improvement in the BSC KPIs results, 15% improvement in the employee survey results, 10% improvement in flexible budget, 30% improvement in the internal rejects, and 182% improvement in people recordable safety incident rate.