NC State of Business

Organizations often seek opportunities to improve their competitive advantage within their respective industries. Many organizations struggle to accomplish this goal without the use of a systematic approach to improve their organizational performance as it relates to quality products or services. Lean and Six Sigma are proven quality techniques that can help improve organizational performance. Although most organizations want to improve quality and cut costs, the deployment and implementation of continuous improvement methodologies is commonly viewed as a daunting undertaking.

For various reasons, some organizations focus their efforts on implementing Lean concepts, while others focus their efforts towards the implementation of Six Sigma methodologies. Lean is considered to be a systematic approach of eliminating waste in all processes of an organization and is based on the Toyota Production System (TPS). The term Six Sigma was coined by engineers at Motorola in the 1980’s which focuses primarily on reducing variation within a manufacturing or business process. Six Sigma improvements are based on a structured problem-solving methodology which requires project management skills.

Many organizations seem to find the appropriate balance of integrating both Lean and Six Sigma within their organizations to achieve optimal improvement performance. The term Lean Six Sigma represents this collaborative approach. By incorporating the tools and concepts of Lean into the structured DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) framework of Six Sigma, organizations are reaping the benefits of two very powerful and effective quality improvement methodologies.

In late January we saw that the Chinese government took drastic steps in response to the tainted milk that killed a half-dozen babies and sickened over a quarter million more: their court issued death sentences for several of the people involved. You can read the report in this story reprinted by the American Society for Quality.

First question: How focused would you be if you thought you might be sentenced to death for poor quality?

I suspect you might pay closer attention to detail. (If you're a food producer, for instance, you might not ship a product that you even thought might be contaminated with salmonella.*) On the other hand, you might find yourself looking over your shoulder so much that you can't pay attention to the work you're supposed to be doing.

What is almost more amazing about the story from China are the sheer numbers involved. Twenty-two different companies (one in each province? I'm not sure) in the Sanlu Group produced almost 70 different milk products in exactly the kind of massive amounts necessary for a country the size and population of China. It wasn't clear to me whether the 904 metric tons of tainted baby formula included the 813 metric tons of tainted products reportedly sold, or if they should be added together for a staggering 1700 metric tons. And the resulting damage? A truly incredible 296,000 children affected, six of them fatally.

But in the end, this case isn't really about poor quality. It's about cheating. The milk was contaminated with melamine, and as the story reported,

Melamine is commonly used in coatings and laminates, wood adhesives, fabric coatings, ceiling tiles and flame retardants. Some Chinese dairy plants added the chemical to milk products so they would appear to have a higher protein level.

So this isn't about companies operating in good faith, which just happened to have hiccups in their production that caused their products to have problems. It's about companies that were part of a huge conglomerate conspiring together to cheat their customers.

Which leads us to our second question: when was the last time you complained about a regulatory agency in this country, or a standard in your industry, that is intended to give your customers confidence that what they buy from you is to truly what they intended to buy? You might want to think twice about complaining, and remember what those standards and regulations are for. Because every time we buy and sell is a transaction of trust -- which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago -- and anything we can do to increase the trust between the producer and the consumer is worthwhile.

And you'll never be sentenced to death for making good quality products.

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*On that subject, see this Wall Street Journal editorial.