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ISO Certification--Continuous Improvement
Episode 12 Continuous Improvement
Episode 12 – ISO Certification Continuous Improvement
In this podcast, our guest Norm Verbeck discusses Continuous Improvement ideas. We discuss how to identify and assess risk, using KPIs to identify areas for improvement, and how to foster a company culture for continuous improvement. Norm shares practical examples and insights gained from his extensive experience.
Core Business Solutions publishes ISO Certification podcast episodes weekly. You can find more episodes here.
Episode 12 Key Content
Hello, everyone, and thanks for listening to the Quality Hub chatting with ISO experts. I’m your host, Xavier Francis, and I’m here with Norm Verbeek, quality management consultant here at Core Business Solutions. Glad you could be with us again, Norm.
Today’s show is entitled It’s Getting Better All the Time, where we’re going to look at continuous improvement ideas and how your quality management system can help drive your business improvement. Now, if you’ve listened to the Quality Hub before, you may already be familiar with Norm, but in case you haven’t. Let’s learn a little bit more about him.
Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself there, Norm?
Sure, Xavier. So I’ve been with Core Business Solutions for about two and a half years now. My previous experience, I have about 15 years in quality management systems and continuous improvement primarily in the printing industry. Then I have about five years of experience where I was working in more supply chain, previous to Core.
That’s cool. I didn’t realize you were in the printing industry. So was this like newspaper-type stuff?
It kind of varied. The particular location where I was mostly based was primarily books and telephone directories.
Of kind of a moot point now.
That’s exactly right.
You can just look at Google for it.
Yeah. So, yes. And again, you know, times change. So you know that declined over time in books as well and yeah pretty much every industry. 15 years of experience kind of. That’s what my background originally was in my initial schooling so…
That’s great. I still love the smell and the feel of a good hardcover book I’m going to be honest. Maybe I’m old. Well, let’s talk about continuous improvement here today. So, Norm, how can we use our quality management system to help continually improve our business?
So opportunities for improvement can come up through a variety of different ways as part of your QMS, they could be action items resulting from possibly follow-up activities that you should already be performing based on your QMS requirements. So you don’t necessarily have to reinvent the wheel. Those opportunities could be coming from management review meetings, any corrective actions, or any type of risk analysis that you might be doing in actions that you might be taking to identify, reduce, or alleviate those risks or opportunities.
Again, any opportunities that come from that.
There also could be actions aimed at addressing and improving customer feedback. These are often documents and action plans that a company can track responsibilities for due dates and track closure for the effectiveness of actions.
I know that the 9001 specifically really does build that continuous improvement in it. Part of it is just following the plan. Like you’re saying do what the standard asks you to do. But I know that getting into the nuts and bolts can be a little bit tricky sometimes, especially if you haven’t done it before. You talked a little bit about risk there.
How can we identify and assess those risks that could impact our business?
So those could occur in a less formal format throughout the year. So again, you know, you’re kind of capturing those during your management meetings that you’re conducting. There could also be the completion of corrective actions. Any associated root cause analysis you might be doing with those, you’re going to try to identify, you know, what are causing the problems when they occur and then hopefully making improvements in those areas.
So that can be anywhere you’re going to do those corrective actions, whether you’re looking at customer feedback, which I think we’re going to talk a little bit about. Do you find within those management reviews and you’re doing you’re looking at corrective actions, what are the risks that often come up?
So a lot of times, you know, you’ll start into root cause analysis, and a lot of times, you know, companies will occasionally stop with like, you know, maybe there was an issue with an employee that they didn’t fully understand what requirements were. So, again, you know, usually you want to go a little bit deeper and try to identify, you know, why didn’t they understand those requirements?
Was there some sort of issue with our training program?
So getting into the process, what’s wrong with the process? Not necessarily a person doing something wrong, but finding out why and the process behind it that failed.
Absolutely. And there could be other methods. I mean, as far as the risk goes, some companies do a SWOT analysis, you know, identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. That’s usually a little bit more subjective. They could view a more thorough kind of quantitative analysis. One example would be an FMEA, which stands for Failure Modes and Effects Analysis.
That’s usually using a scale for impact and likelihood and then trying to come up with some scoring. You know, usually multiply those two scores, and risk likelihood together to come up with a risk prioritization number.
And then hit the big ones and choose what you’re going to do with the other ones.
The big piece is when you’re kind of going through that analysis, trying to come to that consensus with members of your team because, you know, obviously depending on what your role is, you might perceive things a little bit differently.
That’s a good point.
So it’s good to kind of have that consensus amongst the group so that you because, you know, companies have limited resources. They know they address so many things at one time.
Well then, if something’s going to shut down your production, that’s a pretty big risk. And if somebody if it’s a manager on the floor time, hey, we have a piece of machinery that we’re constantly fixing and it’s end of life. Parts are coming, becoming scarce. That’s probably a risk you might want to focus on a little bit more than something else that isn’t new can have a drastic effect on your ability to produce whatever you’re producing.
That’s exactly right. So especially the ones that are going to shut you down. So a good example from, you know, over the last couple of years is COVID.
Oh, my goodness, yeah. Yeah. We’ve only lived through that for, what, two years? How many people had that planned? And that risk is looked at.
Exactly. And, you know, the initial, you know, a shutdown that impacted a lot of businesses. So but, you know, most companies at this point are going to have some sort of plan moving forward for what they’re going to do to address it.
You’re gonna be looking at KPIs. What do we look for to identify trends and areas for improvement using those KPIs?
So there are a couple of different things that you should focus on. One can identify those trends or, you know, KPIs that you should be measuring. Usually, they tie back to one of the opportunities or risk areas for your business. So obviously those are things that you want to measure and make sure things are improving or at least maintaining at least.
But when setting goals and KPIs is beneficial to make sure that they are smart goals so that they’re specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and then time bound so they should have some sort of date.
You have the metrics you’re looking
at. It’s specific, it’s not too ambiguous about what we’re trying to judge, what’s achievable, and what’s relevant. And I guess that would be based on the rest as well, how relevant it is, and let’s get it done within a certain amount of time.
Absolutely. So and then, you know, whenever you make sure that there are measurable this allows for identification of trends about positive or negative performance to those targets. Many KPIs can be traced back to data that’s being captured in an ERP system. That’s an enterprise resource planning system, or at the very least should be tracked in a spreadsheet.
So you can kind of monitor that performance as the year or years go on.
And we have that ability and CORE as well, Do we not? How we can track our KPIs, look at things and that’s going to make it easier with running reports looking at trends.
Yes. And you can see we have a very good audit form for objective and KPI tracking that once they’re set up, there’s a snapshot that’s real-time that you can just, you know, hit a click of a button. You can go in and view a dashboard to see how you’re performing.
Yeah, I know that we have another program which is called the Core Side Chat, and we talk about some of those reports and analyses that you can look at through dashboards and things like that, which is helpful.
And then that data and information, whenever you review that, that can lead to identifying opportunities, threats, risks, you know, other issues that you might be identified. And, you know, over the year or years when you’re tracking those, the trick primarily is to make sure that the analysis evaluation is systematic. That is transparent, and it becomes part of the way you do your business.
Kind of a phrase that I used to hear many times over the years was God We Trust everyone else, bring data.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You know, you can have a sense of, well, I feel like we’re not doing this well. What, what do you have to back it up? That’s or to prove otherwise, You know, And it only makes sense. Do you find that there is a time frame that you should judge those trends on? Is it usually based on how frequently your management review is, how often you get data, Is it a yearly thing, or does that really kind of depend on what you’re tracking?
Of the objectives, in my experience, I always track them pretty much monthly, so you might not necessarily be reporting or reviewing what actions you need to take every month, but I would usually track them monthly just so that whatever frequency you determine, you’re going to do, your management reviews, whether it’s quarterly, twice a year or whenever that you have the data available.
So obviously, you know, the shorter amount of time that you’ve been measuring an objective, you can’t make very good adjustments because this doesn’t have much data yet. But the important thing is to start measuring. So those measurements drive behaviors and then also, you know, what you’re measuring typically what is what gets improved.
Right. Right. Do you find that easy to look at things too frequently, or is it being on the pulse of it by looking at it frequently?
You want to stay on the pulse of it, but you don’t want to, you know, have those knee-jerk reactions to those outliers, like something that might pop up in a given month that the data off or the performance numbers where it’s where you’re typically performing. So it’s important to understand where those outliers are and investigate some of those.
Ideally, you want to kind of look at it over a longer term to see if your company is improving or potentially, you know, declining in performance.
But so maybe if you do see something on a month, the action is, hey, let’s look at why was there an outlier, was there a really bad customer experience we had? And that caused our customer feedback to be lower than before or something like that?
Absolutely.
Okay, that makes sense. You know, at least the more frequently you’re looking at it, the more quickly you can determine what caused that effect. Makes sense.
And a lot of those goals or targets will come from what’s important to your customers. So, you know, one of the more common ones that typically in my experience, we always tracked was, you know, on-time delivery, we’re on time shipment because typically when you, you know, take an order from a customer, you’re agreeing to that promised date when you’re going to ship it or deliver by us.
So obviously that’s important to the customer. So that was one of the common ones, for example, that we used to track to make sure that we were meeting the requirements of our customers.