Reengineering and quality management

INTRODUCTION.

By nature, man seeks answers to the different questions that he encounters as he develops his knowledge, and once he gets these answers, he asks new questions, questions these answers. That is, the dialectic of knowledge, a way through which we continue to ascend in it in a continuous way, and also, why not, firm and sure.

It is not bold to say that the reengineering process is an answer to a question ("Are we doing things well or could we do them better?") That arose after having obtained an answer (the process or activity itself) to a question. that was originally raised (How to do things).

The objective of this work is to take a trip through the theory of reengineering and show how it can be an effective tool in the development of business, in the development of administrative careers and the marketing branch. Also, in many other aspects of the life of companies, provided that it turns out to be the appropriate medicine for the manifestations of the patient. It is not a fashion, it is not something that is done to distinguish ourselves from others and do something different from others; It is, yes, a need when in reality it is, not an imposition on a created or even existing need, but which can be resolved in other ways.

The reengineering technique causes deep and radical changes in the processes of an organization, even touching those in which it had not been thought in the beginning. It does not act on isolated functions, it acts on processes.

1. HISTORY OF REENGINEERING

The way companies work today has been an evolution of Taylor's proposed process of specialization; and that spilled over into all areas of the company.

The beginning of specialization yielded wonderful results, productivity exploded. It was also applied to mental work and not only to material. Even professional and administrative work became specialized, and business firms grouped specialists of similar skills into functional organizations.

There are currently two problems of specialization. As each person is responsible for a part of the process, no one is responsible for the total and the product of the process. This creates a large infrastructure to organize, direct and control work.

The second problem is that it doesn't take advantage of human potential. The fewer skills the work uses, the less it harnesses our potential. (Manganelli, 1995)

Despite this, this type of organization produced greater results than ever before. The command and control organization that is needed to maintain control is inflexible and heavy, good for enforcing conformity and bad for creating commitment. These types of organizations are afraid of risk.

The command and control model is seen today as an increasingly less efficient organization, because we live in an age of accelerated change. Geopolitical, social, economic, cultural and technological trends change so rapidly that these structures fail to respond to changes.

In a non-redesigned organization, there is no owner of the process because no one is responsible for it. Reengineering often creates flatter organizations, which encourages open-door policy and new trends in participatory leadership.

For this reason, the concept of reengineering is an option to react to the current situation and its changes. Reengineering, focused on efficient processes that are based on customer satisfaction, manages to eliminate the old way of operating companies.

Reengineering has had an astonishing level of success, because the traditional paradigms of work organization are out of date.

These date from the time of Adam Smith and Frederick Taylor; the first of them, by publishing his famous book "The Wealth of Nations" (at the end of the 18th century), promoted the economic advantages of labor specialization. Taylor, who is considered the father of industrial engineering, a century later revolutionized the organization of industry on the basis of his well-known time and method studies, which led to a scientific rationalization of industrial work.

This approach produced spectacular increases in productivity in industry, and was based on the division of labor into small elementary tasks of a repetitive nature. The Smith and Taylor approaches worked amazingly well while the markets were small and uncompetitive, and the customers undemanding.

2. WHAT IS REENGINEERING?

Reengineering in a simple concept, is the redesign of a process in a business or a drastic change of a process. Although this concept sums up the main idea of ​​reengineering, this phrase does not encompass everything that reengineering implies.

Reengineering is starting from scratch, it is an all or nothing change, it also orders the company around the processes. Reengineering requires that fundamental business processes be viewed from a cross-functional perspective and based on customer satisfaction.

For a company to adopt the concept of reengineering, it has to be able to get rid of the conventional rules and policies that it previously applied and be open to changes through which its businesses can become more productive.

A quick definition of reengineering is "starting over." Reengineering also means abandoning old procedures and looking for work that adds value to the consumer.

Value-added activities have two characteristics, it is something that the customer appreciates and it is important that they are executed correctly from the first time. Reengineering is based on creating processes that add the greatest value to the company.

The most widely accepted definition today is "Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements within critical and contemporary performance measures, such as cost, quality, service, and speed." (Hammer 1994).

In the previous definition proposed by Hammer and Champy, there are four keywords: Fundamental, Radical, Dramatic and Processes.

These words are key because:

1. A reengineering will look for why something fundamental is being done Design changes must be radical (from the root and not superficial) Expected improvements must be dramatic (not a few percentages) Changes must focus solely on processes.

It can be said that reengineering is a dramatic change in the process and that as an effect of this there will be a breakdown in the structure and work culture.

The fundamental basis of reengineering is customer service, despite the emphasis on this, in general companies do not achieve customer satisfaction and one of the reasons is that the methods and processes are no longer inadequate to such a degree that rearrangement is not enough, what is needed is to re-engineer the process.

In Hammer's view, the essence of reengineering is that people are willing to think differently about the process and agree to get rid of the outdated rules and basic assumptions of the processes in the organization.

Furthermore, reengineering requires the abandonment of old processes and the search for new ones that add value to the consumer, breaking the structure and work culture.

From another point of view, reengineering "It is the rapid and radical redesign of the strategic value-added processes and the systems, policies and organizational structures that support them to optimize the work flows and productivity of an organization" (Manganelli, nineteen ninety five). In its simplest form reengineering changes the process to correct the fit between the job, the worker, the organization and its culture to maximize the profitability of the business.

The concept of breakthrough is not new, previously innovative ideas almost always found answers such as: If it could be done, would anyone have done it already? Had someone else already thought of it? If it were done, what would be the impact on the organizational structure?

The object of reengineering is made up of those processes that are both strategic and value-added.

In general, only 50% of the processes are strategic and add value.

The optimization that reengineering calls for is measured in terms of business results, increased profitability, market share, revenue, and return on investment. Without the relationship between reengineering and improving business results, reengineering is doomed to fail.

Another characteristic of reengineering is that in general it must be fast because executives expect results in very short times.

In addition, the results must be radical to achieve remarkable and surprising results. In addition, it must redesign the processes that add value and discard the others.

The basic importance of these definitions consists in making it clear that not every change or transformation that is implemented in an organization responds to the concept of reengineering, it is not a fad, it is a revolution in the thinking and in the way of acting and operating of an organization in each and every one of its processes, they are not partial changes, but radical ones.

As for its managers and human resources, it implies not only a way of seeing the world, but a new way of living in the world.

3. WHY DO RE-ENGINEERING

The pace of change in business life has accelerated to the point that initiatives capable of achieving incremental improvements in performance can no longer keep up. The only way to match or exceed the speed of change in the world around us is to make decisive, discontinuous breakthroughs.

It happens that many times the employees, managers or machinery are blamed when things do not go well; when in fact the fault is not theirs but the way they work. It is also important to note that it is not because the process is bad, but that it is bad today because the process was designed for other market conditions that existed in the past. (Hammer 1994). Many superbly designed processes in the past are no longer responsive to the present. The world changes, science and technology advance, customer needs are different, competitors grow and improve their approaches, products and services.

According to Hammer and Champy, the Three C's: Consumers, Competition and Change, are the trends that are causing these changes. These three forces are nothing new, although they are very different from how they were in the past.

Consumers

Sellers no longer rule, consumers do. Now consumers can ask the seller what they want, when they want it, how they want it and in some cases even how much they are willing to pay and in what way.

Competition

Before, competition was simple and almost any company that could enter the market and offer an acceptable product at a good price would be able to sell. Now there is not only more competition but they compete in different ways.

You can compete based on price, based on product variations, based on quality or based on service prior to, during and after the sale.

Finally, we must not forget that modern technology has introduced new ways of competing and new competition, the Internet for example. Therefore, you have to be attentive to this to be able to face it and be prepared for this new type of competition.

Change

It has already been noted that consumers and competition have changed, but it must also be emphasized that the way it is changed has changed. Above all, the change has now become more widespread and persistent; Furthermore, the pace of change has accelerated.

With globalization, companies face more competitors; also the rapidity of technological changes promotes innovation.

Before it was believed that automation was the solution, but this all it does is make current processes faster, which is bad if the process is inadequate and even worse if there is no need to do it, which in the long run would be a slight improvement at the expense of an extremely heavy investment. That is why the only way to face this new world is by knowing how to better do current work, which can be done by analyzing said work.

The above takes us to the roots of Reengineering; forgetting that it is mandatory to organize work according to the principles of the division of labor and get the idea that it is necessary to organize work around processes. This is necessary because it is essential to focus on the client and not on the boss, the department or the company.

Globalization

Another factor to take into account in explaining why reengineering is globalization. Globalization presents new challenges to the way of doing business. Commerce and industry must change, must adapt and evolve towards the new market structure.

Reengineering versus continuous improvement

Reengineering means radical change. The tendency of organizations is to avoid radical change, continuous improvement is more in accordance with the way organizations naturally understand each other with change.

Continuous improvement emphasizes small, incremental changes, but it should be noted that the object is to improve what an organization is already doing.

Thus, the ideal situation is to face an initial reengineering of processes and from there, work with the concepts of continuous improvement. For this it is common to use the following methodology:

This graph explains how a well-done reengineering can drastically improve performance because it is based on totally redesigning the process. This does not imply that continuous improvement is being discarded, on the contrary it must be carried out after reengineering to continue improving. Likewise with Total Quality Control. Total quality control looks at all processes, but to improve them incrementally, not to design them.

4. WHAT DOES REENGINEERING INVOLVE?

Reengineering is needed in a company when:

• When the performance of the organization is behind the competition. When the organization is in crisis; like a fall in the market.When market conditions change; Such as technology When you want to obtain a position of market leader When you have to respond to aggressive competition When the company is a leader and knows that it must continue to improve to maintain leadership.

According to Stamatis, reengineering does not necessarily imply cutoffs, although it can happen. It must always be applied with a long-term vision as any short-term attempt will be a failure. New trends believe that the future is for companies to quickly realize areas of opportunity in their reengineering and constantly re-enact them.

According to Omachumo, the advantages of reengineering are:

1. Revolutionary mentality. It induces to think big in the organization. Decisive improvement. Notable changes in short times to respond to customer satisfaction. Structure of the organization. Focusing on the true needs of the client. Renewal of the organization. Increases market share, profitability and better position against the competition.Corporate culture. Helps evolve the culture of the organization Job redesign. Create more exciting and satisfying jobs.

There are factors necessary for a reengineering to be effective. These are:

• Orientation towards the process Ambition Breaking of rules Creativity in the use of technology.

Common characteristics after reengineering are:

• Multiple jobs are compressed into one Processes are compressed vertically Process steps follow a natural order There are processes in multiple versions Work is done where it makes sense Checks and controls are reduced Case management is operated Centralized and decentralized operation

Reengineering is not about fixing something, reengineering means starting over from scratch. The only thing that should matter is how you want to organize work in the present, given the demands of the markets and the power of today's technology, it should be emphasized that it should not matter how the business has been done in the past.

For this reason, to analyze the processes, questions such as the following should not be asked: How to make the process faster? How can we do it better? o How to do it at a lower cost? On the other hand, reengineering must be questioned: why is what is being done? In order to answer this, it must be clear that every relevant process must carry added value for the client, this can be of quality, fair price, provide excellent service, etc., that is, a process should never be carried out just to satisfy some internal demand of the organization of the company.

Tool that uses reengineering

One of the main aspects to take into account in reengineering is technology, however care must be taken in its application. Reengineering changes the processes, the way of doing work, automation makes the process faster.

At present, with the high technological levels reached worldwide, it is said that a company cannot reengineer if it does not change its way of thinking about information technology. Similarly, and even more importantly, a company that believes that technology is the same as automation cannot reengineer.

Finally, a company that first looks for problems and then looks to technology for the solution to them, cannot reengineer. This principle is based on the premise that in this case the process will not be redesigned but rather improved.

So what is sought to instill is that instead of asking how can we use these new technological capabilities to improve what we already do? The question must be asked: How can we use technology to enable us to do things that we are not yet doing?

So the true power of technology does not lie in how to improve old processes but in the breaking of old rules and the creation of new ways of working, which precisely falls within the function and definition of reengineering.

It is important to note that reengineering is applicable at the operational level but not at the strategic and tactical level of the business. It can show a company how to do things, but only in a very limited way how to do things. It does not identify the markets in which the company should be, or the products that it should develop, but it can give the company effective processes to make such decisions.

5. HOW IS A RE-ENGINEERING DONE?

In order to reinvent companies, managers have to undo the old concepts they know about how to organize and run business: they must abandon the organizational and operational principles and procedures they currently use and create entirely new ones. This will make the new organizations look different from the current ones.

Companies should take these 5 general steps to redesign their operating processes:

1. Develop the vision and objectives of the company's processes. Establish priorities and goals Identify processes that need to be redesigned. Identification of critical processes, bottlenecks, etc. Understand and measure current processes Gather the people involved and carry out work sessions Design and prototype the process. Technical implementation.

In addition to these general steps, companies must follow the following principles to reengineer:

1. Organize around results and not tasks. A person carries out all the steps of a process, this design must be done to achieve an objective or result and not a task. That the process is designed by those who are going to use the product of the same. Technology leads to automate processes and to eliminate interfaces and links. Include the work of information processing in the actual work that produces it. Move information and tasks View geographically dispersed resources as centralized Efficiency and innovation in communications Link parallel activities rather than integrate their results Forging links between functions and coordinating while activities are taking place Place the site of decision where work is done and bring control into that process.Those who do the work must make the decisions. Compress the pyramidal organization flat.

The role of management in initiating a reengineering is basic. To carry out reengineering, management must:

1. Persuade staff to accept change Educate early in the process Give clear messages Clarify where the company is and why it needs to change.

The vital and crucial aspect of reengineering, and which must necessarily occur at the beginning of the effort for it to succeed, is the persuasion of people within the company to accept or at least not reject the possibility of a great change within the company. business.

6. WHO IS GOING TO REDESIGN.

To carry out process reengineering, the following roles have been identified:

• Leader.

Owner or responsible for the process.

• Reengineering team Steering committee Reengineering «Zar».

6.1. Leader.

He is a senior executive who supports, authorizes, and motivates the total reengineering effort. It must have sufficient authority to persuade people to accept the radical changes that reengineering implies. Without this leader, the reengineering process remains in good standing without being completed as expected.

You must maintain the final objective of the process, you need the vision to reinvent the company under new competitive schemes, keep employees and managers informed of the purposes to be achieved, as well as the progress achieved.

Designate who will own the processes and assign responsibility for performance progress.

6.2. Process owner.

Area manager responsible for a specific process and the corresponding engineering effort.

Traditional companies do not think in terms of processes, functions are departmentalized, thereby putting organizational boundaries to processes.

The processes should be identified as soon as possible, assign a leader and this to the owners of the processes.

It is important that the process owners have acceptance from the colleagues with whom they are going to work, accept the change processes that reengineering brings, and their main function is to monitor and motivate the reengineering.

The office of the owners does not end when the reengineering project is completed, when the commitment is made to be process-oriented, each process still needs an owner who takes responsibility for its execution.

6.3. Reengineering team.

Formed by a group of individuals dedicated to redesigning a specific process, with the ability to diagnose the current process, supervise its reengineering and its execution.

He is in charge of doing the heavy lifting of producing ideas, plans and turning them into reality.

It should be mentioned that a team can only work with one process at a time, in such a way that a team must be formed for each process that is being worked on.

The team must have between 5 and 10 members, maximum, of which one part must know the process thoroughly, but for a short time so that they do not accept it as something normal, and another part must be formed with personnel outside the process, being able to be people from outside the company, who can question it and propose alternatives.

6.4. Directive Commitee.

Policy-making body, composed of senior managers who develop the organization's overall strategy and monitor its progress, usually including process owners.

They may or may not be present in the process, prioritize, comment on issues that go beyond processes and projects in particular.

6.5. "Czar" of reengineering.

He is responsible for developing reengineering techniques and instruments and for achieving synergy between the different projects in the company.

He is in charge of direct administration, coordinating all reengineering activities that are underway; supports and trains process owners and reengineering teams.

7. RAPID REENGINEERING METHODOLOGY

The Rapid Reengineering methodology is composed of several currently familiar administrative techniques, such as: brainstorming, process analysis, performance measures, identification of opportunities, etc. The methodology is based on 5 stages that allow rapid and substantive results by making radical changes in the strategic value-added processes. The methodology was designed to be used by reengineering teams in business organizations without having to rely on outside experts.

Stage 1 - Preparation

Define the strategic goals and objectives that justify reengineering and the links between reengineering results and organizational results.

Stage 2 - Identification

The purpose of this stage is the development of a customer-oriented model that identifies specific processes that add value.

This includes the definition of customers, processes, performance, success, resources, etc. It also requires a deep knowledge of the entire company and its processes.

Stage 3 Vision

The purpose of this stage is to develop a vision of the process capable of producing a decisive advance in performance. The vision of the new process must be understandable to all staff, describe the primary characteristics of the process, be motivating and inspiring

Stage 4 - Solution

In this stage a technical design and a cultural-organizational design of the company are produced.

The technical design stage seeks to realize the vision (Stage 3), specifying the technical dimensions of the new process

The social design must necessarily be carried out at the same time as the technical one, because for a process to be effective, these designs must be congruent.

Stage 5 - Transformation

The purpose of this stage is to realize the vision of the process by implementing the design of stage 4.

Reengineering Expectations

Successful reengineering occurs progressively over time. Each progressive development requires supporting information, which must be gathered separately when there is no basic positioning guide. Promoting reengineering and controlling expectations are similar activities to marketing a new product.

Change teams must understand the basic expectations of the potential client, then create acceptable strategies and subsequently sell the result, this is not a one-time sale, everything must be sold on a continuity basis because given the magnitude of the reengineering efforts, people easily lose sight of objectives.

Some benefits of reengineering will be tangible, others will not. Reducing the amount of movements that a worker makes in the Toyota line of work cannot be taken only as how much money he can save, but in the comfort with which the worker will carry out his work, and the consequence that he will get less sick or can working for more years, but this is not entirely tangible for managers.

As in cost benefit comparisons, benefits can be divided into two categories: those that can be quantified (such as reduced waste or time) and those that cannot. However, intangible benefits can have the greatest long-term impact.

For example, improving customer support will have both tangible parts and intangible parts, similarly improve product reliability, and further increase good company name and customer loyalty.

8. TYPES OF CHANGES THAT OCCUR WHEN REDESIGNING PROCESSES

Work units change: from functional departments to process teams

In a way what is done is to reunite a group of workers who had been artificially separated by the organization.

When they are put back together they are called process teams. In short, a process team is a unit that comes together naturally to complete an entire job - a process.

Trades change: from simple tasks to multidimensional work

Workers on process teams who are collectively responsible for the results of the process, rather than individually responsible for a task, have a different job. They share joint responsibility with their teammates for the performance of the total process, not just a small part of it.

Although not all team members do exactly the same job, the dividing line between them is blurred. All team members have at least some basic knowledge of all the steps in the process, and probably perform several of them. Furthermore, everything that the individual does bears the stamp of an appreciation of the process in a global way.

When work becomes multidimensional, it also becomes more substantive. Reengineering not only eliminates waste but also work that does not add value.

Most of the verification, waiting, reconciliation, control and monitoring - unproductive work that exists because of the borders that exist in a company and to compensate for the fragmentation of a process are eliminated with reengineering, which means that people will spend more time doing their actual work.

9. THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

Information technologies help the company achieve its main objective: to create value for customers

• Doing the same things more quickly Doing things the competition cannot or cannot do

The transition from deductive to inductive thinking is essential (recognizing a solution and then looking for problems it can solve, problems that the company may not know it has).

9.1. The Empowering Role of Informatics

Informatics plays a crucial role in business and process reengineering, but it is also very easy to misuse. A trainer allows companies to redesign their processes. In reality, the misuse of technology can block reengineering because it reinforces old ways of thinking and old patterns of behavior.

9.2. Learn to think by Induction.

Recognizing the inherent power of modern computing and visualizing its application requires companies to use a way of thinking that business people often don't learn and may not be able to handle. Most executives and managers know how to think deductively. That is, they know how to define a problem very well and then seek and evaluate its various solutions. But applying computer science to business reengineering requires thinking about ways to first recognize a powerful solution and then look for problems that it could solve, problems that the company probably doesn't even know exist.

The real power of technology is in offering solutions to problems that even he doesn't know he has: For example, how to totally eliminate air travel.

The real power of technology is not that old processes can function better, but that it allows organizations to break the rules and create new ways of working: that is. Redesign.

9.3. To break the rules.

Certainly rule breaking is what we recommend for people to learn to think inductively about technology during the reengineering process: Look for the old rule or rules that technology allows breaking, and then see what business opportunities are created by breaking them.

Teleconferencing, for example, breaks the rule that people at great distances can meet only infrequently and at great cost. Today it is possible for these people to meet frequently and inexpensively in an environment where the constraints of geographic separation no longer count.

The old rule that information can only appear in one place at a time can be replaced by the one that states that it can appear simultaneously in as many places as necessary.

Old rule: Businesses have to choose between centralization and decentralization.

Destructive technology. Telecommunications networks.

New rule. Businesses can simultaneously reap the benefits of centralization and decentralization.

Old rule: Managers make all the decisions.

Destructive technology: Decision support instruments (access to databases, modeling software).

New rule: Decision-making is everyone's job.

Ancient rule. Staff who normally work outside the company need offices where they receive, store. Retrieve and transmit information

Destructive technology Radiocommunication and portable computers.

New Rule: Staff who work outside the company can send and receive information wherever they are.

Ancient rule: The best contact with a potential buyer is personal contact.

Destructive technology: Interactive video disc.

New rule. The best contact with a potential buyer is effective contact.

Old rule: One has to find out where things are.

Destructive technology: Automatic identification and tracking technology.

New rule: Things tell you where they are.

Old rule: Plans are periodically reviewed.

Destructive technology: High performance computers.

New rule: Plans are reviewed Instantly.

10. COMMON ERRORS IN REENGINEERING PROCESSES

Trying to improve a process instead of changing it, not focusing on company processes, ignoring everything except the redesign of the process, not considering people's values ​​and beliefs… Reengineering should only deal with how to do things, not with what to do, which is a specific theme of strategy: reengineering and strategy are two complementary and perfectly compatible instruments.

11. PROCESS REENGINEERING AND TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT

Both strategies:

• focus on business processes rely on employee responsibility measure the result from the customer's point of view require the participation of senior management but the basic difference is that, while reengineering pursues drastic and radical changes in business processes, with high risks and results in the medium and long term (12-18 months), Total Quality Management focuses on obtaining incremental, gradual and continuous improvements, obtaining results in the shorter term and with fewer risks.

12. THE ROLE OF FIRST-LEVEL MANAGEMENT

First of all, a suitable manager must be chosen, who meets the conditions for dynamism and innovation. It is challenging because of:

• Lack of experience in reengineering Breaking traditional rules Changes at different levels must be managed simultaneously

The manager must spend between 10% and 30% of his time on tasks related to reengineering and, in addition to his traditional roles, take on some new ones as well as keep morale high.

13. ADDITIONAL CONSIDERATIONS

A company that cannot change its model of thinking about computing and other technologies cannot be redesigned. The fundamental mistake many companies make when thinking about technology is to see it through the lens of their existing processes. They wonder: How can we use these new technological capabilities to enhance or energize or improve what we are already doing?

Rather, they should ask themselves: How can we take advantage of technology to do things that we are not doing? Reengineering, unlike automation, is innovation. It is exploring the newest capabilities of technology to achieve entirely new goals. One of the most difficult aspects of reengineering is recognizing the new unfamiliar capabilities of technology rather than the familiar ones.

Prosci, a North American institution dedicated to collecting and providing information on good management practices, publishes annually a report on reengineering projects developed by companies throughout the world.

The 2002 report included 327 companies distributed in 53 countries (the 1999 report included 248 companies and the 1997 to 57 report). Only 39% of the projects in 2002 were developed in the USA; 18% of them were developed in European countries and only 3% in Central and South American countries.

This organization design methodology does not aim to achieve marginal increases in productivity; its basic approach is more radical. In more than a decade of application it shows dazzling successes… and also failures.

14. REENGINEERING AND QUALITY MANAGEMENT.

Process reengineering (BPR), as already stated above, defends the radical redesign of processes, as opposed to the simple restructuring practiced following traditional methods. Regarding quality, it is defined according to Deming as "Satisfying the needs and expectations of customers, now and in the future, internal and external customer to obtain a competitive position in the market"; according to ISO 9000: 1994 as "Totality of the characteristics of an entity that influence its ability to satisfy established and implicit needs", and according to ISO 9001: 2001 as "Degree to which the set of inherent characteristics meets the requirements". By this definition, the term "quality" can be used accompanied by adjectives such as poor, good, or excellent.

Both techniques share two common characteristics: vision of the activities of the company as a series of processes that interact with each other, and customer orientation.

15. QUALITY MANAGEMENT

ISO 9000 guarantees the client that companies carry out their activity in accordance with these regulations (see the Malcolm Baldrige National Award for Quality, European Quality Award - from the European Foundation for Quality Management - or the Australian Quality Award, the Deming Award from Japan and the International Quality Award). The quality management is everyone's business and it 8 Dimensions are distinguished:

• performancefeaturesreliabilityconformitydurabilityutilityestheticsperceived quality

15.1. DIFFERENT WAYS TO UNDERSTAND QUALITY

Focused on the manufacture of the product: quality means compliance with the requirements.

• to the customer: quality is to satisfy customer expectations to the product: quality refers to the quantity of the unappreciated attribute contained in each unit of the appreciated attribute. to the value of the product: quality is the degree of excellence at an acceptable price and the control of the variability at an acceptable cost to the transcendence of quality: quality is achieving or reaching the highest level.

15.2. QUALITY MANAGEMENT

15.2.1. Management.

Management is defined as:

"Coordinated activities to direct and control an organization, the latter being understood as" a set of people and facilities with a provision of responsibilities, authorities and relationships "

15.2.2. Quality management.

"Coordinated activities to direct and control an organization in relation to quality", which is based mainly on: PLANNING, CONTROL, ASSURANCE and IMPROVEMENT.

Planning basically consists of 3 stages:

• Determine who the customers are and what their needs Design the product, according to the customers' needs Carry out the appropriate processes to achieve the product characteristics set out in the previous point.

Quality Control consists of the evaluation of quality deviations.

The assurance in taking the necessary measures to correct said deviations; and, Quality improvement, in establishing an infrastructure capable of ensuring systematic and systemic quality improvements, as well as in the preparation of improvement projects.

One way of approaching business management is to designate a team of people responsible for the implementation of projects to improve the management or administration of Total Quality, which is based on the search for greater efficiency, effectiveness and effectiveness in production processes and, with this, of an improvement of the results and the image of the company.

An important element to discuss would be to talk about Quality in Management, NOT Quality Management. What is really important is not focused on having or not having a quality certification, which companies pursue as a distinctive element. Quality certificates would be of little value as a differential factor compared to competitors if the client is more demanding than the standards, which usually happens on multiple occasions, or if the entire sector has quality certification. In fact, what it is about is to achieve impeccable management, Total Quality in management. In this sense, the Excellence Models are more complete and inclusive than ISO 9000 itself.

When it comes to total quality, traditional homologation methods are not enough. It is necessary to ensure not only certain characteristics of the product or the manufacturer. It is about certifying that the company is in a position to really offer, and to continue offering in the future, the products in question with the characteristics that are specified, with the delivery compliance that is promised, with the attention that the customer expects, is say, Total Quality.

The concept of quality is no longer limited to the characteristics of a product and begins to encompass the entire Company-Client relationship. It focuses more on the presence of value than on the absence of defects, incidentally assumed by the customer.

The concept of quality extends to everything that is done in the company, or has to be done, to better satisfy customers. It is then worth talking about quality in a triple context:

1. Product quality as one of its attributes Quality of service, customer service to the extent that it contributes to meeting customer expectations by increasing the added value perceived by the customer Management quality that influences customer perception through staff performance; It manifests itself in the adoption of strategies, policy development and design of procedures aimed at customer satisfaction and in the consistent management of resources and people.

By the way, in PROCESS MANAGEMENT the most accurate meaning for the concept of quality is: what the client expects to receive for what they are willing to pay based on the perceived value. From this point of view, quality equates to "customer orientation of the company"; therefore, PROCESS MANAGEMENT is presented as a quality management system aimed at total quality.

The technicality and a false sense of individual specialization, together with the internal competition and the feudal hierarchy of many companies, have led their members to be oriented to their personal task. Everyone is proud of their work from a technical point of view, and the rest does not matter.

Traditional management has been oriented to the effect, profit, forgetting its main immediate cause: Having satisfied and loyal customers. Each person concentrates her effort on the task assigned, trying to do it according to the instructions and specifications received, but with little information regarding the final result of her work. Even in manufacturing processes it is not surprising that a producer does not know, at least clearly, how his work contributes to the final product. In administrative and management jobs this is even more common.

This pyramidal structure, very valid in companies where decisions are always made by the big boss, begins to have difficulties when Total Quality is required in each operation, in each transaction, in each process; it forces that great boss to multiply, especially in supervision.

The origin of traditional structures is based on the fragmentation of natural processes, a product of the division of labor (Taylor), and subsequent grouping of the resulting specialized tasks into functional areas or departments. In these traditional structures; No area director is solely responsible for the successful completion of a process, since responsibility is distributed by areas and several areas are involved in the same transaction. Thus it would be up to the GENERAL MANAGEMENT to take responsibility for it.

If we summarize, in traditional management the GENERAL MANAGEMENT has to intervene very frequently in complete processes, since in the same process many departments or areas intervene with different managers whose only coordination can be achieved by senior management. Furthermore, in this type of organization, adaptation to customer requirements is usually slower and more expensive, which has a direct impact on competitiveness.

Pyramid organizations were responding well to a strongly growing and predictable demand environment that is long gone. The real power is shifting from supply to demand and the customer, each of them, has become the sole guide of all business actions. This fact, together with the difficulties of anticipating the future evolution of the competitive environment, requires profound changes in the Company: in its management techniques and in people.

It is about reuniting the activities around the processes that were previously fragmented as a consequence of a series of deliberate decisions and informal evolution, which means recognizing that the processes are first and then the organization that supports them to make them operational. It is to see the process as the natural way of organizing work. The structure may or may not coincide with the process, since in the same workplace, it can perform functions for different processes.

15. 3. THE IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS

The ten commonly accepted factors during the process of implementing a Quality Management system are:

• Leadership / management commitment Adoption of the philosophy Customer involvement (external / internal) Supplier involvement Open and flexible organization Training / training Empowerment Benchmarking Process improvement Zero defect mentality

15. 4. CASE STUDY

The cost of solving problems is always much higher than doing things correctly at the 1st (cost of non-conformities). Continuous quality and productivity improvement should occur in 3 areas:

• Operational excellence Technical excellence Customer-facing excellence (listening to the voice of the customer)

Quality integration process:

• Establish customer-focused quality standards Relate quality and benefits Empower employees Communicate and share the benefits of quality

The practical case consists of choosing a company under study and obtaining sufficient information in order to develop the following aspects.

1. Prepare a brief history of the company and determine its strategic evolution, that is, if its evolution is the product of attempted strategies, emerging strategies or a combination of both. Identify the mission and the main or objective goals of the company. Prepare a preliminary analysis of its internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as the opportunities and threats it faces in its environment. Based on this analysis, identify the strategies that the firm should follow. Who is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO, Manager or Managing Director)? Assess the CEO's leadership capabilities Find out if this company has a formal mission statement. If you already have an established mission, evaluate it and redefine it according to today's competitive levels. If the company lacks a mission statement,What should it be? Identify the main stakeholders. What are your demands? How does the company try to satisfy them? Choose an important strategic decision made by the company in recent years and analyze the implications of this decision. Did the company act correctly? Identify if the company has a distinctive ability, competitive advantage or disadvantage in your industry (where it records its highest sales). Design a strategic plan to take advantage of your strengths and opportunities, and to address your weaknesses and threats. What human resource policy would you recommend to develop your staff and motivate them even more than they currently are? (empowerment, dowsizing, motivation and incentive systems) Propose quality circles for key areas of the company,detail how it works and how to incentivize employees Identify a process that can be substantially improved. Reengineer this process.

CONCLUSIONS.

• Reengineering is the fundamental and last tool of change. She directs the business process of an organization. In its current state, it helps to adjust business from old paradigms to a new one of service and information. In the future it will continue moving the negocio.La reengineering uses continuous change to achieve competitive advantage. The opportunities for organizations will continue to grow if one takes into account that in one way or another, most of the profit from these organizations will come to business without much effort. However, the businesses that will win the most will be those that can assimilate the latest technology and take advantage of the opportunities, thus preparing themselves to change.

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