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Achieving Quality Results Through Blended Management

led to a “Quality Integration” where the responsibility for ensuring ąuality became everyone’s job. In the process, there became no need to have people whose only role was to inspect product; the inspectors were transitioned into other jobs. Quality was integrated into the manufacturing process with every employee and work team responsible for the quality of their outputs. In 1990, the IAC manufacturing organization began an aggressive campaign to become recognized by their customers as having “World Class” manufacturing capabilities. The executive Staff developed a three year WCM program with ambitious improvement goals in the primary areas of defect reduction, short-cycle production, and materials investment. To emphasize the importance of the new thrust, the Vice-President of Manufacturing closed the plant for an entire day and brought all 700+ employees off-site to discuss the futurę. The Visions, Goals, and Objectives were communicated to the manufacturing workforce and all employees were asked to contribute their ideas for improvement. Employee teams were encouraged to work together to develop implementation strategies and measures to track their own participation and contributions. All teams posted storyboards in their work areas to display their measures and monitor their progress.

Progress towards the goals was outstanding. In three years the number of defects was reduced by 70%, cycle times were shortened by 72%, and materials investment decreased 46%. In October 1993, Industry Week magazine recognized the site as one of America’s Best Plants. The judges were particularly impressed with the work team technology, strong customer focus, and successful application of blended management: the key to quality strategy deployment.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the following individuals for their contributions: Greg Lea (IBM Rochester), Doug Sixel (Alliant Techsystems), and Ed Janik (Honeywell IAC).

Portions of this paper appeared previously in the conference proceedings, The Sixth National Quality Management Conference, 1994, published by the American Society for Quality Control, P.O. Box 3066, Milwaukee, WI 53201.

References

Bracker, J. (1980). The historical development of the strategie management concept. Academy of Management Review, 5, 219-224.