Maybe you heard that interesting ideas often
come from odd places.
I attended the Mouvement Québécois de la
qualité’s 15th «Salon sur les meilleures pratiques d’affaires
2007». Yes, time flies — the MQQ
celebrates twenty-five years and it is their fifteenth event.
Amongst the different booths, I stumbled onto
Magnus Poirier — Yes, the undertaker. Definitely not your average enterprise —
Well, actually, yes. They have 80 employees at 8 sites throughout the city,
various products, services, suppliers, lots and lots of paperwork and many
different institutions to deal with. Also, dare I say it, a growing client base
(think baby boomers, yours truly included). All the right ingredients for
potential delays, errors and frustrations at the worst of times for grieving
families.
So, in 2002, they embarked on a process
improvement system that has resulted in a 30% productivity gain, an
optimisation and standardisation of their processes, giving them a competitive
advantage and improved response time. The greatest result, I was told, was a
better relationship with their clients.
Their solution — an integrated networked
intranet system providing all necessary products and services information,
scheduling (visits, chapels, ceremonies), administrative documents and various
business directories (hospitals, embassies, government) — all at the click of a
mouse. Wow. Obviously to get there, they had to analyse, map and streamline
their processes (Uhhh), but this led to standardised processes and forms and
simplified personnel training. The intranet ensures real-time sharing of the
information amongst the sites, reduces errors and simplifies the coordination
of various services and product selection and order.
Another booth took me into the realm of juices
and their packaging — Lassonde Industries (Grande Mention winner in the Grand
Prix Québécois de la Qualité). What hooked me wasn’t the fact that it seemed
all employees participated in some sort of improvement team, but rather that
they had managed to conjugate Conventional vs New attitudes for
team work.
|
Conventional attitude : v
I make v
You break v
He repair v
We argue v
You inspect and sort v
They manage and decide v
We watch the product v
We sort the good from the bad v
We increase controls |
New attitude : v
We are all responsible for the work produced v
The team observe the process v
The team analyses the process v
The team improves the process v
The team reduces variation v
We form the links in a chain |
By the way, they managed to reduce waste and
increase profitability, by ensuring that less juice is added in their packages
above the 940 ml declaration — That represents a lot of litres (60 ml at a
time) at the end of the year.
Another stop brought me to the National Bank’s
operations group. Since 2003, they have an internal training program, aptly
named AGIR (Apprentissage en gestion pour innover et réussir), which not only
provides 150 hours of training but creates an environment where employees work
on improvement projects with potential savings >5 000$. The results so far
are 165 improvement initiatives, 52 new tools, 3.2 M$ in savings and 190
trained employees. Each team gets to present results to top management and as
the program is one of the UQAM’s perfection courses, the employee receives
university «credits». By the way, the bank has launched the QUALINAT, its own
internal recognition program based on the Qualimètre — A jury of experts (top
management and the president of the MQQ), selects three laureates from all
applicants, who are then presented the award by top management.