BUSI 760 Week 1 DB Forum 1 Thread Example

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BUSI 760 Quality Management and Productivity, Discussion Board Forum 1 Thread

Thread by [Student Name]

The prompt and the bakery are composites standing in for the course's own; the books and the published research are real; the week, points and readings follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 760, which keeps each forum's detailed instructions inside the course.

Two years ago, the commercial bakery where I manage operations launched a continuous improvement program across its three plants. We installed kaizen boards in every department, trained 40 supervisors and line leads in a two-day root cause analysis course and asked each team to post problems, assign owners and close actions within 30 days. The first six months produced real wins, including a 9 percent reduction in scrap on our bun line after a team traced underweight dough to a worn divider. By the end of the first year, though, the boards had gone quiet. Posted problems fell from about 60 a month to fewer than 15, and most open actions sat untouched for weeks. Our tools had not changed. Something else had.

Plenert (2012) argues that the question for managers is not which quality tool is best but which tool fits the problem, the process and the organization's stage of improvement. His warning applies to us. We adopted a package of tools, boards, root cause analysis and action logs, because other food manufacturers used them, without asking whether our plants were ready to use them. The tools themselves were sound. The organization around them was not. We never asked, for example, whether supervisors had the time or authority to act on what their teams posted, or whether the plants' incentive plans, which paid bonuses on daily output alone, gave anyone a reason to stop a line to investigate a defect.

The best evidence for that view comes from Powell (1995), who combined a resource-based argument with a survey of firms that had adopted total quality management. He found that the most visible features of quality programs, such as quality training, process improvement and benchmarking, did not generally produce competitive advantage, because any firm could buy or copy them. What separated successful firms were tacit, behavioral features that are hard to imitate: an open culture, employee empowerment and executive commitment. The tools are the part of quality management a competitor can copy in a month; the culture that uses them is the part it cannot.

That finding fits what happened in our plants. When the program began, our plant managers attended board meetings, approved small spending requests on the spot and praised teams that closed actions. By the ninth month, two of the three managers had stopped attending because of production pressures, and requests for parts or maintenance time went into the normal budget queue, where they waited. Line leads concluded, reasonably, that posting a problem created work for them and changed nothing. Empowerment had been announced but not granted, and executive commitment had been visible only at the launch.

Is fixing the program worth the effort? Hendricks and Singhal (1997) provide one answer. They compared firms that had won quality awards, a proxy for effective implementation, with matched control firms and found that the winners' operating income grew considerably more over the ten years surrounding their first award, along with stronger sales growth. Their evidence concerns effective programs, not programs announced and abandoned, which is the point. A quiet board is not a cheap program; it is an expensive one that produces nothing.

I would propose three changes, all of them aimed at leaders rather than at the tools. First, plant managers would return to a weekly board review with a standing budget of a few thousand dollars per plant that they could approve on the spot for actions the teams propose. Second, maintenance would reserve a set share of its hours each week for improvement actions, so posting a problem leads to a scheduled fix. Third, we would track and report closed actions and their measured results to the executive team monthly, alongside output and waste, so commitment is visible at the top. If Powell is right, these changes will matter more than any new tool we could adopt. I look forward to hearing whether classmates have seen programs revived this way, or whether a stalled program is better replaced than repaired.

References

Hendricks, K. B., & Singhal, V. R. (1997). Does implementing an effective TQM program actually improve operating performance? Empirical evidence from firms that have won quality awards. Management Science, 43(9), 1258-1274. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.43.9.1258

Plenert, G. (2012). Strategic continuous process improvement: Which quality tools to use, and when to use them. McGraw-Hill.

Powell, T. C. (1995). Total quality management as competitive advantage: A review and empirical study. Strategic Management Journal, 16(1), 15-37. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250160105