Processes are what you do to get things done.

As Rufus White of Boeing's Airlift and Tanker Programs, a 1998 Baldrige winner, says, “Everything we do around here is a process.”

How you take and fill orders is a process; how you advertise a vacant position, construct a piece of furniture, teach a class, put together a rear axle or assemble a purpose-built computer are all processes.

“The evidence is clear. The world's most forward-thinking organizations are preoccupied by process improvement. In the April 20th 1998 issue of Information Week, a cover-story survey asked readers, 'What are your IT organization's key strategic technology and business priorities?' The second-highest concern, at 91% of respondents, was 'streamlining business processes.'

“The best way to define a process is to ask what a business does at its very highest level. Every business exists to accomplish something — whether it's manufacturing widgets, providing medical care, servicing computers, or anything else — this something might be described as the key process, or processes, of that business.

“These key processes can be broken down into smaller processes, each of them eventually describing specific activities across people, facilities, information systems, and equipment. These activities are business processes —the key sequence of events that, when combined, define … the identity of the enterprise itself.”

Why does Baldrige obsess about processes? Because process improvement is how you make your enterprise, your organisation, your business, perform better.

Getting a grip on your processes - understanding what they are, how they work, how to measure and compare them, and most important, how to improve them, is the essence of the Baldrige program, because process improvement is at the core of any business improvement.

In each of the six Baldrige approach and deploy categories, the narrative seeks information about processes. The key word is how. How do things occur in your organisation. As the criteria ask you to pull apart and make explicit how your organisation works, it's always looking for processes, for what actually happens.

Process management is the engine-room of the Baldrige scheme. Built into the category are questions about efficient and effective process management - effective design, an emphasis on prevention rather than cure, linkage to suppliers and partners, operational performance, cycle time, and evaluation and continuous improvement.

“Today, most businesses address productivity, cost, or quality issues in the context of a single department or project. For example, if the shipping department can't get all the products out the door on time, then another person is hired, or if confusion exists in the purchasing department, a new form gets created.

“While this by-department or by-project approach may yield short term success, it's essentially self-limiting. Process management delves deeper. Rather than treat a symptom with a quick fix, process management is a disciplined, systemic approach that has the potential to yield far greater long-term benefits - across departments and functional areas of the organization.”

Where does ISO 9000 fit in?
ISO 9000 is an internationally recognised standard - analogous to a warrant of fitness - applied to an organisation's procedures and systems. In the past it has been manufacturers, especially those selling in international markets, who have sought ISO certification. Their suppliers soon followed, notably in the raw materials, transportation and distribution industries. More recently, a third wave of paper based and white collar service industries such as legal firms and insurance companies have been seeking certification (Quality Management 1994 - see the exhibit ISO vs TQM for the details of the references cited in this discussion). Over the past decade or so a fourth wave, including government departments, state agencies, and publicly-funded organisations who increasingly enter private and contestable markets, have also sought to standardize the quality of their products and processes (Smith, 1993).

The origins of ISO 9000
The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), is an international organisation whose members are the national standards bodies of some 90 countries (Eicher, 1992). In 1979 the British Standards Institute submitted a proposal to ISO for a new set of international standards for quality assurance, and the first editions of the resulting ISO standards, 9000-9004, were published in 1987.

An idea whose time had come, it soon became apparent that the new standards would enjoy the most widespread recognition, the most rapid international adoption, and the greatest sales of any ISO standard in existence. Recognised from the beginning as significantly different from “normal” engineering standards - units of measure, terminology, test methods, product specifications - ISO 9000 establishes standardized management tools, used to achieve quality objectives expressed in terms like quality assurance, total quality improvement, or total quality management.

The ISO 9000 Series
ISO 9001 is the standard with the widest application, used where suppliers take responsibility for design, development, and the production, installation, and servicing of a product.
- It contains a complete set of requirements for the quality systems of the supplier, starting from top management and providing objective criteria to verify the existence of key elements in the total quality approach. For example, it defines minimum requirements for documented procedures and instructions for contract review, design and process control, internal inspection and testing.
- It requires that a documented system exists for identification of tested products, control of nonconforming products, and procedures for corrective actions to avoid repetition of processing dysfunctions.
- Further, it defines requirements for product handling, storage, packaging, and delivery.
- Finally, it includes requirements for carrying out internal quality audits to verify the implementation and effectiveness of a quality management system (Eicher, 1992).

Is ISO 9000 here to stay?
Few things have been as high as quality on the agenda of corporate America (Hayes, 1994). With ISO 9000 rapidly becoming the de facto - and in some cases the de jure - standard for quality (particularly in Europe); with many large American firms requiring certification of their suppliers; and with 56 other countries having adopted the ISO series as national standards, the move to quality certification is becoming both pervasive and permanent.

Two aspects of ISO 9000 suggest that it has unique characteristics which set it apart and ensure its long-term survival. First, it is purchaser-driven. Whether the purchaser is a government buying public policy outputs or a small-goods manufacturer buying pigs, if quality is important then standards are essential. Second, it is not a set of procedures that can be imported into an organisation, ready mixed - or bought off-the-shelf; it requires each organisation to design its own system, and is likely to result in ownership by those involved in its design (Hayes, 1994, p59).

In the USA government agencies are moving to adopt ISO standards. The US Food and Drug Administration is incorporating ISO 9001 into its Good Manufacturing Practices for medical devices. The Department of Defence is replacing internal standards with ISO 9000. Other agencies planning its use include the Federal Aviation Authority and NASA. There is currently an active debate attracting a lot of attention on the Internet about quality management issues in the US Air Force .

In short, the evidence strongly indicates a move toward ISO 9000 in the USA, and in the rest of the world, similar to the one in Europe. ISO 9000 is here to stay!

An alternative view
But not everyone thinks ISO is the best thing since sliced bread. British consultant John Seddon is probably the king of the ISO-busters, in the UK at least, and his spirited campaign has consistently won converts over the years. For a summary of his case, see the exhibit The case against ISO 9000.

Seddon's key arguments against ISO are:
Quality authorities need to be honest now about the failure of ISO 9000, before it is too late and too many businesses are damaged, arguing “..there is a better way.” Chapter One of John Seddon's book clearly sets out his 'Ten Arguments Against ISO 9000'. :

• ISO 9000 encourages organisations to act in ways which make things worse for their customers.
• Quality by inspection is not quality.
• ISO 9000 starts from the flawed presumption that work is best controlled by specifying and controlling procedures
• The typical method of implementation is bound to cause sub-optimization of performance.
• The Standard relies too much on people's, and in particular assessors', interpretation of quality.
• The Standard promotes, encourages, and explicitly demands actions which cause sub-optimization.
• When people are subjected to external controls, they will be inclined to pay attention to only those things which are affected by the controls
• ISO 9000 has discouraged managers from learning about the theory of variation.
• ISO 9000 has failed to foster good customer-supplier relations
• As an intervention, ISO 9000 has not encouraged managers to think differently.

Seddon argues that the command-and-control ethos that pervades the ISO way of thinking - an inflexible compliance to a rigid set of written rules - is precisely what most companies do not need. In it's place, he shows how real quality can be achieved by viewing the organisation as a system and focusing on continuous improvement as the best means to create higher quality products and services,” says his web site.

Comparisons between Baldrige and ISO 9000
1. ISO is conformance to standards oriented, is designed to facilitate trade, determines minimum acceptable performance standards
2. Baldrige focusses on excellence, increased customer value, and improving operational performance, with the goal of recognising and sharing forefront strategies
3. Baldrige application writing and ISO 9000 compliance may compete for the same resources. The two systems serve very different, but compatible, purposes.

For a compare and contrast article on ISO and TQM see the exhibit ISO vs TQM

Six Sigma
Six Sigma at Motorola
“Sigma - 'A statistical unit of measurement that describes the distribution about the mean of any process or procedure'.......

“Six Sigma - 'A defect rate of no more than 3.4 per million; statistically, allowing for some variation in mean, this approaches zero defects...' To Motorolans, the term Six Sigma has become synonymous with quality. A number of years ago, as an important step toward achieving our goal of Six Sigma quality, we designed a six step methodology. The initial six step process was to enable manufacturing improvement; this was then extended to non-manufacturing.

“In order to achieve the goal of doing it right the first time, we established and communicated the process that we termed Six Sigma. Using the Six Sigma process has been critical to Motorola's success in its pursuit of continual quality improvement. Beyond this, because the pursuit of Six Sigma quality has required dramatic changes in processes and renewal of work flows, it has also driven new inventions.

“The number of teams has grown; most recently, the teams represented almost 30% of Motorola employees. Silver and gold awards have been to teams representing Motorola in countries in Asia, Europe, and in Central and North America; improvement processes have ranged from asset management to environmental responsibility. As a result of the effort of these teams, we have been able to serve our customers with significantly improved quality in products and services and, at the same time, we have saved millions of dollars.”
Source - Motorola.com Tuesday, June 15th, 1999

See the exhibits Six Sigma and Six Sigma at AlliedSignal

Key process management issues
Flexibility, cost reduction, and cycle time reduction are increasingly important in all aspects of process management and organisational design.

Flexibility is about adapting quickly to changing requirements. It might mean: an ability to quickly change from one product or process to another a capacity for rapid responses to changing demands, or the ability to produce a wide range of customized services.

Flexibility might demand special strategies such as: implementing modular designs sharing components sharing manufacturing lines, and providing specialized training.

Flexibility also increasingly involves variety in outsourcing decisions, innovation with suppliers and supplier processes, and novel partnering arrangements.

Because cost, cycle time reduction and flexibility often involve similar process management strategies, all three will feature in overall, organisation-wide process management. For an example of the links between cycle time reduction and process management, see the IBM Rochester case study.

As an example, Solar Turbine's New Product Introduction (NPI) process is a best-in-industry, systematic approach to designing new and modified products, resulting in a 43% reduction in design cycle time.

See the exhibit NPI at Solar Turbines