If you know the story of BP's spill response plan, chances are, you know it talked about saving walruses, sea lions and more walruses. While that is all fine in paper, now that the spill disaster has happened, the plan proved not only to be flawed but false. To begin with, the plan was big on saving walruses and sea lions -which as one of the congressman pointed out, have not lived in the Gulf area for nearly 300 years. To compound matters worse, the spill response plans from Exxon, Shell and Texaco read almost exactly the same as if they had all been written, bought or copied from the same source. This proves a point that I have long made, and that is, procedures have to match the company processes, and each organization has their own set of processes which is different than that of their neighbor.

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Do you ever feel that even though you have a lot of procedures your QMS system seems unfulfilling and unable to add value to your company? Do you feel the lack of adherence to your QMS system is perhaps a lack of understanding of your QMS? If you answer is yes to these questions then perhaps the cause of your problems can be a basic case of lack of good process mapping.

I still remember it, it was 1997 and the company had just hung a new projector from the ceiling. As with every new tool, I jumped on the bandwagon and switched from slides to using the PC and projector to show my presentation. Unfortunately, Murphy was in the meeting too and my presentation along with other managers like me, did not work. I will never forget Mr. Gil, who rests in peace, when he said, “Ha, ha, ha. What is this technology good for? Technology is not always good. Look at it, look at how much time you are spending...it doesn't work.” Those are the last words I remember from him—laughing about us trying to use computer projectors.

Fast-forward ten plus years: transparencies are nowhere to be seen, computer projectors are the norm. Most of them are portable—small, miniature things compared to the old ones. Electronic systems killed the paper-based systems. And so I ask myself: Why are there still people using paper based corrective and preventive action systems? Electronic systems are so much better! 

Not complex at all. Basically the KISS principle applies to document numbering as well as document headers and footers. Think about it. When you are reading a document, whether it is a procedure or a record, you are most interested on the contents of the document and the quality of it, rather than how long the document number is or whether the President of the company signed and reviewed the document. Is that allowed by ISO? Well, let’s look at the actual requirements of the standard and figure out what we need to do to add value and reduce pain.

One difficult task of many companies is the ability to instill in its employees the mindset of error or problem prevention in order to prevent problems or mistakes from happening and to improve the processes in place. This consequently translates into a low to none ratio of preventive actions against corrective actions issued which may raise an alarm flag that your preventive action is weak. So how can a company boost the number of preventive actions and increase awareness in problem prevention and continual improvement?

This article was published by Quality Digest on 8/24/2009.

This article was published on the October 2009 edition of the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG)'s Standard and Tools Newsletter.